Some Withings Pulse vs Fitbit testing

I hope this is in the correct forum.

So I got a little obsessed last night with trying to figure out why I couldn't manually add a workout to Myfitnesspal without the Withings Pulse eating it.

I use my activity tracker for "the other 23 hours" so in other words I do not wear it when I exercise, since I usually am doing crossfit, or some other exercises that the pedometers do not track very well. I prefer to use the activity tracker to track my daily activity and let me manually track my exercise.

After a lot of testing I have found that if I add any type of manual activity into MFP, the Withings subtracts the added burned calories from its calories. In other words no matter how much exercise I add (running, Crossfit, whatever) Withings basically deletes it, and there is no way to override it. There is also no way to add any exercise into the Withings website, in fact you have almost no control of the whitings from the website. Also the calories info from MFP does not sync to the withings website like it should. During my testing I noticed the calorie burned info from the withings was wonky. On Tuesday I had 9k steps and burned about 1809 calories. On weds I only had about 5k steps but it said I had burned about 1830 calories! I was half as active and I should have burned about half of the calories. I did some digging and found that Withings estimates your calories on low activity days because it assumes you were just not wearing the tracker. When if fact I was just being a lazy *kitten*. There is no way to turn this setting off! The Withings is also suppose to sync automatically every 20 mins or so, however it doesn’t really seem to do that. It syncs when it decides it feels like it, seemingly at random. I usually have to take it out of my pocket and manually sync it.

So I borrowed a Fitbit One from my mother and did some tests. If I add in exercise into Myfitnesspal, or into the Fitbit website, it instantly syncs to the other website and correctly updates the calorie burned info. I can also add in missing steps into the fitbit incase I forgot to out it on. The calorie eaten info from MFP comes over perfectly and shows up in the Fitbit website. The fitbit syncs every 20 mins without fail, I never have to pull it out of my pocket. I did some testing and the fitbit had the some problem as the Withings on the estimated calories on low activity days, however you can turn this off in the settings! You can also add in custom stride length in the fitbit where you can not do this in the Withings (yet)

I think the withings pulse hardware is very well designed, I love the look of it, and the tracking seems very accurate, however the website and manual tracking has some serious problems and right now I would highly recommend the fitbit over the pulse. Fitbit has been doing this for a while now and seems to really have done a great job with MFP integration and giving its users more control over how it tracks.

If you are looking at getting a new fitness tracker I hope this will be of some help.

TL;DR

If you are using MFP get a Fitbit instead of a Withings Pulse