Which Is Better: Apple Watch vs. Fitbit – Lifehacker

Compatibility

A quick thing to get out of the way before we can discuss any more details: the Apple Watch requires you to use an iPhone. Android users are just not going to realistically get much use out of an Apple Watch. If you use an Android, either get the Fitbit already, or check out Android smartwatches like the Pixel Watch 3. 

The Fitbit, by contrast, can work with either an iPhone or an Android phone. There are two things that, according to the Charge 6 user manual, work more smoothly on Android. One is that iPhones will send all their calendar events to the Fitbit, while Androids let you choose which calendar app you want to get notifications from. The other is that Android users can respond to text messages with a quick response or an emoji. iPhone users can receive texts on their Fitbit device, but cannot respond.

Price (and what you get for it)

These watches occupy drastically different price ranges, so this comparison will focus on what you get for the money (not just which one has more features). The Apple Watch does a lot more, and costs a lot more to match. 

The Series 10 is the middle-of-the-road Apple Watch. If you’re on a budget, you can get an Apple Watch SE starting at $249, or the Apple Watch Ultra 2 for $799. But the Series 10—the best Apple Watch for most people—starts at $399 for the 42-millimeter size, and $429 for the 46-millimeter. Cellular connectivity costs an extra $100; even without it, the watch still has GPS, wifi, and can connect to your phone through Bluetooth. 

There are no subscription fees for the Apple Watch, but the watch can run apps, and some of those apps might charge fees. For example, WorkOutDoors, a popular watch app for exercise, costs $7.99 as a one-time fee. Athlytic, which provides recovery analytics for athletes, is a subscription service that costs $3.99/month. But these are third-party add-ons, not the main functionality you’re buying when you buy an Apple Watch. All of Apple’s regular watch features—the Vitals app, the Workout app, closing your rings—come at no extra cost. 

The WorkOutDoors app, right, gives more metrics than the regular Apple Watch workout app. There’s no way to upgrade your Fitbit’s on-screen metrics.
Credit: Beth Skwarecki

The Fitbit, on the other hand, is a much more budget-friendly device to purchase. The sticker price for a Fitbit plus a six-month Premium subscription is $159.95, but keep an eye out for sales—it regularly drops to around $100 for big shopping days like Black Friday, and is often on some kind of discount. 

That said, the premium subscription paywalls some of the features you may be most interested in. Fitbit Premium is $9.99/month once your six-month free trial expires. The premium tier provides a detailed breakdown of your sleep and stress scores, and a library of workout videos and mindfulness sessions. The Apple Watch doesn’t paywall sleep analysis, but it also doesn’t have a stress monitoring app. For workout videos, you’ll get three months of Apple Fitness+ free with your Apple Watch, and then afterwards it’s $9.99/month.

But that’s not all—if you want to play music from your Fitbit, you’ll also need a Youtube Music Premium subscription, which is another $10.99/month. There are no other music services that work with the Fitbit Charge 6, so even if you have something else like Spotify Premium, you’ll need to either pony up for a new subscription or forgo the music feature on the Fitbit altogether.

Not only does the Apple Watch give you your choice of music apps, it also gives you “now playing” controls on the watch for anything you happen to be listening to on your phone, including free podcast apps. 

So which tracker is the better deal? If you just want the basics, the $159.99 Fitbit without any subscriptions is a fantastic bargain. You’ll get the step counting, activity tracking, and sleep tracking features that were probably the main reason you want a fitness watch, for far less money than it costs to buy an Apple Watch or most other smartwatches. On the other hand, if you plan to pay for Fitbit’s subscription goodies, crunch the numbers to see if you’re really saving as much money as you thought. 

Appearance and comfort

Left: Fitbit Charge 6. Right: Apple Watch series 10, 42 mm
Credit: Beth Skwarecki

Both devices have their own characteristic shape and fit. The Apple Watch has a large, rectangular face, while the Fitbit Charge 6 is shaped more like a bracelet. Because of the size of the screen, you can do a lot more on the Apple Watch. Whether that’s a plus or a minus, though, is up to you. Perhaps you like the bracelet/tracker form factor, and you don’t want a watch that looks like a watch. 

The Fitbit’s screen is thin and vertical, and its silicone band has a strange fit that, until I got used to it, felt like it was too tight and too loose at the same time. (There’s a large gap between the band and the bony side of my wrist, even while the sensor is pressed tightly against my skin. Imagine a sort of oval-shaped bangle.) The device comes with two silicone bands: a smaller one for wrists 5.1″ to 6.7″ around, and a larger one for wrists 6.7″ to 8.3″. You can get replacement bands if you like, but they need to be Fitbit-specific ones. Universal watch bands, the kind with a metal pin, don’t fit.

You’ll operate your Fitbit entirely with the touchscreen. The controls are simple enough: swipe up for data, down for settings and shortcuts, left for activities, and right for functions like maps, music, and ECG readings. There is a “button” on the left side that is supposed to function like a home button, but it often didn’t respond, so I would just keep swiping until I found what I needed. (It’s also not an actual button, just a metallic nubbin that gives a haptic buzz when you “press” it.)

Left: Fitbit Charge 6. Right: Apple Watch series 10, 42 mm
Credit: Beth Skwarecki

The Apple Watch has its classic rectangle shape, in either 42 or 46 millimeters for the Series 10. You can buy it with a variety of bands or replace the factory-issued one with any of the aftermarket bands that are available, typically silicone or fabric. These are also specific to the Apple Watch and don’t fit the pin-style standard watch bands. The Apple Watch fits like a regular watch—no weird gap—and its thinner body gives it a lower profile than the Charge 6.

To navigate around the Apple Watch, you’ll need to learn to use it like a mini phone. There’s a side button that brings you to the control center, and a digital crown that acts as a scroll wheel. You can also press the digital crown and it will act as a button, usually bringing you either to your list of apps or back to the home screen. When you’re within an app, though—like the Workout app—most of the actions you take will be with the touchscreen. 

The Apple Watch has an always-on display (which you can turn off, if you prefer). When the display is on but your wrist is down—that is, the watch thinks you’re not looking at it—it can display a lower power version of the watch face. This is the default configuration, and it’s what I used when testing the battery life. The Fitbit also has an always-on display option, but it’s turned off by default, and I did not have this enabled when I tested its battery life. It looks pretty cool though:

With the “always on” display, this is what you’ll see when each watch thinks you aren’t looking at it.
Credit: Beth Skwarecki

Charging and battery life

Battery life is a huge point of difference between these two watches. To summarize: you’ll need to charge your Apple Watch for about an hour every day, or your Fitbit for about two hours once or twice a week. 

You’ll be using your charger daily, so get a cute one.
Credit: Beth Skwarecki

The Apple Watch has a big, always-on screen, and it does a lot of stuff—so it runs through its battery pretty quick. You’ll get between 24 to 36 hours of use, and should expect to charge it daily for about an hour. Since you probably want to wear it while you sleep, the ideal times for most people to charge are when you’re in the shower, or when you’re working at your desk. 

The Apple Watch’s charger is a cable with a USB-C port that plugs into a power source, and a magnetic disc that clicks onto the back of the watch. Third-party charging stands abound, from little bedside stations that can also charge your phone and AirPods, to stands that simply fit your factory-issue cable into a cute shape. I have this retro one that looks like a Macintosh 128K—but they’re available in other shapes, too.

On a typical day, I find the Apple Watch has 30 to 40% battery left after 24 hours (including wearing it to sleep and for a workout), and I get about 36 hours out of it if I let the battery completely run down. It takes about an hour to fully charge, but can also gain an impressive amount of juice with short charging stints—eight minutes on the charger is enough for eight hours of sleep tracking, Apple reports. (I didn’t time my oh-crap-it’s-bedtime charging sessions, but that sounds about right.)

The Fitbit Charge 6, charging.
Credit: Beth Skwarecki

The Fitbit Charge 6, on the other hand, is much lower maintenance. I reached five full days in my testing, from 100% to fully dead, and my activities included a one-hour run on four out of those five days. Google’s estimate of “up to seven days” sounds optimistic, but not farfetched.

The Charge 6 also has its own proprietary magnetic charger. This one has a regular rectangular USB-A plug for your computer or your wall adapter, and on the watch end it’s got a magnetic rectangle with two little metal pins. The Charge 6 takes about two hours to charge from empty to 100%. Rather than find a free two-hour block of time once a week, it may be easiest to charge it during your shower or at your desk every few days.

Steps and habits

The Apple and Fitbit ecosystems each have their own metrics and frameworks to nudge you into healthy habits, so I’ll take a look at each of them here, starting with Fitbit. 

Fitbit’s main metrics are steps, distance, and calorie burn, all of which you can see with a quick swipe up from the main screen. The Charge 6 will also give you a buzz every hour if you haven’t burned 250 calories (by its estimation) in that hour. It’s not clear exactly what you’re supposed to do to make it happy, so I just used that as a reminder to get up and do something, although I often didn’t hit the target. 

Within the Fitbit app, you can choose which metrics you’d like to see each day. By default, steps are most prominent, with zone minutes, distance, and calories right below. You could also choose a cardio fitness view that puts cardio load up top, with sleep as one of the secondary metrics, or a weight management mode that focuses on calories, with your body weight and your logged food calories also visible. 

Fitbit’s app
Credit: Beth Skwarecki/Fitbit

Apple, on the other hand, has its famous “rings.” You can view these on the watch itself (from a watch face complication, for example) or from the Fitness app on your phone. You have three rings: Move (red) represents a target number of active calories for the day (mine is set at 300), Exercise (green) is a target amount of exercise for the day (mine is set to 30 minutes), and Stand (blue) is a goal of walking for at least one minute every hour, for 12 hours of the day. This app will also track your steps, distance, and flights climbed, but they aren’t part of the rings. 

Left: Apple’s Fitness app, showing your “rings.” Right: Apple Health app, showing more data collected from the watch.
Credit: Beth Skwarecki/Apple

There are plenty of other metrics the Apple Watch can track, and the best way to see all of those is in the Health app, which is different from the Fitness app. The Health app consolidates data from a variety of devices and apps you might use, so if you have more than one device, it can be hard to tell what is coming from the Apple Watch specifically. Still, that’s a place you can go to see your resting heart rate, your cardio fitness score, and your sleep stages, among other things. 

Activity tracking

I’ll get into the details of activity tracking accuracy in the next section, so let’s talk for a minute about the features and experience of tracking exercise activities. On the Fitbit, it’s pretty straightforward: you swipe left and pick an activity. There are 37 to choose from, including my faves Strength and Running, but also Crossfit, Dancing, Golf, Core training, and some general activities like Workout and Outdoor Activity. 

On the Apple Watch, you have more options. Not just in the number of activities (I counted 85, including Pickleball) but also the apps you have available. Instead of using the built-in Workout app, you could track a run with Nike Run Club, or track a Peloton ride with the Peloton app, or hike with WorkOutDoors. Each app has its own features and advantages. For the testing I did for this article, I mostly used WorkOutDoors, since it has a convenient interface for downloading heart rate and location data after a workout (the native Workout app does not). 

During a workout, the Apple Watch lets you play music from your phone or directly from the watch; the Fitbit just gives you those YouTube Music controls to play music from your phone. The Fitbit can track workouts without a phone nearby, so long as you don’t mind doing them without music. The Apple Watch comes in a version with cellular connectivity (for an extra charge when you buy it and an extra fee from your cell provider), in case you want to make calls or receive texts when you don’t have your phone with you. The Fitbit needs your phone for everything except the basics.

Heart rate and GPS accuracy

Both devices can track your heart rate during exercise, as well as your location if the activity is something like a run, walk, or bike ride. If you just want activity tracking as a check-a-box kind of thing, then, yup, they both do it. 

How well do they do it, though? In my testing, I found that the Apple Watch kept up with a Garmin pretty well on location tracking, and with a chest strap on heart rate—not perfectly in either case, but definitely good enough for the average person’s use as a fitness tracker. 

The Fitbit was more hit-or-miss. Let’s start with the good news: the Fitbit Charge 6 reported a reasonably accurate heart rate most of the time. If you wear it very loosely, it gets a few spurious spikes, but so would any wrist-based tracker. (More below on why I was testing a loose fit.) The graphs here are the best and worst results I got from the Fitbit, and ironically they show that the Apple Watch sometimes has data dropping out—not ideal! The Fitbit is in aqua, the Apple watch in red, and I have chest strap data in black for reference.

Fitbit Charge 6 in aqua, Apple Watch Series 10 in red, chest strap for reference in black.
Credit: Beth Skwarecki

The GPS is another story, though. The Apple Watch is the clear winner here, working with GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, QZSS, and BeiDou networks on pretty much any outdoor workout. Its sense of location is never too far off. 

The Fitbit Charge 6 has a more unreliable GPS setup. When it’s working well, its accuracy is on par with the Apple Watch’s. But there are two issues that can seriously compromise its location accuracy. 

The first is the Fitbit’s “dynamic” GPS mode, which is on by default. The Charge 6 has GPS + GLONASS onboard, but it saves battery by using your phone’s GPS if your phone is nearby. Phone GPS isn’t usually very accurate, but of course, that depends on your phone. 

If you listen to music while you run, you’ll have your phone with you anyway, since the YouTube Music feature only controls your phone music—the Fitbit doesn’t store or play music by itself. I always carry my phone when I run, so unknowingly (at first) all of my GPS tracks were from my iPhone 12 Mini (which Apple can pry out of my cold dead hands when it makes a new mini phone). Here’s a hill repeat session with the Fitbit shown in aqua. The reference Garmin did great, the Apple watch did OK, and the Fitbit thought I was wandering around people’s front yards. 

Fitbit Charge 6 in aqua, Apple Watch Series 10 in red, Garmin 265S for reference in black.
Credit: Beth Skwarecki

There’s another issue with the GPS, though, which is what happens when you actually use the onboard GPS. And this is not all bad news! For the most part, the onboard GPS does quite well. Here it is on a run in the park. Aside from an issue with GPS lock at the beginning—I should have waited to start the run until it said it was connected—both the Fitbit and the Apple Watch do quite well. Not perfect, but certainly good enough. 

Fitbit Charge 6 in aqua, Apple Watch Series 10 in red, Garmin 265S for reference in black.
Credit: Beth Skwarecki

Check out what happened when I tightened the Fitbit’s band, though. I learned from reading other reviews that some people have found they need to tighten the strap to get a good heart rate reading (not an issue I had) and that, when tightened, the GPS accuracy goes down the toilet. I normally wear the Fitbit on the third hole from the end, so I tried it looser—everything was fine—and then I did a run with the band squeezed as tight as it could go, on the fifth hole from the end. And, yep, there’s a pretty serious accuracy issue when you do that!

Fitbit Charge 6 in aqua, Apple Watch Series 10 in red, Garmin 265S for reference in black.
Credit: Beth Skwarecki

If the Fitbit were like this all the time, I’d say it’s far too screwy for regular use (much like those heart rate tracking headphones that couldn’t actually lock on to my heart rate). But this wasn’t an issue until I purposely pulled the band way too tight, while also turning on the setting that forced it to ignore my phone’s GPS. From a point of view of “which is better?”, the answer is clearly the Apple Watch. But as a pass/fail test, both devices are fine for casual fitness tracking—and neither would be my first pick for a serious athlete anyway (I’d recommend a Garmin or Coros).

The bottom line

The better watch for you depends on what you’re looking for. If you want activity tracking, sleep tracking, steps, and general health monitoring, and don’t care about the rest—both watches can do that, and the Fitbit can do it for a lot less money. 

On the other hand, if you want something full-featured and customizable, with more accurate sensors and a wider variety of ways to use it—the Apple Watch is there for you. You’ll have to pay more for the privilege, though, with plenty of opportunities for add-ons. There’s cellular connectivity if you choose to buy that model, and subscription fees for some of the fancier fitness apps. You’ll also need to remember to charge it every day. It’s a high-maintenance, high-reward kind of device.