1. The list in brief
2. Best Android watch overall
3. Best budget Apple Watch
4. Best premium Apple Watch
5. Best mid-range Apple Watch
6. Best premium Android watch
7. Best watch for style
8. Best cheap Wear OS watch
9. Best Fitbit
10. Best watch for stress
11. Best premium Wear OS watch
11. How we choose
12. How we test
13. Latest updates
The best smartwatches are excellent fitness gadgets. They’re built to track your activity levels, record your workouts, and show you health and recovery insights. But they also do much more. The top smartwatches around today connect to your smartphone, delivering notifications, and even phone calls, to your wrist, as well as give you quick and easy access to a range of apps, like meditation apps, timers, weather insights, and so much more.
Whether you need a workout companion or simply want a stylish-looking watch with some extra features, a smartwatch is a great piece of tech to invest in, the good news is that these days there’s a lot of choice – even a sold selection of cheap smartwatches if you’re on a budget.
We've tested and reviewed many smartwatches, including the most popular and high-end entries, like the latest Apple Watch models, including the Series 9 and Ultra 2, and Samsung smartwatches. We've also spent time with Fitbit's offerings and Wear OS watches from brands like Fossil, Ticwatch and Mobvoi, too, ensuring that there's something for everyone in our best smartwatches guide below.
Matt is TechRadar's Fitness and Wearables Editor, which means he's an expert on workouts, smartwatches, and all things fitness tech. Matt's spent years covering the health and fitness beat: a former staffer at Men's Health magazine, he's also written for publications like Runner's World, Women's Health, Men's Fitness, LiveScience and Fit&Well.
The quick list
The best Android watch overall
The Samsung Galaxy Watch 6 is top of the list because it does everything you want an Android watch to do. It runs a version of Wear OS, it offers advanced health features such as ECG and blood pressure monitoring, and it's reasonably priced.
The best cheap Apple Watch
The second-generation Apple Watch SE does almost everything you could expect of a standard Apple Watch (excellent health and workout metrics, seamless iOS integration) with a few cost-cutting corners like nylon backing rather than stainless steel.
The best premium Apple Watch
The Apple Watch Ultra is an adventurer's dream Apple Watch: next-level GPS accuracy, a fully-functional dive computer, safety and navigation tools for hikes, and a jumbo battery life (well, for an Apple Watch at least)
The best mid-range Apple Watch
The Apple Watch 9 straddles the line perfectly between the Apple Watch SE and the Apple Watch Ultra series. It's a great smartwatch for fitness enthusiasts and everyday communications needs alike, provided you're an Apple user.
The best premium Android watch
The Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro is the Watch 5 on steroids, with a bigger battery, brighter screen, GPS tools like Track Back to prevent you from getting lost, and a more durable case with raised bezel.
The best watch for style
The Google Pixel Watch 2's attractive-looking pebble shape is simple and elegant in its edge-to-edge design. Google's excellent Wear OS and Fitbit integration is the icing on the cake.
The best Android watch overall
The Samsung Galaxy Watch 6 is a smart-looking watch in every sense of the word. It looks great on your wrist while offering powerful features. A larger Super AMOLED display is sharp and clear, as well as able to handle very bright outdoor scenes.
Performance-wise, it's fast although you'll reap the most benefits when paired with a Samsung smartphone. There's no iPhone support here either.
Besides SmartThings integration, the highlights here is the Samsung Galaxy Watch 6's updated chipset, the Exynos W930, and the ability to monitor your body's muscle and fat composition. It's bordering on the ultimate fitness tool with extensive sleep tracking also helping you get the most from yourself every day. Shame about that one-day battery life, though.
Read our full Samsung Galaxy Watch 6 review
The best cheap Apple Watch for iPhone
The Apple Watch SE 2 is arguably the best Apple Watch for most people, as it’s a lot more affordable than the Apple Watch Series 9, yet has most of the core features for those models, and even the same chipset as the Series 8.
The main things it lacks are an always-on display, an ECG, and blood oxygen tracking from the 8 (although the current Apple Watch Series 9 is now being sold without blood oxygen tracking), and the Double Tap feature from the 9, but the Apple Watch SE 2 still has a wide range of health and fitness features, plus potentially life-saving additions like Car Crash Detection.
It’s also powerful, has impressive battery life for a proper smartwatch, and is very light and comfortable to wear. So it strikes a superb balance between price and performance, and is a great relatively affordable pick.
Read our full Apple Watch SE 2 review
The best premium Apple Watch for iPhone
The Apple Watch Ultra 2 is the ultimate Apple Watch with one of the best screens we've ever seen on a wearable, with its sumptuous Retina Display OLED commanding up to 3,000 nits of brightness. It's bigger and bulkier, than the standard Apple Watch, and has a faster S9 processor, enabling that excellent Double Tap gesture available on the Series 9 below. In all other respects, it's identical to its predecessor, the original Apple Watch Ultra.
It could still offer better battery life (despite surpassing the regular Apple Watch) but a powerful and accurate GPS is great for exploring, especially with watchOS 10's improved hiking waypoints feature, plus it's a working dive computer with the Oceanic Plus app.
It's expensive but powerful, and during testing, we easily found this to be the most capable wearable that the brand has ever made, albeit it's still more likely to be found on the wrists of weekend warriors rather than true adventurers due to that limited 36-hour battery life. Still, that's good enough for most of us.
Read our full Apple Watch Ultra 2 review
The best mid-range Apple Watch
The Apple Watch is the best smartwatch family of devices, and the Apple Watch Series 9 is the latest and greatest mid-range option from Apple, sitting nicely between the cheap SE and premium Ultra. It gives you all of Apple's latest features from watchOS 10, without splurging on the adventure kit you don't need from the Watch Ultra or Ultra 2.
Watch Series 9's biggest addition is the new Double Tap feature, allowing the Apple Watch to be controlled at least partially hands-free. While the Watch Series 9's battery life remains average and the watch looks the same as previous models, there's good reason why Apple's iconic squircle look and huge display are so popular.
We found that the processor boosts the speed a tad, the new Ultra Wideband will sync well with iPhone 15 and future iPhones, and there's that Crash Detection tool that could just save your life (but hopefully you'll never need it). Plus, there's all the benefits of watchOS 10. If you want the Apple Watch experience, the Apple Watch Series 9 is a great all-rounder.
Read our full Apple Watch Series 9 review
The best premium watch for Android
The Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro review is big, bold and brash with an eye on assisting outdoor enthusiasts. It's a big departure from the standard Galaxy Watch line, and fulfils the same niche as the Apple Watch Ultra does among iOS enthusiasts.
The AMOLED screen is super smooth to use while also being twice as durable as the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 before it. All the improved health features are there with the Pro offering up a route workout GPS function so you can plan your route carefully with turn-by-turn navigation.
It has the prowess of a Garmin watch with the glamor of a Wear OS device, ensuring you get the best of both worlds. Its 80-hour battery life is better than many other Wear OS watches, and most smartwatches period, although it won't stand up to the weeks you get on a Garmin.
Read the full Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro review
The best Wear OS watch for style
The Google Pixel Watch 2, like its predecessor, is an uncommonly beautiful smartwatch. It has a natural rather than a manufactured look, with a glossy face that curves to meet an equally curvaceous body. The construction is close to seamless.
Because of that curve, there's more glass facing you than on the Apple Watch Series 9, which both adds to the elegance and cunningly hides a larger-ish black bezel surrounding the screen. The battery life is slightly improved compared to the original, getting fast charge, while a new multi-path HR sensor improves workout tracking.
This is a bright, colorful, and responsive AMOLED display, considerably smaller than the Apple Watch Series 9's rectangular face, but Google does a lot with the reduced screen real estate. We never found ourselves wishing for more, except for the battery life. Although it's an improvement over the original Pixel and most Apple offerings, it's still a continual frustration at 24 hours: less than the Samsung Galaxy Watch 6, and a bugbear we have with many watches on this list compared to, say, a Garmin.
Read our full Google Pixel Watch 2 review
The best cheap system-agnostic smartwatch
The CMF Watch Pro by Nothing is a very cheap, very attractive smartwatch that offers a lot for the money. It's got in-built GPS, up to 13 days of battery life, and in our review we mentioned the design was great, both in software and hardware. If you want a simplified smartwatch with a few health metrics, this is the one to get.
The downsides? With that low price point, of course, comes some missing features. It's never going to be as stacked with third-party apps or as versatile as an Apple or Samsung Galaxy watch, and you have to go through the rigmarole of manually adding contacts before calling them on the watch. The OS is pretty minimal, as one might expect from Nothing.
However, if you're looking for a cheap do-it-all watch that still looks attractive, you could certainly do a lot worse. The CMF Watch Pro is well-built, attractive and simple to use, and will certainly pick up a cult following.
Read our full CMF Watch Pro by Nothing review
The best Fitbit overall
The Fitbit Versa 3 is one of the best wrist companions for those who want to focus on fitness features. Despite the fact the Fitbit Versa 4 is out, we still reocmmend the Fitbit Versa 3 as a better value buy.
Why? Well, despite the occasionally-frustrating side button, the Fitbit Versa 3 has several features missing from the Versa 4. The watch supports Spotify and Deezer for music, which was gutted from the 4 (presumably to make the Pixel Watch a more attractive buy) and it's cheaper now.
Fitbit's suite of fitness tracking features isn't the most comprehensive of all watches, but it's very well-presented, and thoughtfully laid out so the average users can make sense of it. Premium subscriptions add extra depth, but if you can pick the watch up cheap, there's enough meat to get your teeth into to make it worth the buy even without Premium.
Read our full Fitbit Versa 3 review
The best Fitbit watch for stress management
The Fitbit Sense has a design that's quite similar to the Versa, listed higher on this list, and as a Fitbit it's also quite similar to use. However, this Android smartwatch model comes wtih health features that go beyond the physical.
The Fitbit Sense has the... well, sense, to check in on some aspects of mental health too, logging your mood and stress, as well as providing meditation and mindfulness lessons. Its main issue is that you have to pay for Fitbit Premium for lots of its extra features. There aren't exactly many other watches on this list that require you to keep paying after you've bought it.
Performance-wise, we found it to be impressive during testing. Putting the Sense through a pretty intense spin session, we didn’t see any unexpected dips in heart rate that indicate an issue with fitness trackers. It also vibrates to indicate when you're moving between heart rate zones, which is very useful for training.
Read the full Fitbit Sense review
The best premium Wear OS watch for non-Samsung users
The TicWatch Pro 5 is an excellent all-rounder and an outstanding Pixel Watch alternative.
It has a lot going for it. For one thing, it uses the mighty Snapdragon W5+ Gen1 processor, so performance is good in our tests. It also offers up to 80 hours of battery life, and very accurate fitness tracking metrics. Looks great on-wrist, too. Never mind the Pixel Watch, this beast could give the Samsung Galaxy 5 Pro a run for its money. With 7000-series aluminum + high-strength nylon with fiberglass, it's safe on the most rugged of trails.
The TicWatch Pro 5 is a little pricey, and doesn't come with an LTE option, a real kicker at this level. But if you can get past that, it'll be a doughty workout companion
Read the full TicWatch Pro 5 review
How to choose the best smartwatch for you
Unfortunately, your choice of smartwatch often depends on your choice of phone, as not all wearables are compatible with competitor devices. Apple Watch only works with Apple iPhones. Samsung and Google watches, and other Wear OS devices, only work with Android devices, but you can use a Samsung watch with a Google phone and vice versa.
Fitness tracking wearables from Fitbit will work with any device and synchronize with the Fitbit app, but those devices tend to focus more sharply on fitness features, and don't offer all of the robust apps and services you'll find on other smartwatches.
Most wearables will get about a day of battery life, which will be disappointing if you're converting from a Garmin watch that lasts weeks. You can find a few watches that last longer on this list.
Finally, smartwatches can be expensive, and frankly they don't offer much value for what you pay. Before you spring for an Apple Watch Ultra, you might ask if you are really going Scuba diving this year, or if you're just going to check your text messages without disturbing your dinner mates.
What should I look for when buying a smartwatch?
The first thing to check is whether your phone is compatible with it - you can't use an Apple Watch with an Android phone, and you can't use a Google Pixel Watch with an iPhone. Beyond that, consider the battery life and the features - how often will you be happy charging it, and what do you really need out of your watch? A simpler watch can be a better pick.
Which is the best smartwatch?
The best smartwatch changes all the time, but typically you'll find an Apple Watch or Samsung Galaxy smartwatch topping the list, as these tend to be packed full of high-end features and polish.
How we test smartwatches
Every smartwatch on this list has been fully and extensively reviewed by the expert team at TechRadar, so we know exactly what makes them tick.
Our review process involves using the devices as if they were our own personal wearables, ensuring every smartwatch gets fully tested in the real world. A comprehensive sweep of features takes place, and usage is varied over multiple days to give us a clear idea of how battery life performs.
Using that knowledge we've then ranked them, while also factoring in their price, performance, value, and core specs.
Latest updates
04 July: Added the Ticwatch Pro 5 to the list, and reformatted this buying guide.
