The Best Smartwatches of 2023

With a wide range of features, an understated design, and few weaknesses the Apple Watch Series 8 is the top smartwatch you can buy. The Series 8 can track your fitness, provide even more insights into your health than ever (including helping with tracking your menstrual and sleep cycles), handle phone calls and messaging, and much more, all controlled by elegant and intuitive software. While it's not a massive jump over the Series 7, it's still the best smartwatch on the market.

Whether you want an aluminum case with a sports band primarily to help you stay healthy, or a stainless-steel case with a leather band to keep you connected during a busy workday or one of the new rugged bands designed for the Apple Watch Ultra, there’s a style for you. Setup is a breeze, and the Series 8 is the perfect partner for your iPhone. It can help you find your iPhone by triggering an alert sound and even be used as a remote control for the iPhone camera.

If you opt for an LTE model, you can leave your iPhone at home and make or receive calls and text messages on your wrist (data plan required.) The Series 8’s OLED touchscreen is bright, sharp, and surprisingly easy to swipe and tap your way around. The Always-on display makes it easy to see in a variety of scenarios, and the Digital Crown on the watch’s side can be rotated for fine control in menus or pressed to call Siri into service.

Fitness and health features include GPS tracking, heart rate, and blood oxygen monitoring, reminders, and new temperature sensors for retroactive menstrual cycle prediction. Like the latest Apple Watch SE, there’s also a new Crash Detection system designed to inform emergency services if you’ve been in an accident. While the 18-hour battery could be better, the Low Power mode added via watchOS 9 allows you to stretch that to 36 hours.

Apple’s onboard apps and digital watch faces are top quality, and there are plenty of third-party apps available. The Apple Watch has also sparked the creation of all sorts of accessories, from interesting charging solutions to alternative bands, cases, and screen protectors. The main downside is the lack of support for Android, which effectively rules this smartwatch out if you don't own an iPhone—though this is the case with many competitors, including Samsung’s newer Galaxy watches.

The Series 8 is the most complete smartwatch on the market. If you like the look of it, but the price is a little too high, we recommend you check out the Series 7, which offers most of the same features, or the even more affordable Apple Watch SE (2nd gen), which drops some key functions like Always-on display but saves you a bundle.

If you’re an iPhone user, the Apple Watch SE is a great way to step into the world of smartwatches. Building on an already great product, this 2nd-generation SE model adds a faster processor, improved features, and a few new ones—most notably crash detection, which can alert family members and emergency responders in the event of a car collision.

Available in 40mm and 44mm sizes in your choice of three colors, the Watch SE starts $30 below the previous model, a surprising but welcome move on Apple’s part. Like all other Apple smartwatches, the SE is a stylish, extremely versatile wrist companion. It links with your iPhone like no other smartwatch brand (including the otherwise impressive Fitbit Versa 3), allowing you to make and take phone calls, send and receive text messages, run countless apps, stream music and much more.

It’s also an activity- and lifestyle-tracking champ, able to log just about any exercise you can think of (everything from swimming to pickleball) and monitor your sleep. It’s less polished at automated activity-tracking than the Versa 3, and unfortunately, it doesn’t have nearly the same battery life: Expect about 24 hours from the SE, versus anywhere from 4-7 days on the Versa.

Apple still offers relatively few watch face options, but at least you can dress up the external look of the watch by choosing from hundreds of band styles and colors. However, if you want an always-on display, you’ll have to look to the pricier Watch Series 8, which also adds features like blood oxygen level, temperature-sensing, and advanced women’s cycle-tracking.

Otherwise, the Apple Watch SE will prove more than enough smartwatch, and the newly lowered price makes it even more compelling. Calling it a budget watch seems almost unfair because its price belies its capabilities. This is an easy choice as the best all-around smartwatch for sheer value.

Thanks to a number of minor, but much-welcomed tweaks to its battery life and design, the Android-only Samsung Galaxy 5 feels like a much more refined device than its predecessor, the Galaxy Watch 4.

The back of the Watch 5’s case is curved to help it better hug the wrist. Its display is still vibrant, and Samsung made some big strides in improving the watch’s accessibility features. Those include a new high-contrast font, color corrections and filters, and the option to remove UI animations and reduce transparency and blur. The Watch 5 also comes in a "Pro" version, which is a bit chunkier and less sporty but includes a boosted battery and some other upgrades for a premium price hike.

Those who plan to pair the watch with a set of wireless headphones will be pleased to know you can adjust settings like the balance for each ear. The Watch 5 series does have some quirks, however.

Long pressing the top button on the watch's right side is permanently tied to Samsung Pay, disappointing if you don't want to use your smartwatch for contact-free payments. During testing, the Watch 5’s battery (rated for up to 50 hours) drained faster than expected when using it for light fitness tracking with always-on display enabled. Additionally, we didn’t like that Samsung has completely ditched the Galaxy Watch series’ once iconic rotating bezel. The digital bezel that replaces it proved less consistent in testing.

Anyone with a Galaxy Watch 3 will see the most benefits from upgrading to the Galaxy Watch 5, thanks to its faster processor and refined Wear OS operating system that mixes in Samsung's own customization (provided you don’t mind giving up the physical bezel). It all adds up to the best Android-compatible smartwatch on the market.

The Google Pixel Watch is a great all-arounder smartwatch for Android users, boasting good fitness features and stunning style. The design is one of our favorite things about the Pixel Watch, doing away with the rugged look and feel of many smartwatches in favor of a scaled-back, fashion-forward approach. It’s only available in the 41mm size, meaning it’ll look especially great on anyone with smaller wrists.

Of course, the Pixel Watch isn’t just pretty, it’s quite functional too. Google acquired Fitbit a few years ago, and the Pixel Watch is the first Google product that really leverages that acquisition. It offers good fitness tracking and integrates with the Fitbit app, which allows you to easily see all your fitness metrics, recent workouts, heart rate information, and more. Its Wear OS software works well, and it’s relatively easy to use. And while you're exercising, the Pixel Watch will look out for you: it can detect if you've fallen off your bike or tripped and face-planted. After such an event, unless you tell it not to, it'll automatically attempt to call for the medical assistance you need.

So what are the downsides? Battery life is just OK, for one. It ended a normal day with only 30% remaining in our testing, so if you want to use it for sleep-tracking, you’ll probably need to charge it before bed. It’s also missing a few sensors/features you’ll find in rivals from Apple and Samsung. Its blood oxygen sensor isn’t yet active, for instance, and its ECG function isn’t yet set up to detect atrial fibrillation. While it will auto-track activities like a short walk or tennis, and log them when finished, it won’t currently let you do things like pause mid-workout. That said, we may see some of these addressed in a firmware update.

The other downside to using the device is that to really unlock its full potential, you’ll need to pay for Fitbit Premium. Google includes six months of Premium with purchase, but after that, you’ll lose access to things like detailed sleep score breakdowns, your daily readiness score, and Fitbit’s workout library. Despite those downsides, the Pixel Watch does a lot of things well, making it an excellent option for those seeking a fashionable, Google-focused smartwatch.