Various wearables, be they popular smartwatches or budget fitness trackers, have become a mainstay on our wrists over the last few years. It’s easy to see why: they’re great tools for staying fit and healthy, and they allow you to keep an eye on your vitals and scores, as well as track all kinds of important metrics. The health benefits of fitness watches are undeniable.
However, staying active with a fitness tracker is not the only element of a healthy lifestyle. Equally important is regeneration, and what better way to recover after a tough workout or a long day than with some quality sleep? Fortunately, the list of wearables below excel not only at helping you train, but also at keeping up with your sleep patterns and helping you make the most out of your nightly rest.
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Fitbit / Pocket-lint
Fitbit Sense 2
1. Best overall sleep tracker
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Withings
Withings ScanWatch Light
2. Best sleep tracker for discreet styling
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Apple / Pocket-Lint
Apple Watch Series 9
3. Best daily smartwatch for sleeptracking
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Best Buy
Google Pixel Watch 2
4. Best for Android users
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Credit: Garmin / Pocket-Lint
Garmin Epix Pro (2nd Gen)
5. Best for fitness fans
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Sleep tracking tech allows you to maintain good quality sleep, helps you rest and recover, and even allows you to determine the best exercise regime based on how rested your body is. In this guide, we’ve curated the best sleep-tracking watches out there, so you can take a big technological step towards better rest.
Best sleep-tracking watches: Our top picks
Fitbit Sense 2
1. Best overall sleep tracker
Great design, comprehensive sleep tracking
Although not as comprehensive as some smartwatches, the sleep tracking offered by the Fitbit Sense 2 is excellent. Additionally, the rounded bezels and soft design makes it comfortable to wear the Sense 2 to bed. It also packs all the built-in sensors required to provide a great picture of overall health and freshness to take on the day ahead.
- Vibrant display
- Easy to use
- Reliable sleep tracking
- Limited third-party app support
- Some features locked behind Fitbit Premium
- Heart rate sensor not the quickest
The Fitbit Sense 2 makes for an excellent sleep tracker for a few reasons. Chiefly, we found it to be light, comfortable and lacking the sharp edges that can disturb your sleep with some other wearables.
Fitbit Sense 2: Excellent health watch
Fitbit’s latest flagship fitness-tracking smartwatch has a lot of convenient features, plus plenty to monitor your overall health. Here’s our review.
Secondly, it includes SpO2, skin temperature and heart rate tracking, all of which work in tandem, alongside a gyroscopic sensor, to deliver accurate sleep data. Understanding the information the Sense 2 collects is simple, thanks to Fitbit’s Sleep Score, which is based on 10 key metrics.
The lower the score, the less likely you will feel fresh to tackle a workout. Annoyingly, you have to pay for Fitbit Premium to access more granular data, such as information related to sleep stages, but the basic tracking is plenty good enough.
Withings ScanWatch Light
2. Best sleep tracker for discreet styling
A smartwatch without the bulk
This hybrid smartwatch can happily be worn everyday, without friends and colleagues realizing you are tracking a whole host of metrics. The subtle timepiece offers 30 days of battery life while monitoring your sleep quality and heart rate.
- Discreet styling
- Great battery life
- Fantastic overall health tracking
- Lacks sports-specific profiles
- Not particularly waterproof
- Withings+ is a costly extra
If the idea of living with a techy smartwatch turns you off, look towards the Withings ScanWatch Light. This hybrid smartwatch looks like a dress watch and comes in multiple subtle hues to match your style.
Withings is more of a health brand, rather than gunning directly for the fitness and sports market like Garmin, Suunto or Polar. With that in mind, the company’s products keep an eye on several key health metrics, including sleep quality, heart rate and steps, painting an overall picture of your energy reserves and suggesting ways to improve.
Apple Watch sleep tracking: What it does and how to use it
Everything you need to know about tracking your sleep with the Apple Watch, including how to set it up and what results you can expect.
As a sleep tracking device, it is excellent, but it is when you look at the macro picture that the sleep quality monitoring really comes in to play. Armed with this information, you can create a routine that aligns with your body’s needs. It plays nicely with Apple Health and Google Fit, so it should fit into your existing ecosystem nicely, while the Withings app is well-made and very easy to use.
Apple Watch Series 9
3. Best daily smartwatch for sleeptracking
There’s not much it doesn’t do well
$329 $399 Save $70
The latest Apple Watch, running the most up-to-date watchOS 10, is a formidable fitness and health tracker, with the ability to go into great depths in regard to sleep quality and how your daily routine may be affecting this. A dedicated Sleep app can create sleep schedules to help you meet your sleep goals. It also has the ability to set alarms at the perfect time for waking. The Apple Watch will track your breathing rate as you sleep, which helps paint a reliable picture of your overall health.
- Packed with sensors
- Slim profile makes it easy to wear
- Numerous bands for increased comfort
- Battery life can be an issue
- Pricey compared to rivals
- Digital crown can get in the way
We have already waxed lyrical about the Apple Watch Series 9, which manages to cram in even more excellent features over its predecessors. As a pure sleep tracking device, Apple has long been on top form, offering a bespoke Sleep app that feeds into the bigger Apple Health picture and determines a good number of sleep quality factors.
Apple Watch Series 9: Playing it safe, but playing it well
With some upgrades but not huge changes, is the Watch Series 9 worth buying? Here’s my review.
The Apple Watch can estimate the time you spent in each sleep stage — REM, core, and deep — as well as when you might have woken up or were disturbed during the night (although you probably already know that, especially if you have kids).
What’s more, the device looks at sleep trends over a 14-day period, so you can get a better look at just how exhausted you may or may not be. Setting sleep goals can generally help create better habits around sleep, while a Sleep Focus mode silences other Apple devices and limits distractions before you go to bed and protects your sleep after you’re in bed. Apple’s huge arena of accessories helps round out options for the best bands or straps for your wearable — choose the one that will meet your comfort levels for sleep or even from a selection of eco-friendly bands.
Google Pixel Watch 2
4. Best for Android users
Google integration is seamless
$332 $350 Save $18
Android users rejoiced when the Google Pixel Watch was released, and the second generation only made it better. The Pixel Watch 2 benefits from its collaboration with Fitbit, meaning users get comprehensive health tracking, including some serious sleep insights. It’s also sleek and comfortable.
- Fitbit integration
- Beautiful design and top-notch build quality
- Slick Google experience
- Battery life is still middling
- Lacks a bigger screen option
- Android only
The first generation of the Google Pixel Watch was already an awesome device, combining great hardware with second-to-none software. It did have some problems, but ultimately, Google did a great job with its debut smartwatch.
Google Pixel Watch: The Apple Watch of the Android world?
How does Google’s first proper smartwatch compare with its third-party WearOS competition?
It isn’t difficult to see, then, why the Pixel Watch 2 is so high on our recommendation list. Its integration with the Google ecosystem, built-in health features and Fitbit integration are a sight to behold. It also comes with features like an ECG app, which you can use to assess irregularities in your heart rate and shares any worrying information with your doctor. Google even improved battery life, but it’s still the weakest point of the device — you will probably need to charge it every 24 hours.
But hey, we’re here for sleep tracking, and the Google Pixel Watch does that too. In essence, you get all of Fitbit’s expertise in this area, harnessing the Pixel Watch 2’s gyroscopic and heart rate sensors to determine the quality of your sleep. Like most devices we’ve mentioned here, the Pixel Watch’s Fitbit integration means you can set goals, program bedtime reminders and see sleep insights to help you get better rest.
Garmin Epix Pro (2nd Gen)
5. Best for fitness fans
A formidable fitness ecosystem
Garmin’s fitness ecosystem is arguably the best out there, offering detailed insights that only professional athletes would have had access to in the past. For anyone leading an active lifestyle, the detailed sleep tracking (and the way it plays a vital role in the company’s Body Battery score) is vital to creating and sticking to a detailed fitness program. Of course, you don’t need to run a marathon to make the most of Garmin’s devices, as the company also ensures its Connect app paints a clear overall picture of general health and wellness.
- Great battery life
- Crisp display
- Detailed insights
- Chunky
- Expensive
- Overkill for some
A little caveat before we begin: the Garmin Epix Pro 2nd Gen is likely too much smartwatch for anyone looking for casual sleep insights, as it can pretty much navigate users to the top of a mountain and back again without breaking a sweat — all the while tracking every vital stat known to man and telling you how to conquer Everest faster next time.
Garmin Epix Pro (2nd Gen): More sizes, minor upgrades
The Garmin Epix Pro (Gen 2) brings small upgrades to its AMOLED-packing sports watch, with new case sizes to suit more people.
But what the Epix Pro lacks in simplicity, it more than makes up for with genuinely insightful sleep metrics, such as the way jet lag is killing your sleep habits, how stress is impacting your REM and how your insane workout regime is impacting recovery times.
As a pure sleep-tracking device, it’s overkill, but if you are serious about your sports and fitness, this is a formidable watch that provides unrivalled insights and analysis.
Fitbit Inspire 3
6. Best sleep tracker on a budget
Fitbit power for a reasonable price
For those who want a slim and subtle device that does a commendable job of sleep and activity tracking, the Fitbit Inspire 3 is worth considering. It’s a great device which offers outstanding battery life, compelling features and Fitbit’s software support, all for a reasonable price.
- Fitbit prowess for fitness and sleep tracking
- Slim and subtle design
- Great battery life
- Small display
- May overestimate your activities
- Touchscreen can be a little finnicky
Fitbit devices rarely disappoint, whether that’s the company’s top-tier smartwatches or most budget-friendly models. The Fitbit Inspire 3 is an excellent example of that. The cheapest Fitbit on the market is a great option if you’re looking for an accurate, feature-rich sleep tracker on a budget.
Fitbit Inspire 3: Great entry-level fitness tracker
Should you buy the Fitbit Inspire 3, or would you be better off spending a little bit more and buying the Luxe or Charge? Here’s our review.
As befits a Fitbit, you get a slew of different scores here, which will help you not only accurately track your nightly sleep, but also make sense of all the data that the device collects. Moreover, thanks to both SpO2 and 24/7 heart rate tracking, the data collected is detailed and exhaustive, so you can keep an eye on everything your body does when you’re not awake.
Aside from all the sleep insights, the Inspire 3 is also a great fitness tracker, offering you various workout tracking options, a connected GPS and a 10-day battery to top it all off. What’s more, with its sleek and minimalist design, it will complement almost every outfit, so you can wear it with your pajamas, as well as regular work attire.
What is the best sleep tracker? The bottom line
It’s tricky to choose the best of the best, as many of the watches we have featured here offer so much more than sleep tracking. That being said, if improving your sleep is what you’re most concerned about, the Fitbit Sense 2 is your best bet. It offers accurate measurements of your heart rate and other sleep-related metrics. However, it shines the most when it comes to the insights the Fitbit app provides based on your stats. Those can help you regulate your sleep patterns, improve your rest, and allow you to make your sleep even more restful.
Fitbit Sense 2
Editor’s Choice
Of course, that doesn’t mean the other options do these tasks worse. The Withings ScanWatch Light is a great option for those looking for a discreet and stylish option, and for cross performance with fitness and sleep, you can’t do much better than the Garmin Epix Pro 2nd Gen. The Google Pixel Watch 2 is an incredible companion to an Android phone, and arguably looks the best out of the bunch. The updates to the Apple Watch Series 9 were minimal but effective. Finally, if you’re on a budget, you should give the Fitbit Inspire 3 a look.
Why buy a sleep tracker?
Wearing one of the watches listed above for long periods of time will build a solid picture of your overall health and fitness, as well as how your habits are potentially impacting your daily life. A sleep tracker delves into the various cycles of sleep, portioning out how long you spent in light, deep and REM stages — all of which have different functions for rest, recovery and memory forming. Many also offer smart alarms, which are especially helpful for those of us who have a hard time getting moving in the morning.
Above all else, wearing a sleep tracker will help you to form better habits, even if that’s simply going to bed a bit earlier or limiting distractions before you hit the hay.
How did you choose the best sleep trackers?
As a team, we have been extensively testing health and wellness smartwatches for years. Plus, as a fitness technology writer for many years, I have personally worn most of these devices for months at a time, so I understand first hand what they are like to sleep with and how helpful the data they provide is to users.
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