5 Best Screenless Fitness Trackers In 2026 - Premium Whoop Vs. Affordable Fitbit Air & More

I review smartwatches and other fitness devices for a living, and if you've paid attention over the last year, you'll have seen screenless fitness trackers once the province of just Whoop evolved to a whole sub-genre of wearables. So is Whoop still top of the heap? Or can you get just as good fitness tracking from the newer, cheaper competitors, from both big names and small? I've tested five of this year's best screenless fitness trackers, wearing them in daily life, testing them against heart rate monitors, and even, as you can see here, testing them against each other. Before we dive into this video, Make sure to scan this QR code to learn more about becoming a TechRadar insider. Membership is completely free and gives you access to exclusive perks, rewards and more. So, who wins the Battle of the Fitness Trackers? Let's show you our top 5 picks one by one, starting with the original, The Whoop. When I reviewed the Whoop MG in September 2025, I thought the app was one of the best laid-out wearable interfaces I'd ever seen. It offers lots of metrics, including unique ones like bodily strain, had AI that was actually useful in comparison to the little tidbits we were getting at the time from the likes of Garmin and Strava, and a great workout builder. But it was so detailed and so expensive that I thought the user base likely to get enough value out of it was pretty narrow, and one year on, I stand by that assessment. The Whoop 5.0 is a band with a slim puck weighing 26 grams on the heavier end for these trackers. You can get bicep bands and clothing, including underwear, with pockets for the tracker if you don't want to wear it on your wrist. It contains an optical LED sensor array like all these bands, accelerometer and gyroscope, and like all the others, no GPS. It can also broadcast heart rate to another device like a treadmill or Peloton, and battery life is impressive at 14 days, and it comes with two different kinds of charger, a standard charging dock or a power pack like this one. Which you can charge independently. This means you never have to take your WHOOP off, and thus leave no moment untracked. Unlike any other wearable on this list, you don't buy a WHOOP, you buy a membership. Which is an annual subscription at one of three tiers, and they send you a WHOOP. If you don't renew your membership, it becomes an inert hunk of plastic and metal. The bottom tier membership is WHOOP 1. And this gives you the basic WHOOP with a cable charging dock that costs $199. The middle tier adds more metrics like WHOOP age and a stress score along with the power pack, and at the top tier for $349, which affords you the WHOOP MG instead of the WHOOP 5.0. This upgraded tracker swaps the plastic clasp for metal, more accurate sensors, a nicer band, and adds medical grade heart health features like an ECG scanning feature, as well as the premium never take it off power pack. The problem with this pricing scheme is that while the Whoop ecosystem and the app is very very good, the battery life is great and the puck is nice and unobtrusive, it's actually quite bad value. Eventually even the lowest tier is going to out cost any other fitness tracker you can get, especially the others on this list as they all cost around a year's annual membership to Whoop 1 and you own them outright, even if most of them have premium tier elements baked into their apps. The Whoop's also of limited use for runners and cyclists as having a screen to help you train with speed, heart rate zones and direction is just too useful. This is acceptable if you've got a cheaper device, but at premium prices, the Whoop is hard to recommend for everybody. The Google Fitbit Air is slim and light, slimmer even than the Whoop 5.0, weighing just 5 grams or 12 grams with the strap. That's insanely light. It comes with a choice of one of three different band options. A silicon active band, a woven performance loop, or a polyurethane elevated modern band. I'm wearing the performance loop at the moment. The Fitbit Air is lovely and light, which makes it incredibly comfortable to wear day and night. Crucial for effective sleep tracking. It feels a bit like a toy bracelet, But I won't hold that against it as it's just down to that lack of weight. Many times during my testing period I forgot it was on and it's slim enough that I've seen people online convert it so they can wear the Fitbit Air on the back of their watch straps. Sensor wise it has the LED sensor array although not as many as some of the others on this list, along with the accelerometer and gyro as standard, and it packs a seven day battery life. Impressive for a device of this size. It's even got a haptic vibrate smart alarm function like the Whoop, Which is nice. We found it accurate in heart rate tracking compared to the Apple Watch Ultra 3 and generally a good performer for the price. The Google Fitbit Air costs $99 and for that you get access to all your basic metrics like heart rate, sleep score, readiness score and new health guardian features like insulin resistance trends and blood pressure trends. The app is much messier and harder to use than Whoop, and that's largely because it was built for the Google Health Coach Premium Subscription Program. This costs an additional $10 a month or 100 bucks a year, and it's basically a chatbot trained on lots of health data and content. You can upload pictures of your food to get an estimate of your macros, plan your diet, help you plan workouts, surface your metrics from within the app, and much more. During testing, I found it useful and flexible enough, especially for nutrition logging and workout building, But there have been reports of inaccuracies online, plus my tolerance for interacting with chatbots is quite low. I'd much rather just tap a button to get the information I need, rather than type out my request in natural language. The Garmin Circa is my Goldilocks tracker. It's got granularity and lots of metrics like the Whoop, but it's still pretty good value like the Google Fitbit Air, rounding out the top three. As a result, I called it the best screenless fitness tracker of 2026 overall in my review, and I think it'll hit that sweet spot for most people. The Garmin Circa is a bit larger than the Fitbit, weighing 21 grams, and it's got the usual array of LEDs, SPO2, accelerometer and gyroscope via Garmin's Elevate V4 heart rate sensor array. Battery life is 7 days and it uses the proprietary Garmin cable just like the usual Garmin watches do. Plus, my favorite bit of design, it's got a tactile button. Press it once to start a workout and once to stop a workout and you get a vibration each time to tell you it's worked. It's much better than relying on the other app's automatic activity tracking detection and as somebody who just likes tactile things, it instantly endeared the Garmin Circa to me. You can also use the button to stop the haptic alarm. It comes in four different color fabric bands. But no other material option. I would have liked to have seen a silicon option here, but it's not a deal breaker. The device costs $199 and you get a lot for your money, including access to Garmin's excellent suite of Garmin Connect features. Lots of metrics, including sleep score, heart rate, and daily readiness scores like the Fitbit, and VO2 Max, Garmin's fitness age, and stress, which you can only get on higher tier Whoop subscriptions. Performance-wise, it performed well against my heart rate monitor, Accurate enough on a regular basis for general purposes, and it's also great for Garmin users that use its Edge cycling computers, as cyclists can see their route maps on their consoles and get their metrics on wrist. An additional $7 a month gets you Garmin Connect Plus with its AI nutrition logging and Garmin Coach training plans. The Helio Strap from Amazfit is another budget option, costing $100 in the US, and like the Fitbit, it's got an optional add-on for an AI wellness advisor in the app, along with lots of audio content like relaxation and meditation, which costs $70 for an annual subscription. Amazfit's gone all-in on value to make a device that isn't as slim and unobtrusive as the Google Fitbit Air, but certainly is its equivalent in terms of basic features and value. It's very light at 20 grams and comes with a wrist strap as standard, Although, like Whoop and Garmin before it, it also offers an arm strap at an additional cost. Although, that strap is cheaper than either of the other two's bicep bands. It's quite proud on the wrist, and as you can see on the band, this is the Hyrox version, as Amazfit is the official timekeeper of the fitness race franchise, but the band also comes in a discreet two-tone dark grey. Sensor-wise, it's got the same kind of array as all the others have. LED heart rate tracking, skin temperature, gyro and accelero, and haptic feedback alarm. There's no button here. Like WHOOP and Fitbit, you either manually start a workout in the app or trust its automatic activity detection. It can also transmit live heart rate data to a third-party device like a treadmill like the WHOOP can. Our reviewer found the performance of the strap Just fine from an accuracy and daily wear perspective. Battery life lasts 10 days, which is great, and its charger is this magnetic puck that you can stick on any old USB-C charger. The app doesn't have a lot of the options and features you get from some of the other trackers, such as the AI-powered nutrition logging from Garmin and Fitbit, or the comprehensive workout builder and strain score from the Whoop. Amazfit has its own unique metric in the biocharge score, but in practice, it doesn't work much differently from the redness that you get on all these other trackers. Last on our list is the Polar Loop from the same company that make the Polar electrical heart rate monitor I use to test all these other devices. It's the only one out of the five with metal clasps apart from the high-end Whoop MG and it costs $199 to buy outright, the same as the Garmin. There's no subscription element here, which is great, apart from Polar's completely optional fitness program software which works out an adaptive training program for you. It's a nice looking device with high quality fabric bands and stainless steel elements on the side weighing a total of 29 grams. Apart from the WHOOP, the Loop was the first device released out of the four I listed here, and it's definitely the most premium feeling and looking. WHOOP actually tried to sue Polar for trademark and trade dress infringement in October 2025. Sensor wise, it's got many of the same tools as everyone else, LED optical heart rate sensors, accelerometer and so on, but no blood oxygen sensing, which means it's limited in tracking fitness and recovery. It's also got the lowest water resistance rating out of the bunch, but it's fine for swimming in a pool. Hardware-wise, it looks great, and its auto-activity detection works well, but Polar's software experience is lacking, which is a common frustration for us users of the Polar Heart Rate chest strap. It's a very stripped-back experience that feels like an old-school website, and while that's got some charm, it's not the most usable app in the world. That's my assessment based on our time spent with each device, and after testing all of these devices side by side, I can confirm they're roughly in the same ballpark as each other in terms of accuracy, with around 8 BPM average heart rate deviation between the WHOOP, the lowest, and the Fitbit, the highest, with the others falling somewhere in between. Previous testing has confirmed each one is within an acceptable margin of error from the Polar H10 heart rate heart rate monitor for me to recommend them. So, my top choice If money is no object, I'd go for the Whoop. If you're after a cheap fitness tracker, I'd opt for the Google Fitbit Air. And if you want something in between, I'd choose the Garmin. Do you agree with our list? Have you got a different ranking? Drop a comment below if you've tried any of these trackers, and we'll see you next time on TechRadar.com.