RANKED: The best health trackers to keep you healthy and fit in 2026

Leading the pack at just £79, the HLTH Band is the cheapest device on this list and, by a wide margin, the best value. There are no subscriptions. No premium tiers. No locked features waiting behind a paywall. You buy it once and you own everything it does, forever. That alone puts it in a category most rivals can't reach. 

What surprised us most was the battery. We charged it once, strapped it on, and didn't think about it again for the best part of a month. Thirty days on a single charge means you actually wear it through everything... Sleep, workouts, travel, the lot. And that's where the real value lives. Patterns only show up when the data is there. 

The metrics are serious too. HRV around the clock, blood pressure, deep and REM sleep stages, blood oxygen, stress, recovery. The full set, no upsells. The screen-free design takes a day to adjust to, but once you do, you stop staring at your wrist and start using the data the way it was meant to be used. It's accurate, affordable, and built to last. For most people, this is the easiest pick on the list.

If you're a serious athlete chasing every last percent of performance, the Whoop MG is hard to fault. The recovery scoring is industry-leading and the strain analysis is genuinely useful for hard training blocks. 

The catch is the price. Whoop costs £349 a year, every year, and the device stops working the moment you stop paying. Three years of tracking sets you back nearly £1,047. That's almost thirteen times the price of our top pick. There's also no screen, no real blood pressure tracking (just estimates), and no way to ever truly own what you're paying for.

The Oura Ring is the prettiest tracker we tested. If you can't stand the look of a band on your wrist, this is the one. Sleep tracking is excellent and the app is genuinely lovely to use. 

But the £349 price tag is just the start. Oura charges £69.99 a year on top, and without it, most of the insights you actually bought the ring for disappear. Three years in, you've spent over £559. There's also no blood pressure, no real workout tracking, and the ring needs charging every week.

A beautiful device with a quiet ongoing cost. Style first, substance second.

The Samsung Galaxy Watch 8 is a proper smartwatch. If you're already deep in the Samsung ecosystem and want notifications, apps, and calls on your wrist, it does the job well. The blood pressure feature is also medically certified, which is rare.

The trouble is, it's a smartwatch first and a health tracker second. Battery dies in around 30-40 hours, so you're charging it every other day. And every time it's off your wrist, you're missing data. The screen, the notifications, the apps all pull your attention back to the very thing you wanted to escape. And the blood pressure feature only works after you calibrate it with an arm cuff every four weeks.

Great gadget. Not the best health tracker.

The Garmin Forerunner 265 is a runner's watch through and through. If you're training for a marathon or chasing a personal best, the GPS accuracy, training plans, and recovery insights are some of the best in the business.

For everyone else, it's overkill. At £369, you're paying a heavy premium for features most people will never touch, like VO2 max estimates, race readiness, and multi-band GNSS, while missing basics like blood pressure and continuous HRV (Garmin only tracks HRV during sleep). The bright AMOLED screen pulls battery hard too, leaving you charging roughly once a week with regular GPS use. And like the Samsung, it's a watch on your wrist, not a tracker that disappears.

Brilliant for runners. Wasted on everyone else.

 (last updated 20^th April)

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