The Fitbit Inspire 3 is the budget-friendly fitness tracker of our dreams

It's under $100 and packed with useful metrics and features.
By Sam Stone  on 
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man's wrist with fitbit inspire 3 small fitness tracker
Credit: Sam Stone / Mashable
4.5/5
Fitbit Inspire 3
The Bottom Line
For just under $100, the Fitbit Inspire 3 packs so many great health metrics and fitness tracking into a small wearable.
Buying Options
Mashable Score 4.5
Wow Factor 4
User Friendliness 5
Performance 4
Bang for the Buck 5
The Good
  • Works right out of the box
  • Intuitive and easy to use
  • Impressive suite of included apps
  • Provides workout insights that are genuinely helpful
  • Premium membership includes guided workouts
The Bad
  • Heart rate is occasionally inaccurate
  • Battery life is shorter than advertised
  • Smart Wake alarm falls short of expectations

A Mashable Choice Award is a badge of honor, reserved for the absolute best stuff we’ve tested and loved.

As the saying goes, you can’t improve what you don’t measure. In the decade that I’ve been working out, trying new diets, tweaking macros, and experimenting with new weight lifting plans I’ve come to learn that tracking progress is key to moving forward in your fitness journey. That’s where a fitness tracker comes in. Ideally, a fitness tracker is a set it and forget it situation: You slap it on your wrist, and it quietly records helpful biometric data in order to translate it into easy to read information when you’re ready. 

That’s where the Fitbit Inspire 3 comes in. It sits easily on the wrist, and compared to other wearables it’s relatively small. The watch counts steps, tracks heart rate, and measures calories burned, among other metrics, and, in combination with Fitbit app, converts all that information into data you can use to inform your workouts. 

The Fitbit Inspire 3 fit seamlessly into my existing workout routine, and seeing some analytics even pushed me to work harder in some cases. Some features, like hourly reminders to get up and get some steps in, felt a bit extra — particularly on days I knew I’d be going to the gym in just a few hours — but could certainly be helpful for someone hoping to more regularly include low impact activities, or for someone hoping to make fitness more of a routine. 

What features are included?

As a fitness band, the Fitbit Inspire 3 offers a surprisingly large amount of features and apps. First and foremost, it’s a pedometer; it counts your steps, and logs the miles you’ve walked or run. It also has a heart rate monitor which keeps track of your pulse, and in turn the calories you’ve burned in a day. It also tracks your sleep cycles, as you shift between light, deep, and REM sleep throughout the night. 

man's wrist with slim Fitbit Inspire 3 fitness tracker
The Fitbit Inspire 3 has a slim profile but is packed full of features. Credit: Sam Stone / Mashable

It can automatically categorize your activity — it senses when you’re on a bike ride versus when you’re on a run for instance — and records your blood oxygen level, too. There are options to log stress levels, complete mindfulness sessions or guided workouts, and log menstrual cycles. It tracks your breathing rate, skin temperature, and heart rate variability. You can log the foods you’ve eaten to track calories, and log your weight in. It vibrates on your wrist when your phone receives texts or calls, and to top it all off the thing is waterproof up to 50 meters. 

After a few days of calibration, it really feels like the Fitbit Inspire 3 tracks nearly every major metric of your fitness — and that’s a good thing. I found that these functions were genuinely helpful in feeling better, and getting more out of my workouts. Sleep analysis can help you figure out which factors are preventing you from waking up refreshed (for me it was phone time before bed), and features like the Readiness Score, available with the app’s premium subscription for $10 per month, can help you know when to focus on recovery or get in a hard workout. 

Most functions work perfectly

From the moment I put it on my wrist, the Fitbit Inspire 3 seamlessly became a part of my fitness routine. I especially appreciate that it automatically recognized the activity I was doing, and after a particularly hard workout it was kind of vindicating to check out how high my heart rate had been.

I found the watch’s left/right swiping and up/down scrolling incredibly intuitive, and, although the app has a lot of different menus and screens to display the myriad data the Fitbit has collected, I’d mastered it by the third time I opened it. 

Almost every feature worked flawlessly. That being said, during my testing, as I went from long runs, to hard cross training, to leisurely bike rides I found a few small flaws that are worth mentioning. Most notably, the heart rate monitor becomes inaccurate, recording a lower heart rate, during intensely sweaty workouts. Sweaty wrists mean that the sensor can’t work correctly, and records the wrong heart rate. I noticed this only once or twice during particularly long and hard workouts, and I wouldn’t call it major flaw.

I also found that the Smart Wake feature, which purports to wake you up with vibration when you’re at the lightest phase in your sleep, didn’t work as advertised. I’d hoped to wake up feeling refreshed and ready for the day, but I woke up groggy every time. Sleep metrics from any fitness tracker may not be exactly accurate, though, and I didn’t mind skipping over this feature. 

There are some small downsides

There are, however, a few issues that are worth knowing about before buying. Namely: notifications. There are a lot of them. For the most part, they’re customizable, but I found it annoying to find the right screen in order to switch them off again and again. I didn’t love getting a buzz on my wrist urging me to get up and take 250 steps every hour while I was focusing on work. I was not crazy about getting a buzz on my wrist in the midst of a workout to tell me that I was logging Active Minutes — Fitbit's metric for minutes with an elevated heart rate. I straight up didn’t care to know that I’d met my daily calorie goal. 

The battery life, too, was a bit less than advertised. The tracker is supposed to have 10 days of battery life (dependent on use, as the Fitbit website reads), but I found it to be closer to six or seven days, instead. Since it’s charging time is just less than two hours, I definitely did not mind throwing it on the charger for a while every week. And it sure beats the Apple Watch's battery life.

Is the Fitbit Inspire 3 worth the price?

This fitness tracker has an impressive amount of features, apps, and customizations available. Sure, there are one or two kinks that could be worked out, but overall it’s an incredible device that is super helpful for someone hoping to get into a fitness routine, or push themselves that much further at the gym. This Fitbit model is priced just under a hundred dollars, and with the monthly $10 charge for premium features, still feels like an absolute steal. For anyone new to fitness or any dedicated gym rat, the Fitbit Inspire 3 gets you more than you pay for.

How we tested

We tested this product because Fitbit is one of the most well-known fitness tech brands on the market. As a pioneer in the field, it has a big reputation to live up to, and since the Fitbit Inspire 3 is among Fitbit's cheapest products, we wanted to see how well it performed. 

The Fitbit Inspire 3 was tested for 10 consecutive days, during which it was put through its paces in challenging weight-based workouts, metabolic conditioning, regular runs, and everyday use. During that time, it was worn 24 hours a day, except for the hour or so that it needed charging, and each available feature, including premium features, was used. Overall, it fit seamlessly into a workout routine, and while a few notifications felt extraneous, most aspects of the Fitbit Inspire 3 experience were helpful.

Some other factors we took into account while testing this fitness tracker:

  • Features: The features available cover an impressively wide range of wellness metrics, including a food diary and mood regulation tracking. For the most part, these features functioned perfectly, and gave helpful insights into movement and fitness habits.

  • Battery Life: The advertised battery life was 10 days, with the caveat that a charge’s lifetime might vary with use. In testing, the battery’s lifetime was closer to six days, but wasn’t a huge issue since charging was very fast.

  • Accuracy: These metrics are only useful if they’re reasonably accurate, and, largely, the Fitbit Inspire 3 captured accurate biometrics. In a few instances, under extreme conditions, the heart rate monitor became inaccurate, which lost it a point on performance.

Mashable Image
Sam Stone

Sam Stone is a freelance writer based in NYC.


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