Best Budget Fitness Tracker 2021

You may think that the budget band for fitness trackers would be super low-end devices that can only count your steps. This isn’t the case though, as the tech has advanced, the price for it has come down. Now you can get week-long battery lives, continual heart rate monitoring, sleep tracking, and more.

You’ll likely be surprised by the number of features now available in the budget market. Even so, not every product will suit everyone’s needs, so make sure you look through the features on offer, compare prices, and then pick what’s right for you.

To help you pick the best for you, we’ve drawn up a list of the best budget fitness trackers in 2021

The Fitbit Inspire 2 is a reasonably priced offering from the best-known fitness tracker brand. For just under $100 it can monitor your exercise, heart rate, and sleep. It provides a broad range of stats, though many of these require a Fitbit Premium subscription. You do get a one-year subscription included in the price but may end up missing some features when that expires.

It has a fantastic 10-day battery life, though this is helped by the small screen and relatively small feature set compared to high-end models. It will attempt to automatically guess what exercise you’re performing from a range of 20 options, though you can reassign them if it gets it wrong. It’s waterproof down to a depth of 50m although the heart rate sensor won’t work when underwater.

The Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 6 also sold as just the Xiaomi Mi Band 6 is a super cheap fitness tracker. In the real world, it is best suited to general health tracking, however, as the band isn’t the most secure or comfortable, and some of the fitness features are hit and miss. For example, it consistently overestimates the distance covered in a run and doesn’t offer any specific workout advice.

It does offer a blood oxygenation measure, that features spot checks, it can also monitor your heart rate and sleep patterns. It’s waterproof to 50m but doesn’t feature a built-in GPS. The screen is particularly bright, making it great for use outdoors in direct sunlight. It also comes in a variety of colours.

The Amazfit Bip is a relatively low-cost budget fitness tracker. Its main selling point is the huge 45-day battery life which can be recharged to full in just two and a half hours. It features a heart rate sensor, GPS, and a workout tracker. Unfortunately, it can only track one of four workout types: indoor running, outdoor running, walking, and outdoor cycling. This means it won’t be particularly helpful if you tend to do other forms of exercise.

It features a GPS chip that can connect to both GPS and GLONASS satellites. GPS locking is generally solid, though it can take some time to get a fix in the first place. It’s very lightweight at just 32g making it easy on the wrist. The instruction manual included is very vague and unhelpful.

The Garmin Vivosmart 4 is an ultralight and super-slim fitness tracker. It weighs just 18 grams, despite this, it packs a 7 days battery life, a heart rate sensor, and a pulse ox sensor. While the pulse ox sensor can’t run constantly, you can set it to measure your blood oxygen levels overnight and perform manual spot checks throughout the day.

The tiny size does mean that the screen is really small, this makes it hard to show or find some information and generally makes the device more difficult for those with impaired sight. While the Garmin store does allow you to choose a band size, the Amazon listing doesn’t and also doesn’t specify which size band it comes with.

The Huawei Band 3 Pro is a slim and lightweight fitness tracker. This slim design means that the screen isn’t very big, which complicates the pairing process which requires you to scan a QR code on the screen with your phone. It does offer a great 12-day battery life though, alongside a sleep tracker and heart rate tracker.

The inclusion of a GPS module points you towards this tracker’s strong point. It’s great for tracking exercises where you move. For example, it can track you while you swim and even track what stroke you’re doing in the pool. It struggles more for stationary exercise in a gym.

That was our roundup of the best budget fitness trackers in 2021. Have you recently bought a budget fitness tracker? What sold you on it and what has your experience been so far? Let us know down below.