Best Fitness Trackers 2022 | GPS Smart Watches for Runners

Key Specs

• Battery Life: 18 hours
• GPS: Built-in
• Heart Rate: Yes
• Sleep Tracking: Yes
• Water Resistance: Up to 50m

This smartwatch is priced far below Apple’s other watches but still 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. It has the ability to send and receive calls and measure heart rate and sleep metrics. 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 the Apple Watch 7 (below) are that the SE has a smaller display, doesn’t charge or process as fast, and has a heart rate sensor that is one generation behind, among a few other small differences—but for basic tracking with all the GPS and social perks of an Apple Watch, it’s a great bargain.

Key Specs

• Battery Life: 7 days (5 hours in GPS mode)
• GPS: Built-in
• Heart Rate: Yes
• Sleep Tracking: Yes
• Water Resistance: Up to 50m

More smartwatch than mere tracker band, the latest Fitbit Charge 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 touchscreen is bright and clear, even in daylight—with up to a seven-day battery lifespan. The watch has a few smartwatch-level perks, like 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. And the brand’s associated app is among the best, too—it’s fun and intuitive to use, and cleanly designed to clearly display all your relevant data.

Key Specs

• Battery Life: Up to 10 days
• GPS: Connected, not built-in
• Heart Rate: Yes
• Sleep Tracking: Yes
• Water Resistance: Up to 50m

The Inspire 2 is more of a traditional fitness tracker, with a narrow band and clear greyscale 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.

Key Specs

• Battery Life: Up to 11 days
• GPS: Built-in
• Heart Rate: Yes
• Sleep Tracking: Yes
• Water Resistance: Up to 50m

The Venu sits somewhere between the Garmin Forerunner 945 and the Garmin Vivomove HR in our lineup here—it’s a little more casual-looking than a traditional GPS watch but not quite as classy as the Vivomove, which has watch hands and a leather band. That said, if you want a sleek watch that can go from office to the gym without looking out of place, this is the Garmin for you. It 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.

Key Specs

• Battery Life: Up to 5 days in “smart” mode, up to two weeks in regular watch mode
• GPS: Not built-in
• Heart Rate: Yes
• Sleep Tracking: Yes
• Water Resistance: Up to 50m

If you like to wear your fitness tracker everywhere—to work, to the gym, to a fancy gala—the Vivomove HR is the undercover smartwatch for you. On the surface, it appears to be a traditional watch with a stainless-steel face, moving hands, and options to add a sporty silicone or classy leather band. But the watch operates in stealth mode as a fitness tracker, with a light-up digital screen in the background that can display your steps, heart rate, calories, and distance—as well as other smart features like music controls, message notifications, and calendar alerts. It doesn’t have built-in GPS, but you can measure pace and distance of activities using the watch and the GPS Connect app.

Key Specs

• Battery Life: 4 to 7 days
• GPS: No
• Heart Rate: Yes
• Sleep Tracking: Yes
• Water Resistance: Up to 100m

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 Nature and Science of Sleep. 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 overall 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.

Key Specs

• Battery Life: 6 Days (12 hours in GPS mode)
• GPS: Built-in
• Heart Rate: Yes
• Sleep Tracking: Yes
• Water Resistance: Up to 50m

The Versa 3 edges out its brethren as our favorite Fitbit model due to its wealth of premium features—including on-board GPS—at a relatively low price compared to other smart watches. The watch monitors all your fitness metrics through 24/7 health and activity tracking, with over 20 workout modes, and also features Spotify streaming, Voice Assistant controls, and other standard smartwatch functions. The watch’s touchscreen is intuitive and easy to use, as is Fitbit’s app. Best of all, the watch has a stellar battery life of up to six days in “normal” mode and 12 hours in GPS—and it charges quickly when you need a fast re-up.

Key Specs

• Battery Life: Up to two weeks in smartwatch mode, 10 hours in GPS mode
• GPS: Built-in
• Heart Rate: Yes
• Sleep Tracking: Yes
• Water Resistance: Up to 50m

For data-obsessed runners, the Forerunner 945 has the most exhaustive feature list ever, including virtual pay 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, you also get all the traditional metrics, like step-counting, heart rate, sleep stats, VO2 max, and many more; plus, the watch will accurately measure your swimming, cycling, and running accurately through GPS. And the battery life is excellent—the watch holds a charge for up to two weeks in smartwatch mode or 10 hours in GPS mode.

Key Specs

• Battery Life: 8 days
• GPS: No
• Heart Rate: No
• Sleep Tracking: Yes
• Water Resistance: Up to 50m

For kids over 6 who want to track all their fitness metrics—or just try to increase their overall activity level—the Ace 3 is a fun tool. The clear greyscale screen is easy to read and displays all their daily stats, like step number, movement per hour (with move reminders), active minutes, sleep time, and sleep quality—and then rewards kids with virtual badges and animated celebrations for achieving goals. Using the Fitbit app, users can also set up step challenges with family and friends, or send messages. (The tracker’s display will show call notification, but not calls.) The tracker is waterproof down to 50 meters, so you don’t have to worry about your kid jumping into the pool with it on. The tracker band is available in lots of different kid-friendly colors and themes.

Key Specs

• Battery Life: Up to 18 hours
• GPS: Built-in
• Heart Rate: Yes
• Sleep Tracking: Yes
• Water Resistance: Up to 50m

Apple’s biggest update to its beloved smartwatch is in the watch face itself—the Series 7’s display is larger and easier to read on the run, with a lighter, thinner casing. When you’re mid-run or mid-walk, the watch also now has audio updates on your pace and distance per mile, and will hound you if you’re falling short of your set goal pace, distance, calories, or time. As for health tracking, the Series 7 does everything you’d expect from a device that connects to Apple Fitness+ and the Activity app, like guide you through workouts and track your steps, heart rate, activities, sleep—and even blood oxygen reading and ECG measurements. It’s essentially a personal trainer, smart tracker, and computer strapped to your wrist. And while the battery life isn’t stellar, the watch charges at lightning speed—the battery level will go from 0 to 80 percent in about 45 minutes.

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