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Google Bought Fitbit. So What?
Best All-Round Fitbit
Fitbit Charge 6
Runner-Up
Fitbit Inspire 3
Stylish Wristwear
Fitbit Luxe
There was a time not too long ago when Fitbit was essentially the only wearable in town, the most popular way to brag about step counts and the rest. While its status has waned in the face of ever-growing competition, Fitbit is still making easy-to-use fitness trackers and watches.
Now under the ownership of Google, Fitbit is continuing to refresh its trackers and smartwatches. So if you’ve not yet been lured in by an Apple Watch or can’t afford to spend big, you still have good Fitbit options for tracking fitness, sleep, and other health metrics, with a nice variety of designs and features.
Updated December 2023: We added the Fitbit Charge 6 in place of the Charge 5.
For more WIRED fitness guides, check out the Best Fitness Trackers, the Best Smartwatches, the Best Garmin Watches and the Best Running Gear.
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Photograph: PATRICK T. FALLON/Getty Images
Google Bought Fitbit. So What?
In January 2021, Google officially announced that it had completed the acquisition of Fitbit for a reported $2.1 billion, grabbing hardware and software teams that also absorbed assets from Pebble, which Fitbit acquired in 2016. Quite rightly, some people have concerns about the shift in ownership from a data privacy point of view. In a blog post, Rick Osterloh, a senior VP at Google, stated that the deal was always about devices and not data. Fitbit has supported this claim on its own help page, where it explains the Fitbit by Google brand and states that Google will not use Fitbit health and wellness data for Google ads. Whether that will remain the case in the future isn’t completely clear.
Google’s presence seems to grow by the month. Since that acquisition, we have seen new devices launched under the Fitbit name with native Google apps built in. Google has also launched its own smartwatch in the form of the Pixel Watch, with fitness tracking features from Fitbit. Google is still launching wearables with Fitbit’s name, and we expect Google’s own hardware to continue to absorb the software smarts that Fitbit has been working on since it entered the wearable tech space.
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Photograph: Fitbit
Best All-Round Fitbit
Fitbit Charge 6
While the features from Fitbit’s smartwatches get stripped, its premium fitness tracker inherits more smarts, making it a more desirable Fitbit to opt for. The Charge 6 (7/10, WIRED Recommends) is a tracker that will track your steps (if you still care about steps). It also offers great sleep tracking and extras to appeal to casual fitness fans and those who like to keep stress in check. Fitbit doesn’t rip up the design script from the Charge 5, keeping that colorful AMOLED touchscreen while thankfully bringing back a physical button.
Google’s presence has increased on the Charge with the useful additions of Google Maps and Google Wallet, and less so YouTube Music controls unless you’re wed to Google’s music service. The biggest change on the fitness front lies with the ability to use the Charge 6’s heart rate sensor to send data to connected gym equipment—the sensor accuracy feels good enough to do that in most workout scenarios. The built-in GPS support doesn’t rival dedicated sports watches for accuracy and reliability, though. Unlike those watches, Fitbit can dish out good sleep data and makes it insightful and easy to take action. The EDA Scan app takes Fitbit deeper into stress tracking territory with the ECG sensor giving the Charge 6 some surprisingly serious heart-health monitoring abilities. You’re getting all of this for less than Fitbit’s smartwatches, and also gaining some features too.
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Photograph: Amazon
Runner-Up
Fitbit Inspire 3
The Fitbit Inspire 3 offers the best battery life you can get on a Fitbit right now: up to 10 days, depending on how you use it. It also improves on the previous Inspire by adding an AMOLED touchscreen. I do wish this was a tad bigger, but it’s a big visibility improvement over the previous two Inspire trackers. Fitbit focuses on its core strengths here, giving you a better screen and interface—influenced by its smartwatches—to view daily step count progress. This form factor is extremely comfortable to take to bed and track sleep stages. It’s also just a nicer way to check in on your phone notifications.
The Inspire 3 also packs in a high-performing optical heart rate monitor for insights like resting heart rate and an SpO2 sensor that focuses on tracking blood oxygen levels only during sleep. If you’re intrigued, you can see your breathing rate, skin temperature, and “stress management” scores via the mindfulness and wellness-inclined additions. The Inspire 3 proves you don’t have to spend big to get the best of what Fitbit has to offer and enjoy better battery life than all of the trackers and watches that sit above it.
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Photograph: Fitbit
Stylish Wristwear
Fitbit Luxe
The most desirable wearables don’t scream that they’re packed with tech, and while Fitbit has sought to make all of its trackers and watches pair with your outfit, the Luxe looks most like a fancy accessory. The Luxe sets a colorful AMOLED screen on your wrist and matches that with a slim, stainless steel case and a range of mesh, woven, and leather bands. It even looks great with the bundled silicone band.
Beneath this attractive exterior lie the sensors and smarts to reliably track heart rate throughout the day and night and capture SpO2 data while you sleep for a useful-if-not-vital dose of wellness data. This Fitbit has 20 exercise modes and “connected GPS” via your phone to give it some limited sports-tracking functionality, though I found the lack of an altimeter to track a flight of stairs I climbed a disappointing omission. The suite of mindfulness tools such as Fitbit’s Relax breathing exercises and Stress Management Scores show the direction it’s heading. For now, the Luxe manages to wrap those core Fitbit features up in a slender and stylish frame.
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Photograph: Fitbit
The Best Fitbit Smartwatch
Fitbit Versa 4
Now that the Google Pixel Watch actually exists, the fate of Fitbit’s own smartwatches feels up in the air. But if the idea of owning a Pixel Watch doesn’t appeal and you’re interested in a more Fitbit-centric experience with better battery life, the Versa 4 is the one to go for. You get a smartwatch with a gently curved design—it’s almost identical to the Versa, but with the welcome return of a physical button. There’s a large, vibrant, 1.5-inch AMOLED touchscreen display and a battery performance that can really stretch over the promised six days if you don’t leave the screen on 24/7.
As for sports, the Versa 4 gives you built-in GPS to track outdoor runs and rides and the motion sensors to track indoor swims well enough—though not with sports-watch-rivaling accuracy. Fitbit’s latest PurePulse heart-rate sensor is a better fit for day-to-day heart rate stats than it is for a CrossFit class. And third-party app support has been replaced by native Google apps, like Maps, with Google Assistant joining Amazon’s Alexa. As a device that lets you check your phone notifications, keep an eye on step counts and sleep, and forget about charging it constantly, the Versa 4 has plenty to like.
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Photograph: Fitbit
Serious Health Tracking
Fitbit Sense 2
The Fitbit Sense was clearly designed to attract the kind of people who were looking at the Apple Watch (and the rest) as much to monitor health as gym time. The Sense 2 delivers that primarily through an ECG sensor that’s approved in the US to help wearers detect potential signs of atrial fibrillation. A skin temperature sensor can monitor temperature changes during the night to spot any trends and an SpO2 sensor goes to work when you’re sleeping to detect breathing disturbances. While it’s not a regulatory-approved feature, it can potentially detect signs of the sleep disorder sleep apnea.
An electrical cEDA sensor captures on-the-spot and continuous measurements of galvanic skin response that Fitbit uses as a marker of stress. Fitbit needs to work on delivering information on potential stressors in a useful way, but it’s a start. The Sense 2 also grabs all of the cheaper Versa’s fitness-tracking and sports-tracking features, including built-in GPS, and uses a PurePulse heart-rate sensor to keep track of your Active ZoneMinutes when you’re upping the intensity. You need Fitbit Premium ($10/£8 per month) to unlock all of the most valuable health insights. If you want a Fitbit smartwatch with a stronger and more serious health-tracking edge, this is the one you want.
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Photograph: Fitbit
Honorable Mentions
If you’re on a budget, you might want to consider last year’s Fitbits or if you want to combine tracking with a more rounded smartwatch experience, there’s the Pixel Watch. Here’s how they stack up.
- Fitbit Inspire HR ($79): It doesn’t have that more colorful and vibrant display of the Inspire 3 (above), but if you want to get many of the same staple fitness features, plus sleep-monitoring accuracy, you can pick this fitness band up for less than $100.
- Fitbit Versa 3 ($141): That physical button aside, the Fitbit Versa 4 doesn’t offer hugely different features or performance compared to this Versa 3 watch. So if you can hunt out the older Versa, you’ll get a strong fitness-tracking and smartwatch experience overall.
- Fitbit Sense ($169): Again, the differences between the original Sense and the newer Sense 2 are fairly minimal. With the first Sense, you’re missing out on the reinstated physical button, the cEDA sensor (as opposed to the EDA sensor), and a few very minor design changes.
- Google Pixel Watch ($350): If you don’t entirely love Fitbit’s software, then the Pixel Watch provides an alternative with a really clean, slick version of its own Wear OS operating system that also hosts those core Fitbit fitness-tracking features.
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Photograph: Fitbit; Apple
Fitbit Versus Apple Watch
Fitbit and Apple are still arguably the two biggest names in the fitness-tracking business. Fitbit offers more form factors to choose from, while Apple is led by its Apple Watch, with the Ultra appealing to endurance athletes. Fitbit’s trackers and watches have a more beginner-friendly feel and can offer longer battery life between charges compared to Apple’s collection of smartwatches. Fitbit also has more advanced native sleep tracking, while Apple is playing catchup on that front.
If you care about daily activity tracking, both offer motivational features to keep you moving throughout the day. Fitbit doesn’t get you to close those rings like Apple does, but it will nudge you to get up. The lion’s share of its stats and metrics are geared toward telling you how active or inactive you’ve been. Both are serious about health tracking, offering ECG, SpO2, temperature, and optical heart rate monitors on most devices for useful and possibly life-changing insights. The Apple Watch has more strengths as a sports tracker; the richer app store gives it the edge here. But for a variety of designs; ease of use; and sheer range of metrics and data across health, fitness, and mental well-being, Fitbit certainly holds its own.
