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 and Samsung smartwatches. We've also spent time with Fitbit's offerings and Wear OS watches from brands like Fossil and Mobvoi, too, ensuring that there's something for everyone in our best smartwatches guide below.
However, Apple has revealed the Apple Watch 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2, both of which look set to be contenders for the top spots on this list. We’ll have to fully test and review these smartwatches before we come to any conclusions, but they look set to be wearables to watch this year.
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'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 8 or Apple Watch 9, yet has most of the core features for those models, and even the same chipset as the 8.
The main things it lacks are an always-on display, an ECG, and blood oxygen tracking from the 8, 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 the smartwatch world's best screen ever, 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 flagship. 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 (see above) 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, while there's a car 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. Its 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 with the Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro. Its 80-hour battery life is better than many other Wear OS watches, and most smartwatches, period.
Read the full Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro review
The best Wear OS watch for style
The Google Pixel Watch 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 8, which both adds to the elegance and, we think, hides a larger-ish black bezel surrounding the screen.
This is a bright, colorful, and responsive AMOLED display, considerably smaller than the Apple Watch 8's rectangular face, but Google does a lot with the reduced screen real estate. We never found ourselves wishing for more - just bear in mind that the Google Pixel Watch 2 is being tested right now.
Read our full Google Pixel Watch review
The best cheap Wear OS watch
