The 8 Best Fitness Trackers for Runners

The entry-level variant of this Apple smartwatch is priced far below Apple’s other watches and comes in two bevel sizes 44mm or 40mm for smaller wrists. Still, it offers a feature-packed tracking experience, with all your activity stats displayed through a simplified version of Apple’s Fitness app. The watch has GPS tracking, maps, music, and health metrics.

Apple also offers a cellular version of this watch for about $50 more, which has the ability to send and receive calls—without an iPhone—if you have a cell plan that covers it. It also has a bright colorful display with an easy-to-use interface that will feel familiar to Apple users.

The biggest drawbacks to the SE as compared to most fitness trackers, including the Apple Watch Ultra (below), is that it has a small battery that doesn’t last for all-day outings. So if you’re training for a marathon or tracking events that last 6 or more hours, the device may die on you while tracking. The watch comes with three months of Apple’s Fitness+ services, which cost $9.99 a month after that.

The Inspire 3 is more of a traditional fitness tracker, with a narrow band and updated color screen that displays the time, steps, calories burned, heart rate, and more. It has an unbeatable 10-day battery life and syncs with the easy-to-use Fitbit app.

The biggest downside of the device are that it doesn’t have built-in GPS tracking—you have to do that through the phone app if you want to record distance and speed of your activities using GPS.

But for basic tracking of your steps, sleep, and heart rate, it’s a solid bargain—and an excellent way to monitor all your health stats.

More smartwatch than mere tracker band, the latest Fitbit Charge 6 is excellent at cataloging all your daily activities with good accuracy, including steps, activity through built-in GPS, sleep, and heart rate. The color display touch screen is bright and clear, even in daylight—with up to a seven-day battery life.

The fitness tracker has a few smartwatch-level perks, including Fitbit Pay and Spotify Control, so you can control your playlist from your wrist. You can also customize the display screen to choose your app notifications, and even respond to Android messages with pre-selected responses, when tethered to your phone.

Fitbit’s app is among the best, too—it’s fun and intuitive to use, and cleanly designed to clearly display all your relevant data.

With the Venu 3, Garmin made some important updates to this smartwatch, which doubles as an excellent fitness tracker. Available in both 30mm and 35mm for smaller or larger wrists, the Venu 3 has a larger screen than its predecessor (the Venu 2). It also has a mic and speaker for taking calls, a more advanced heart rate sensor and, for the first time for Garmin, a sleep tracking function.

Garmin has offered some of the best fitness tracking sensors and software in a GPS smartwatch and that continues here. The Venu 3 has all the functionality of a high-end smartwatch, including a heart rate sensor, full activity and tracking metrics, built-in GPS, smart notifications, virtual payments, and storage space for up to 650 songs.

It can connect to apps and stream music. Plus, it has a long battery life and bright, easy-to-read color display—a solid choice for runners who don’t need the exhaustive metrics and mapping of the 945. What’s more is that it is sleek enough to go from the office to the gym without looking out of place.

The Apple Watch Ultra 2 is Apple’s flagship smartwatch/fitness tracker. It’s a wrist computer (encased in burly titanium and sapphire crystal) that easily doubles as a fitness tracker—with all its features—and triples as a smartphone. It’s also an adventure watch that can a beating drubbed up by the wildest of trail runners or gym rat in the weight room, as our colleagues at Men’s Health noted: “It’s fallen from shoulder high and smacked right into concrete and come away unscathed.”

The Ultra 2 monitors heart rate and sleep, plus it has GPS tracking and hosts or streams music via cell service. The watch also tracks other health metrics (though it has a blood-oxygen monitoring sensor, that tracking was blocked in 2023 over a patent infringement claim). It has access to a plethora of apps through Apple’s app store, too.

If you want a fitness tracker that doesn’t look like a fitness tracker or take up wrist space, this is it. The Oura Ring is best known as a sleep tracker, and though the brand has continued to add more daytime health-tracking functionality, the compact, titanium device remains one of the most accurate trackers of overall slumber, according to this 2021 comparison of eight commercial trackers published in the journal Connected, not built-in.

To collect your stats, the Oura sits on your finger like a traditional ring and uses temperature, heart rate, and other “body signals and daily habits” streamed to the brand’s app to calculate your health metrics. It then makes suggestions on how you can improve sleep and mental recovery—and predictions about your menstrual cycle based on the app’s period tracking.

The ring will also measure overall activity level and assign you an score based on your whole-body activity and step count. It’s accurate and unobtrusive, so if you’re looking for an overall health tracker and not something more akin to a GPS watch, this is the tool to try.

If you’re looking for a true sports watch with fitness tracking and training capabilities, check out the Suunto Race. With more than 95 different activity modes, including obstacle racing, open water swimming, and roller skating, it will give you metrics on your performance for almost any activity you can think of.

It also has great training and recovery features. The GPS watch allows you to download maps to it for backcountry navigation without a smartphone. And like a few of the other options from Garmin and the Apple Watch Ultra 2, it has a barometer and altimeter. It also has some of the best battery life we’ve seen, capable of 40 hours of tracking in full sports modes between charges, making it an ideal smartwatch for endurance racers.

For data-obsessed runners, the Forerunner 965 has the most exhaustive feature list ever, including step-counting, heart rate, sleep stats, VO2 max, and many more. Plus the watch has plenty of activity modes for cross-training and tracks swimming, cycling, and running accurately through GPS.

Garmin also includes virtual pay in the watch and the ability to access color maps and create round-trip courses on the fly. The watch houses up to 1,000 songs, so you can play your own MP3 collection or stream through Spotify while you’re running. In addition, the battery life is excellent—the watch holds a charge for up to 23 days in smartwatch mode.