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Achieving your fitness objectives doesn’t have to be expensive or hard. Keeping track of your progress will be vital, but not everyone needs to pay hundreds of dollars on the best smartwatches out there. The average cheap tracker might offer just the proper tools to help kickstart your health journey, such a heart rate monitor, sleep quality statistics and so on. And, after evaluating a variety of budget fitness trackers, I can say with certainty that you might be surprised by how much a $100 (or less) wearable can do — a welcomed treat for people who don’t want to spend a ton of cash on an Apple Watch. Many of these gadgets go much beyond being glorified pedometers, providing in-depth information on how you're sleeping at night or giving you a breakdown of your heart rate variability during a workout. But considering their price, there will be some tradeoffs. To help you decide which is ideal for you, I examined a variety of the top affordable fitness trackers available today to uncover the ones that are worth your money.
What To Look For In A Cheap Fitness Tracker
All of the best fitness trackers should have at least three features: a program to track workouts or movement of some sort, the option to monitor and collect sleep data and the ability to measure health metrics like heart rate and blood oxygen levels (though, the readings might not be super accurate). Don’t set your eyes too high and expect measures like blood pressure monitoring; for that, you’d need to buy in a more expensive wearable like a Samsung Galaxy Watch, which will set you back over $400.
Fitness Features
A inexpensive workout tracker can be helpful for someone trying to keep tabs on short, manageable objectives like 10,000 steps before sundown or 30 minutes of an HIIT workout to get your heart rate peaking. An experienced long-distance runner wishing to prepare for a triathlon might opt for a more expensive device that can detect cadence or ground contact time, and can track more customizable programs, offer multiple sports modes or give deeper insights into performance statistics.
At the absolute least, a budget workout tracker should be able to offer fitness tracking features beyond walking and running – otherwise, it would just be a pedometer. The number of actions a device will recognize varies. Some will get funky with it and consider skateboarding a workout, while others won’t be able to track a jumping jack.
At this price, you may expect a device to assess a mix of cardio, machine workouts and strength training. With each, you might obtain a numerical or visual analysis of heart rate activity, general pace, and calories burnt per session. Although some cheap trackers can offer a really good overview of heart rate zone activity during a workout, a more technically advanced device might be able to go a step further and explain what your results mean and coach you on how to keep your heart rate in a specific bracket so that you can burn more fat per workout. I observed that the more budget-friendly the device, the more probable it is that a tracker will fall short when it comes to wise advice or delivering predictive insights beyond a certain workout. If a budget tracker does manage to offer some kind of a coaching program, you may expect it to sit behind a paywall.
Workout tracking and managing your recuperation is just as vital to any fitness program. A sub-$100 device should be able to tell you how long you’ve slept and provide a breakdown of deep, light and REM sleep activity. It's not a guarantee that you will obtain a sleep “score” or insights on how to achieve better slumber - that data is normally found on more expensive wearables. Also, because these trackers aren’t built for nighttime specifically – be careful of comfort. The bands and watch face on an inexpensive fitness tracker may not be perfect for obtaining some nice shut-eye.
Connectivity And Practicality
Not all activity trackers, budget-friendly or not, are designed to smoothly interface with a smartphone. The trackers tested for this roundup can’t immediately make calls or send SMS to contacts on a paired smartphone. They may, however, show and dismiss incoming calls and notifications via a Bluetooth connection. You may forget about reading your email or paying for a coffee from your wrist with these more cheap devices.
Most cheap fitness trackers also won't contain a built-in GPS. Instead, they normally depend on a linked smartphone to gather location data. The problem of utilizing a fitness tracker without GPS is that it might not give as precise for measuring distance or pace. You also can't utilize a budget tracker to receive turn-by-turn directions during a walk or while conducting errands. For the more outdoorsy consumers, having GPS could be a critical safety feature if you want this kind of capabilities at your fingertips.
Design
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You also might discover that an affordable fitness tracker is tougher to navigate than a more complex wristwatch. Whether it be a screen size issue or simply not having a clever enough interface, don't expect every feature to be one that you can engage with directly on your wrist. Oftentimes, you may need to whip out your smartphone to log information or get more in-depth health data.
The quality and build of screens and bands will also differ in this category. Don’t anticipate the finest resolution OLED displays or the fanciest materials in the bands. But you should expect some level of perspiration and water resistance.
Best Affordable Fitness Trackers For 2024
Xiaomi Mi Band 8
Tracks: Heart rate, sleep, stress, blood oxygen, women’s health | Supported Operating System: Android 6.0 and above, iOS 12.0 and above | Memory: 100GB | Screen size: 1.62” | Waterproof: 5ATM water resistant | GPS: No | Battery life: 16 days
The Xiaomi Smart Band 8 shone out on several fronts – it not only has the easiest interface to navigate when recording exercises, it also has the most comfortable band to sleep in. This device features pretty much everything you would expect in a fitness tracker, and it comes at a price that’s hard to beat. The 1.62-inch, 192 x 490 pill-shaped AMOLED display is full color and glows very bright both indoors and out. Although it doesn't have a physical navigation button, you can move across the UI by swiping up and down, or left and right.
The Smart Band 8 is fairly comfortable, but what truly made it secure the top place is how informative its workout data were. Unlike some of the other trackers we examined, the Smart Band 8 does not require you to download any exercises from its companion app. Meaning, you may get right started tracking exercises as niche as skiing. When a workout is complete, you get all the information you’d want on your wrist - from heart rate readings to pace and speed, to calories burned and more. It may sound basic, but several of the other trackers we evaluated merely report step count and distance walked after a walk. The amount of time spent in each heart rate zone will appear in your report, from light, intensive, aerobic to anaerobic.
Xiaomi’s tracker also includes a unique “Pebble” mode, which allows you to clip on the tracker to shoelaces using a specific casing to gather running and cycling statistics. Using Pebble mode, you can obtain a clearer analysis of how you fared during a sprint -– notably numbers like flight ratio and ground contact time, coupled with general information about your running style. You may also read this: Developing a mobile app costs what?
Best Affordable Fitness Tracker - Runner Up
Amazfit Band 7
Tracks: Heart rate, sleep, stress, blood oxygen, women’s health | Supported Operating System: Android 7.0 and above, iOS 12.0 and above | Memory: 2.3GB | Screen size: 1.47” | Waterproof: 5ATM water resistant | GPS: No | Battery life: 18 days
The Amazfit Band 7, like the Xiaomi Band 8, includes all of the workouts you can track pre-loaded on your wrist. It also offers a unique UI that allows you to select a personalized goal, like burning 500 calories, before starting a workout. Plus, it has a substantial 18 days of battery life (or more if you choose power-saver mode).
The Amazfit band includes a particular scoring system called PAI, which stands for “Personal Activity Intelligence.” This indicator is calculated from your heart rate during all activities (even ones that don't involve tracked exercises) and offers you a number score from 1 to 100. You want to achieve your score as close to 100 as possible, through workouts and rest, to maintain your total heart health good. Like the Xiaomi Smart Band 8, the Amazfit Band 7 shows a user a breakdown of their overall heart rate zone activities on the watch display.
The watch also has a unique “one tap measure” that provides you insights into your heart rate, blood oxygen levels and even a stress score based on your heart rate variability.
A Basic Fitness Tracker That Works
Fitbit Inspire 3
Tracks: Heart rate, sleep, stress, blood oxygen, women’s health | Supported Operating System: Android 10.0 and above, iOS 15.0 and above | Memory: 6.4GB | Screen size: 0.7” | Waterproof: 5ATM water resistant | GPS: No | Battery life: 10 days
I expected more out of the Fitbit Inspire 3 since, well, it’s Fitbit. Also, considering it's the most expensive tracker on the list, you would assume you would get more. The tracker does serve its purpose -– it can record your workouts. However, only 6 kinds of activities can be tracked at a time. To add more specialist exercises like a weight-lifting program, you need to launch the Fitbit app and swap one exercise widget for another. It does give a rudimentary analysis of your calories burned, heart rate, and all of the stuff you would normally want to get in a performance report. In comparison to the Fitbit Charge 6, the Fitbit Inspire 3 doesn’t offer a built-in GPS, so you have to carry your phone with you to precisely measure pace or distance.
One thing I do love about the Fitbit Inspire 3 is its Active Zone Minute analysis after a workout is monitored. This is a function exclusive to Fitbit that assesses how hard your exercises were and how much fat you burned in the process. The app does an excellent job of breaking down various health parameters during exercise and can tell you how much recovery you need before your next session. It's good to have that knowledge, but the fact that you need to pull out your phone to acquire deeper insights might be a nuisance.