BEST Fitness Trackers 2025: Comparing Accuracy, Features, and Value

what is up YouTube being a division one athlete and a personal trainer for the past four to five years working at multitud of luxury gyms and sports training facilities I've been around a bunch of different fitness trackers and myself lifting hundreds and hundreds of pounds to running a lot of miles and Hiking swimming everything in between I've tried a bunch of different fitness trackers from an AA ring Apple watch Garmin whoop Fitbit I've tried them all and I've researched them to figure out how accurate they are the prices who they are for and who are

they not for today's video is going to be about that so let's get into it let's start off with the Apple watches they're one of the most common devices that I've seen people wear in the gym and sports and I have the Apple Ultra 2 on my wrist right now the Apple watch is great it's a great series especially if you have an iPhone they connect seamlessly like apple does with most of their products the calorie tracking is different based on each workout they have a whole library of different workouts does everything a watch does

tell you the time timer stopwatch but this one tracks your uh activity as well so I can see my total active minutes based on my age weight height um I can see how many minutes each day in green that I've actually been in a a burning state of my heart actually working out total active calories and then total calories in the day so active calories are coming from again when I'm working out my heart rate is elevated and in blue I can actually see how many hours that have stood uh in that day just standing

up in one hour for like a second I think tracks an hour so not that accurate but it does tell you how often that you've been uh standing throughout the day in the fitness tracking section it gives a detailed breakdown of the amount of stairs that you've climbed that day and distance traveled in Miles the watch is super customizable as well through the app and on the watch itself you can change different watch faces you can add friends and you get a notification like when my friend or my client completes a workout I get a

notification I can see what they did and how they did you can change the settings on how much information you want to display if you want to display at all but it's a cool setting to make a little small community and knowing that other people are working out um and they can see when you're working out and what you did and what you accomplished fact checking along with the personalize information of the age height uh weight and using a couple different sensors well as heart rate monitoring uh on your wrist your radial pulse it'll give

a breakdown and try and estimate the amount of calories that you're burning each day or each activity it is one of the more accurate devices on the market again each of these devices is going to be accurate more in one exercise or a couple different exercises instead of being accurate overall but Apple has seen from studies to be around 15 to 20% off market so if it's telling you you burned 100 calories on say rowing maybe you only burned 80 but whereas walking it can be a little bit more accurate because there's less variables the

thing with Apple watch is the battery life so on the lower tier ends of the watches the intro watches the battery life is 18 hours and even on the top one that I'm wearing it's 36 hours so if you wear it overnight you're pretty much going to have to charge it the next morning or not wear it the next day so sleep tracking isn't the greatest benefit coming from an Apple Watch that's why I'm wearing an aura ring as well and we'll get into the aura ring soon now on to fitbits when I got into

fitness tracking uh in college I used a Fitbit fitbits are cheaper they're a lot easier to sort of get into uh Fitness tracking if you don't have an iPhone especially and they have a great Community online there's a lot of people that use fitbits and the community has a lot of different uh advice tools and recommendations from thousands and tens of thousands of people that use the fit the Fitbit has a longer battery life so you can get some sleep tracking from it Fitbit is using the same thing as Apple watch you know the user

profile of their age weight height as well as motion sensors and heart rate data to try and give an accurate display of how many calories and activity you're burning on each movement Fitbit is generally considered reliable with a 10 to 15% off so if you're looking at doing a 100 calories on rowing maybe you only did 90 but based on the varied type activity if you're using it for walking running lifting it's pretty much going to be accurate just as the Apple watch next up is going to be the or ring the or ring I've

had this thing for about two years I love it it does track activity but it isn't very good at tracking activity uh the placement on the finger it just doesn't pick up the pulse the right way and there's just too many other variables that it's just not picking up what it is great for is sleep and Recovery tracking I wear this every night when I go to bed and in the morning I wake up and it gives me a detailed breakdown of my recovery from the day before based on the activities and it can also

take my plug-in from My Health Data that's getting from my Apple watch on my iPhone and so it can give a more detailed information on what I did uh expenditure wise and feed that into what its recommendation is is how to recover better as well as sleep timing how long it takes to get to bed my temperature at night it is a full array of data to make you sleep better but I do think that just relying on it for the activity tracking is a loss because it doesn't do it as accurately that's why I'm

wearing the Apple watch and the Ora ring the calorie tracking on the Ora ring can be as high as 30% off like I said it's just in a weird place and it's more focused on the recovery and sleep aspect rather than the actual activity burning so I love the or ring but if I'm looking to get activity tracking out of it I'm pairing it with something that's better at doing that the AA ring is good for overall daily normal activity but tracking high-intensity workouts or different variations of workouts that are more complicated it's not as

accurate and could be up to 30% off whoop I didn't have a whoop very long they do have a great on Monon trial where they'll send you the watch you can try it out for free if you don't like it send it back or you go right into their subscription model and the whoop is used by a lot of athletes I've just seen a lot of golfers all different types of athletes in different sports trying to use the whoop and I've heard nothing but amazing things from it it provides detailed analytics on recovery whoop is

trying to take the or ring and the watch and bring them together The Best of Both Worlds they're using heart rate variability resting heart rate and the Sleep data that it's tracked to give you a better understanding of your strain level they call it so how much your body is strained from yesterday and how much sleep and recovery and and activity you need to do to sort of set yourself up for the best you whoop can be 10 to 15% off for specific workouts but its main focus is strain what did you do yesterday and

how did your body recover from it and what do you need to do today to make sure that you're recovering better it's really focus on recovery and telling you what your body needs from what you did along with the AA ring the AA ring is more focused on the Sleep the whoop is more more focused on what you did in the workout previous combined with the sleep and how that will impact your training for the next day I didn't stick with the whoop watch because it doesn't do what normal watches do I wanted a watch

that could actually tell the time do a timer softw watches and it doesn't have a face on it last but not least are the Garmin watches before wearing the Apple watch I had a Garmin Phoenix 7x Pro Sapphire mouthful but it was a ,000 watch and it was souped up with everything I loved it because the battery life on it could last at least 30 days so if you're taking this out into the mountain range if you're a big outdoor person um love running a lot on trails and exploring new areas or even fishing golf

it has all these maps that you can upload into the watch and see real time where you are in relation to all these other things and it can track very well the distance and sort of give you better split times uh all things that come with running and longdistance endurance training love the watch for this they provide a lot more metrics and features for advanced athletes or people that are very serious about what their activity is of course it does cover General training but if you're investing into this watch you are probably investing a lot

of time into training and want to get the best fitness tracking basically a supercomputer of training on your hand Garin are using heart rate data the same bodily functions of age height weight they're also using GPS coordinates and motion sensors to provide an accurate calorie expenditure depending on how you wear the device and what activity you're doing they can be up to 10 to 15% off on the accurate calorie expenditure so in summary the deviations of accuracy on calorie tracking is this Apple watch is 15 to 20% Fitbit is 10 to 15% or ring is

20 to 30% and Garmin watches are 10 to 15% this is all based on what activity you're doing where you're wearing this item each device has its strengths and limitations based on you personally and what you want to get out of the watch let's go into why you should or should not buy each of these products the Apple watch is versatile it's not just a fitness tracker it's also a smart watch it allows you to get different apps integrate with your phone a lot more and you can basically leave the phone behind and have cellular

on your watch so you don't even need the phone as well as all the benefits that I said about its Fitness tracking it integrates very well with the phone and all these different Fitness tracking apps or even if you want to change the watch face on your watch there's a bunch of different cool apps and Integrations that allows you to seamlessly connect with all these different variables it's also very relatively accurate compared to the rest of the watches that are here why you shouldn't buy an Apple Watch Apple watch falls in the middle range but

if you're looking at the lowest entry it's on the higher ticket price compared to other watches in the market from Apple for Apple so it pairs really well with iOS but I don't have an Android so I'm assuming that it doesn't really work and talk to or listen to Android phones as well so this would be a strong consideration if you're thinking about getting an Apple Watch and you don't have an iPhone and finally the battery life it's just so short you have to charge it every day or every other day or else it's dead

it's a really inconvenience but you just have to stay on habit about charging it and that's really the main drawback of the Apple watch before I got an Apple Watch I was apprehensive because I just didn't want another phone on my wrist but honestly you can turn all of the features that you don't want off you don't have to have notifications on of getting text and emails or stock movements you can turn all that off if you just want the watch and track your activity which I do then you can do if you want a

second phone on your hand you can do that as well why you should buy a Fitbit they have a lot cheaper options so it's an easier way to get into the market compared to other watches it's super user friendly easy to set up up easy to use I think the Apple watch is as well but the Fitbit has less of a barrier to entry since it can work with both Android and iPhone flawlessly another reason to buy is the community like I said it's a huge Community a lot of people use them there's a lot

of tips tricks hacks in their community and a huge base of people that the same with the Apple watch you can view their activity tracking and keep up to date with your friends family or even different groups that you want to stay a part of and see what they're doing on and off the court why you should not buy a Fitbit while there are a lot of features on it it does lack a lot of features as well compared to the Garmin Apple watch whoop it's not giving you as much details on your strain from

the day before it doesn't have a lot of the different types of activity exercising for specific workouts but if you're just looking for a general tracking device this is fine but if you want something more detailed more high-tech the Fitbit isn't going to be that fitbits in my opinion also look a little bit ugly they look cheap they are cheaper than the other SmartWatches and they definitely look the part when you're looking at them finally the accuracy of fitbits again if you're trying to track a different workout that isn't listed on its available spread then

it's going to have a lot harder time of accurately tracking your expenditure and you're going to have to upgrade or look to a different model to try and get those features for specific activities like longdistance running hiking golf biking um triathlon it's just not going to give you as enough detail information why should you buy an order ring the in-depth detail the in-depth it gives great detail on sleep and Recovery tracking every night and the variables that go into it so you can actively change what you're doing to get a better night's sleep and feel

more rested the price it's on par with the other fitness trackers on the market right now it's not as great for Fitness tracking so when you actually break it down and look at the price of if you had to buy a ring and a fitness tracker it's kind of a high price point but the details that you get from your sleep and activity are unmatched the Rings are also very stylish I have lifted a lot with mine it's scratched up and still works like a charm I've rack pulled deadlifted holding it in my hand with

hundreds of pounds and it hasn't broke merely scratched still good as new why you shouldn't buy an or ring if you're not looking for just sleep and Recovery this isn't the product for you it does not do a great job at tracking Fitness an activity across the board and it is a pricier point when you want sleep tracking and Recovery tracking and activity tracking they're two different things the Ora ring does one and if you want to do the other greatly you're going to have to buy something else so you're looking at a higher price

point than just the ring why you should buy a whoop whoop has athletes in mind first they are focused on high multitude of workouts The Strain that your body deals with the strain that your body deals with from expending yourself in those workouts and then how it and what it needs to recover for the next day the subscription model that they have for payment is easy to start with the watch the community Sport with whoop like Fitbit is great there's a vast amount of people with a lot of data doctors scientists that are using this

and uploading their thoughts and opinions based on the the data that they're seeing and you can go view this in their community and of other people that are really focused on being the best at their craft or improving on any specific exercise that they did the day before why you shouldn't buy a whoop while the subscription cost makes it easier to get into the whooop it does add up over time when you're looking at it over a year you could buy one watch with that same thing but if you're looking over 10 years you could

buy 10 watches for the price of one whoops Advanced metrics and data can be overwhelming for someone that just wants to do daily General tracking Garin watch why should you buy a Garmin watch Garmin offers a wide array of different Fitness tracks in watches starting from the bare minimum all the way up to the upper echelon military style watches they have a high battery life the GPS works really well you can download songs music onto the watch you can leave the phone behind don't even have to worry about it and it's pretty detailed especially for

endurance athletes the rugged design makes it look awesome like a normal watch but behind the lens is a super computer the durability and design make it great for doing all those crazy outdoor activities that you'd be interested in doing when buying a Garmin why you shouldn't buy a Garmin they are at a higher price point when you want the great stuff out of the Garmin they're also very complex it's a lot of data just like the whoop the Garmin is even more data because there's so many more activities that it tracks very detailed so if

you're looking for something more simple the Garin is not that it is very complex and when I had the Garmin I had one of the very nice ones and trying to work with two different apps on the iPhone connecting to the watch it was kind of a headache I just wanted something simple that tracks my activities it's not as userfriendly let's compare the new prices for every device that I've said Apple watch you're looking to spend a starting at $249 and it can take you all the way up to $1,249 so it is a wide

array the one that I have the ultra was around $800 and I love it Fitbit watches on the low end can start at $99 and up to the top are around $399 remember you get what you pay for the or ring base model starts at $299 and can scale up to $549 but keep in mind you will only get basic information if you do not pay the subscription model on the app as well which is around $6 a month and that I'll give you the actual all the detailed information that I said if you're not

going to pay the $6 a month and keep that subscription there's almost no point in my eyes in buying the ring so that is something that you have to keep in mind when you're looking at cost the Loop has no upfront costs but it is a subscription model that you can pay monthly or pay in full the bottom tier is $20 a month which equates to $239 a year or you can pay two years and that will break down to around $30 a month or $399 for 2 years Garmin watches have an entry level thing

at $80 or they can scale up to $1900 the one I had before this the Phoenix 7x Pro Sapphire was around $1,000 super complex it was just too much for me um in terms of complexity so that's why I switched to the Apple watch but if you're looking for those endurance and high-tech um workouts garment might be for you so to wrap it up in my opinion the best for Recovery tracking is going to be the aura ring and the whoop the best for activity you're looking at Apple watch Garmin and whoop I personally would

go for the Apple watch or the Garmin if I'm focused more on activity training just think about what activ activities you do how complex is it walking and lifting or is it running marathons and golfing and all these different activities on a consistent basis maybe you want more Garmin if it's just the normal stuff maybe you just want accurate information and can have access to your phone on your wrist that's the Apple watch Fitbit if you have a lower price budget maybe that's where you start but the whoop is also a great option it's just

can you Bear Down paying that much money over that period of time to keep that much data do you need that much data in your life sometimes too much data is overkill I'll put the links to everything that I spoke about down below and if you buy something or if you have one of these already please leave a comment below and tell me what you have and the top thing you like about it and the top thing you don't like about it until next time peace