Fitbit Charge 5 review

We wore the Fitbit Charge 5 for a week, using it as our main fitness tracker throughout the testing period. We wore it alongside the Fitbit Inspire 3 to compare features such as heart rate tracking, step counts and other metrics measured by the two devices. 

During the testing period, we used it for a variety of exercise types, including high-intensity interval training, walking, running, yoga and strength training. We wore it continuously to assess battery life. This also meant we could check sleep tracking.  

When we review these devices, we look to assess them across a variety of categories – design, setup, performance, features and value for money. We also use the companion app to see how user-friendly it is, and how well data is transferred between the devices.  

Fitness trackers have been around for years, so you’d hope the set-up process would be as simple as possible by now. The Charge 5 does not disappoint. If you don’t already have it, download the Fitbit app (iPhone | Android) and create an account.  

When you open the box, you’ll see the fitness tracker, a quick-start guide, the charger, and a second wristband so you can make sure you have one that will fit your wrist properly. 

After turning on the Charge 5 for the first time, it will be automatically detected by your phone. We were prompted to let it charge while setting it up. When you’re ready, tap on the “set up” button, and follow the steps to complete the process.  

You go through quite a few screens, but it’s intuitive and user-friendly. We had to perform a software update that took about 20 minutes. Once that was complete, we were ready to get started. Overall, it was a painless process.

The Charge series hasn’t always been the prettiest design, and the Charge 5 remains quite a hefty unit in comparison to some of its siblings. It’s certainly a lot larger than the likes of the Fitbit Inspire 3 or the Fitbit Luxe, so if you want something quite delicate, this might not fit the bill.  

It is slimmer and more rounded than the Charge 4 it succeeds, however. Despite only weighing 28g (1oz) it feels well-made and robust, which is what you’d expect for a product that had a premium price tag at launch. 

We’re not overly keen on the silicone wristband. Fitbit does provide two different wristband sizes in the box, to suit most wrist sizes. But the so-called Infinity band, which loops back under itself, is a little fiddly to put on.  

We also found that it caught uncomfortably on our arm hair as we put it on. Once it was on, though, it was soft and comfortable to wear. While we did note a little skin irritation occasionally, removing the band for a few hours was enough to make this go away.  

If the band that comes with the Charge 5 isn’t to your liking, it is easy to swap out with an alternative. These are widely available and come in a variety of designs and materials, both from Fitbit and third-party manufacturers.

One drawback is that older straps are no longer compatible. So, if you are upgrading from an older model, you’ll need to get some new straps. 

Fitbit uses a proprietary magnetic charger design with the Charge 5. It’s a big improvement over the clip design used on the Charge 3 and Charge 4, which we really didn’t like. But it has a very short cable, and you’ll need to provide your own USB-compatible plug to use it with. It doesn’t support wireless or fast charging either.  

Even if we weren’t delighted by the wristband or the charger, the overall design of the Charge 5 is a step up from the Charge 4. The screen is a sharp full-colour AMOLED display, albeit perhaps a little on the small side, at 26.43mm (1.04in).  

The bezels are still quite thick, but blend into the screen well enough that it isn’t a major issue. Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protects the screen, so we’re confident it can withstand the odd bump without major damage. There are also plenty of clock faces to choose from to suit your preferences. 

The Charge 5 is completely controlled by the touchscreen, using taps or swipes. The screen is big enough to make this functional most of the time. But one issue is trying to wake the screen up in the middle of exercising, when it can be fiddly. Again, this is more a minor irritant than a deal-breaker. 

Fitbit has tried to focus on the things that will be most valuable in the Charge 5, hence the upgrades to the screen, and the more elegant design. Overall, it’s a notable step up from its predecessors, even if it isn’t perfect. 

One of the selling points of the Charge 5 is the wealth of health and fitness tracking it offers. Especially for this price bracket, the Charge 5 does as much and more than most competitors.  

As well as the standard features you’d expect from a fitness tracker (such as step counting, heart rate, sleep and exercise tracking) it offers additional metrics such as blood oxygen readings, ECG (electrocardiogram), EDA (electrodermal activity – used to measure stress levels) and menstrual cycle tracking.  

The Charge 5 also offers in-built GPS and GLONASS (Russia’s global positioning satellite system) to accurately track outdoor exercise. One further feature is Fitbit Pay – but this is compatible with only a handful of UK banks, so we weren’t able to test it and suspect most people won’t be able to use it. 

There are also smart notifications to alert you to calls, texts and other apps. These are read-only, so you’ll still need your phone nearby to reply to messages or take phone calls. When you receive a notification, you simply tap to read, then dismiss it or open it on your phone, as appropriate. Swiping the screen up or down also lets you answer or decline a phone call, although you’ll still need to speak into your phone.  

We missed a few notifications when we didn’t feel the Charge 5 buzz on our wrist, but generally it worked well to alert us to incoming calls and messages. 

Despite all these features, there are some notable absences. With no altimeter, this won’t track stairs climbed or hiking altitude, for example.

It seems odd to have removed this feature when it was available on the Charge 4. Nor does the Charge 5 offer any sort of music playback or support, even though this was available on the Charge 4. 

The Charge 5 can track around 20 different types of exercise, including walking, running, cycling, strength training, yoga and swimming. It is also water-resistant, so taking it into the pool shouldn’t be an issue.  

It’s easy to track the workout you want by scrolling to the exercise menu and choosing the workout you’re about to begin. It will only show a maximum of six exercise shortcuts, but you can edit which ones it displays in the app so your favourites are available. It can also auto-detect exercise and then track it, allowing you to review the results in the app later. We found this to be generally reliable in testing. 

To start a workout, swipe to find the exercise menu. Swipe up or down to find the relevant activity, then tap the screen to select it. When you’re ready, tap the “Play” icon to get started. To stop, you tap the screen and pause the workout. You then need to swipe down to find the “stop” icon. 

ECG (electrocardiogram) is a feature we’re seeing appear in increasing numbers of smartwatches and fitness trackers – the Withings ScanWatch being one notable example. This takes 30 seconds, and monitors your heart rate for signs of atrial fibrillation, a common form of heart arrythmia.  

As with EDA, this is easy to use – although it’s worth noting that it will only give you a reading if your heart rate is above 50 beats per minute. 

The EDA (electrodermal activity) scan is designed to gauge stress levels. You gently hold the sides of the Charge 5 for three minutes while sitting still. Your device then monitors your heart rate and changes in the sweat level in your skin. The more “responses” it detects, the more stressed you may be.  

You can then add your mood and even use the app for some mindfulness sessions. This feature is also linked to the stress management feature available with Fitbit Premium.

One of Fitbit’s greatest strengths is the Fitbit app, which presents data clearly and cleanly. It also offers a wealth of supporting content such as a sleep profile, video workouts, and more. Some of the key features are: 

Your Daily Readiness Score is provided in-app, and works in a similar way to the Body Battery that we’ve also seen on Garmin devices such as the Venu 2 and Vivosmart 5. It takes measurements such as your activity levels, recent sleep and heart rate variability, and gives you a score to tell you how ready your body is for exercise.  

A “Low” readiness score will be met with a suggestion that you rest or try some active recovery, such as a gentle walk, or yoga. 

A “Good” score means you may be encouraged to do some moderate exercise, with a warning “not to overdo it”. An “Excellent” score means your body is ready to perform. It takes a few days for your first readiness score to appear, and two weeks in total for your score to be fine-tuned, as the app learns how your body responds to exercise and recovery. 

This is a nice feature. We felt it was potentially a good way to help people identify when to push hard and when to back off. It is, however, only available through Fitbit Premium, which costs £7.99 a month, or £79.99 if you pay in full for a year upfront. We’ll discuss Premium in a bit more detail below, but it is a frustration to see so many features blocked unless you’re willing to pay extra. 

Your Cardio Fitness Score gives an indication of how fit you are based on your resting heart rate. The more heart rate data the Charge 5 collects, the more accurate the estimate will be.

It is, in essence, an estimate of your VO2 Max (this is the maximum amount of oxygen your body can use during exercise: the higher the number, the fitter you are).  

This useful feature can show you where you sit relative to other people your age and gender. It also shows how much you may be able to improve your score over time, which we think can be quite motivational. 

Another interesting feature of the app is Active Zone Minutes tracking. Rather than simply tracking the amount of exercise you do, the Charge 5 and the app identify the intensity at which you are working.  

If you are in what they class as the ‘cardio’ or ‘peak’ heart rate zones, then you are assigned two active minutes for every minute of exercise you do.  

This means that vigorous activity is given a greater weighting when it comes to hitting the weekly exercise goals set through Fitbit. 

And now for Fitbit Premium. We mentioned before that you get a six-month free trial when you buy a Charge 5. This gives you access to an enormous amount of additional content over the basic Fitbit app. Features that are exclusive to Fitbit Premium include: 

• Daily Readiness Score 
• Stress Management Score Breakdown  
• Wellness Report 
• Workouts 
• Mindfulness content, including guided audio from Calm 
• Sleep Score Breakdown 
• Blood glucose trends 
• Recipe inspiration 

There’s a lot of content and, if you want to really throw yourself into health and wellbeing in a big way, it offers a lot that may be of interest. But for almost £8 a month, we’re irritated by Fitbit Premium. After a year, you’ll have paid almost as much for Fitbit Premium as for the Charge 5. And it doesn’t feel right that Fitbit limits access to some of your own data and insights unless you pay for it. 

We can see the justification for charging for additional content such as guided meditation, recipes, and workouts. But insights such as your Daily Readiness Score or Sleep Score feel like features that should be available to anyone who has bought and paid for the product.  

This is compounded by the fact that rivals, such as Garmin, don’t charge extra for their equivalent of these features. 

Leaving aside our reservations about these additional Fitbit charges, the app is among the best we’ve used. It’s user-friendly and tracks a lot of data. If you’re keen to monitor as many health metrics as possible, this is a great app to support you.  

The all-round performance of Fitbit Charge 5 was excellent. We were impressed with its consistency and accuracy across almost all the metrics we were testing. 

GPS tracking was very good. The Charge 5 uses GPS and GLONASS satellite systems, and when we went for a run or walk, we felt that it tracked our movements accurately. We took the same route each time for consistency, and every time it came out at the same distance.  

This also agreed with measurements taken from other devices such as the Withings ScanWatch and Coros Pace 2. The Charge 5 did take a little longer before making a connection than other devices we’ve tested, but no more than 20 seconds or so. 

When comparing the Charge 5 and the Inspire 3 with overall activity tracking through the day, the results were also interesting. The two devices were generally closely in agreement when it came to total daily steps, with the Inspire 3 generally counting around 800 steps more per day (usually for a daily tally of 14,000-16,000 steps). Despite this, the Charge 5 typically counted more distance covered (we suspect this is tied to the lack of GPS on the Inspire 3).  

In terms of calorie-burn estimates, the two were generally within about 100 calories of each other. We can’t say definitively whether these estimates were accurate, but it was good to see the numbers weren’t wildly far apart. 

We tried a variety of different exercise types while testing the Charge 5 – yoga, walking, running, strength training and HIIT (high intensity interval training). In every case, we felt that HR accuracy was good, and generally in agreement with the Inspire 3 we were also testing. 

Average heart rates were generally no more than three or four beats per minute (bpm) different, with the largest difference being eight bpm on one long walk. 

Resting heart rate was also impressively consistent, generally within four or five beats bpm each day. These readings were also in line with other devices we’ve tested. 

In terms of sleep tracking, there was a bit more variability. There are question marks around how well fitness trackers and smartwatches track sleep, so it’s difficult to say how accurate the Charge 5 was. 

While the Charge 5 and Inspire 3 generally agreed with the duration of sleep we got, there were much larger differences in how much deep sleep each measured. The Inspire 3 estimated as much as double the Charge 5 on one occasion. There was little consistency either, with each of them being higher on some nights, and lower on others.  

What we can say, though, is that we never felt that the Charge 5 was wildly inaccurate. We didn’t, for example, spend a night wide awake, only to be told we’d had a wonderful night’s sleep, or vice versa.  

It’s probably best to use this metric as a rough guide, rather than taking it as anything definitive. 

We were able to test these courtesy of the Fitbit Premium free trial that comes with the product. Overall, we did feel they added to the overall experience. Daily Readiness takes a few days to calibrate, and then after 14 days will be fine-tuned. But in the time we were testing it, it did suggest when would be good days to push with intense exercise, and days where backing off might be beneficial. We can see this being useful to help people avoid overtraining. 

Stress Management scores are calculated by measuring heart rate and electrodermal activity scores, physical activity and sleep patterns. The score is out of 100 (higher numbers equate to being less stressed) and can be used to indicate when your Fitbit thinks you may be under stress. You can use this to identify patterns, or possible triggers for your stress, to help you manage it better.

For us, this was less useful during our testing as we were generally pretty relaxed. But in the long-term, we could see how this might help people to spot patterns and try to reduce their stress levels.   

Fitbit promises up to seven days of battery life on the Charge 5. Obviously, this is going to vary depending on how you use the device. If, for example, you set the display to always-on mode, you’ll probably manage around three days. Likewise, regular use of GPS will also reduce battery life (Fitbit suggests five hours of GPS battery life). 

We found that we got about six days of battery before we needed to recharge. That included tracking four indoor workouts, plus two outdoor workouts with GPS, as well as having notifications and heart rate monitoring turned on. 

A 5km walk with GPS activated reduced the battery by around 7%, and we saw battery decline by around 15-20% each day. This is very much in line with expectations. While a week isn’t an especially long time for a battery to last, it does mean you’ll only need to worry about charging it once a week or so, leaving you plenty of time for activity tracking.  

It took just under two hours to go from 0% to 100% battery charge. The proprietary charger means fast charging isn’t an option. It’s not the quickest, but if you were desperate, a short charge of 15 minutes would probably buy you another day or two before needing to charge it again.  

When first released, that £170 RRP for the Charge 5 was difficult to justify. In that price bracket, you also have the excellent Coros Pace 2, and you’d only be £80 or so away from the Apple Watch SE.  

However, the price has dropped significantly, and it’s now widely available for under £125 (and even under £100 when it’s on offer). We’d say that represents very good value, given the wide range of features it has. It’s still one of the most comprehensive fitness trackers available. 

However, the fact that several features are only available if you’re willing to pay for a Fitbit Premium subscription is a big problem in value terms. While there are plenty of additional features in Fitbit Premium, many of them may not be of interest.  

Workouts, for example, might not appeal if you already go to the gym, or use an alternative on-demand service such as Apple Fitness Plus. The fact that certain health metrics are only available with that subscription leaves a sour taste in the mouth. We wouldn’t consider £80-£96 a year good value for a Daily Readiness Score. 

Overall, we can’t say that the Charge 5 is excellent value, as much of what it offers will incur ongoing costs. But we can say that what you get when you buy the Charge 5 is an accurate device that can measure a lot of health and fitness metrics. Without the Premium subscription, you’ll still get accurate GPS and heart rate tracking – arguably two of the most important elements of a fitness tracker.   

If you aren’t completely convinced by the Fitbit Charge 5, here are some alternatives to consider.

The Fitbit Inspire 3 is a smaller, lighter fitness tracker from Fitbit, that is also significantly cheaper than the Charge 5. The RRP is £84.99, but we have seen this available for under £70. And for that, you get the majority of the features of the Charge 5, with a few notable exceptions. There are no ECG or EDA measurements, and no in–built GPS. The GPS won’t matter if you want to track indoor workouts more than walking or running, for example.  

You also get slightly longer battery life (up to 10 days) and guided breathing sessions by following cues from your wrist. It’s less comprehensive, but if you want to spend less and still enjoy the Fitbit app, this is a good starting point. 

Polar is a company with a reputation for fitness-focused devices, and the Polar Unite offers all the fitness-tracking metrics you’d expect, such as step counts, heart rate monitoring, fitness assessment and sleep tracking. It also offers daily workout suggestions and guided breathing exercises.  

It lacks built-in GPS, and instead relies on your phone to track routes and distances covered. The battery isn’t quite as good as the Charge 5 either, offering up to four days, rather than a week. At £129.50 it’s at the very top end of what we’d consider budget – but it’s an attractive package with strong fitness tracking credentials.  

The Vivosmart 5 is another that sits at the very top end of this price bracket, at £129.99. For that price, you get a host of fitness tracking features, as well as Garmin’s Body Battery, fitness age and stress monitoring, to mention a few of the additional features. It adopts the traditional band-type shape of many fitness trackers, and offers up to seven days of battery life.  

The Garmin Connect app presents data clearly, which is great if you are getting serious about tracking your fitness. Unlike the Charge 5, it lacks built-in GPS, and the screen is monochrome, rather than colour. But much like the Polar Unite, it’s the fitness tracking and data recording that will make this worth considering.  

Were the Fitbit Charge 5 still as costly as its launch price, we’d be less inclined to recommend it. But now the price has come down towards the more budget-friendly end of the market, the equation has changed. You’re getting a premium product at a far more affordable price. And the Charge 5 really does offer a lot. 

The health and fitness tracking is generally excellent, and the built-in GPS is a huge bonus that many competitors in this price range don’t offer. Fitbit’s app is fantastic, and the company really knows how to create a user-friendly experience. The screen is bright, colourful and easy to read, and the build quality is very good – even if we weren’t in love with the wristband that came in the box.  

For many people, the Fitbit Charge 5 offers everything they could want from a fitness tracker. It will certainly appeal to anyone who is getting serious about their exercise. 

The elephant in the room, however, is Fitbit Premium. It remains a big disappointment to see features such as the Daily Readiness Score, Sleep Score breakdown and Stress Management Score breakdown hidden from users who don’t want to pay for the subscription. This is compounded by the fact that some competitors offer similar features at no extra cost. This definitely taints our view overall.  

If you’re already paying for a Fitbit Premium subscription, or will make use of all the extra features, then buying the Charge 5 makes a lot of sense. But if you don’t plan to use all those features, then you’re either choosing to pay a lot for a few extra insights, or you’re not going to get all the benefits of this device. It’s an excellent fitness tracker, and in many ways, the best you’ll find in this price bracket. But the Premium subscription means it won’t be for everyone. 

• Built-in GPS to help track outdoor exercise is important to you 
• You want a user-friendly app to monitor your data 
• You’re looking for Fitbit’s most feature-packed fitness tracker 

• You don’t want to pay extra to access all its features 
• You’re looking for a larger screen 
• You want in–built music control