Garmin activity trackers.

I have the garmin vivosmart hr and i love it! I havent owned any other fitness tracker so i cant really compare, but it's perfect for my needs. Tracks my steps, hr, calories burned, exercise, sleep, and most especially, it tells me to move when im inactive for too long. Havent got a complaint so far

Wall of text here, sorry.

It really depends on what you want to get out of it. I currently have a Vivosmart and kind of hate it; I used to have a Fitbit.

1. Just in general, I think fitness trackers are better for relatively sedentary people who want to become moderately active than they are for active people who want to get more active or more intense. This was why I switched from Fitbit to Garmin -- the Garmin seemed like it would be a bit more sports-oriented -- but I was disappointed. In retrospect, I think once you're moderately active then it's probably just time to consider special purpose devices for your specific sports (running watch, swimmers watch, various biking devices, etc.).

2. I like that my Vivosmart is waterproof, but only as a convenience factor (e.g., I can wear it in the shower and so on). It's terrible at tracking swimming (strokes don't seem to correlate to steps), and the touch screen is too sensitive so swimming has a tendency to "wake" it up and then all kinds of crazy things can go wrong.

3. The Garmin website and phone apps you use to see your data are notoriously terrible. They don't display information in very useful ways compared to the Fitbit website, and they don't track information well even related to how the tracker itself works (e.g., it's still mostly a step-based tracker, but it's very hard to find any data breaking down your steps during activities on the website and app. If you dig deep there's an all-day chart, but that chart doesn't have clear or precise markings for time of day. And you can't track number of steps to a particular exercise (including running!). Also, I've noticed that the Garmin website goes down more often than Fitbit's did, and Garmin seems to be doing a lot of silly tweaks that have been reducing the functionality. (For instance, they can't seem to decide if walking counts as "active calories" or not on the "Active calories" report, so that changes arbitrarily from time to time).

4. One feature the Vivosmart has that I thought had a lot of potential was the "Move Bar," which essentially buzzes you when you've been sitting too long. Unfortunately, the way it determines inactivity (only constant movement in full 1 minute increments counts, so if during an hour you get up and walk for 30 seconds 5 times in an hour it doesn't count as you having moved at all during that whole hour) is not useful for how I live, so it buzzes at me even when I've been on my feet doing various chores for an hour. I hear it works pretty well if all you want it to do is buzz you when you're sitting at a desk at work all day (and don't mind that it will keep buzzing at you on your free time at home).

5. One more dig at Garmin: it feels to me like Garmin corporate management is in the activity tracker business as a "defensive move" in that they see other brands of fitness trackers as a threat to their business with running watches. Which is fine, except what's happening is that Garmin seems to get all worried that its own customers are using general fitness trackers instead of buying more expensive running watches or other devices. So there's stuff their Vivosmart and Vivoactive are actually capable of, but Garmin has either disabled the website from letting you see the relevant data or otherwise sabotaged. And then when you complain, they say "well, that device wasn't meant for that. Buy this other thing!"

6. A general note and I'm sorry if you're going to think this is a bummer. If you want to "measure" your calories burned for the purpose of eating calories back, all activity trackers are nonsense in terms of accuracy -- don't bother (better to just be as consistent as possible with your routine and stay on top of your TDEE). Any fitness tracker can help you assign an estimated number to how active you've been, which can certainly be useful when you're tracking your data over longer periods of time. You can tell if you're gradually becoming more active, or less active, or if you're having a particularly lazy day, or the opposite. But you can't count on any fitness tracker to give you anything like an accurate number on actual real calories. So I'd say when picking a tracker, don't pay too much attention to features that claim to help you do this (especially ones that track your heart rate). Also, as far as I know all of them give a lot more weight to exercise with "steps" than things that don't have steps. (At the end of the day, fitness trackers are all just super-charged pedometers that upload data to the internet for you to see better, really). In general I think my Fitbit was way better at just generally quantifying my activity than my Vivosmart is (but it always gave me like 2x the calories per minute for taking a slow walk compared to say, doing aerobic dance, kickboxing, or cardio kettlebell workouts). Vivosmart seems to only like running, and its estimate of my calories burned seems highly correlative just with steps. Even though it talks to my HRM during exercise, if that exercise isn't running w/ lots of steps, it just doesn't seem to care.

Whoops. Nicer software that meant to say.

I'll also add, that my vivofit has been perfect for me in terms of helping me track my eating back calories. I've been maintaining for a while now and I eat back every single calorie. The estimates provided are generally lower than what I get for my fitbit. I don't use a TDEE method and I calorie cycle and I count on the numbers my Garmin gives me. So if I have a 1600 calorie day, and I go for a 2 hour gym sessions or a run w/HR, and I get an additional 1400 calories, you better believe I eat (and drink) it all back and I have had no problems maintaining weight.

Check out the Polar devices too.

I have owned several Garmin devices and they are so buggy that I do not recommend them to anyone. Go to the Garmin forums and look at all the posts about issues with just about every Garmin device they make. The devices themselves are made very well, but the firmware/software has many issues. Also their servers go down quite often (sometimes for days) without any warning or notification, and all devices are rendered pretty much useless until they are back up.

I recommend doing some research on Polar, fitbit, and others as well.