Fitbit Sense review: One of the best wearable sleep trackers

The Fitbit Sense excels at tracking vital information. There are four main areas it focuses on: Minutes in the “zone,” number of steps and floors, miles traveled, and calories burned. It also tracks the amount of time you spend asleep, as well as how much time you spend in each stage of sleep.

The standard watch face shows you the date, time, number of steps, your sleep score, and your current heart rate. There are multiple faces to choose from, and Fitbit can sync up with your phone to display your calendar, incoming texts and calls, and more.

Within the Fitbit app, you can log fluid and calorie intake, set a goal weight, and more. Fitbit reminds you to get up and move, and tries to get you take at least 250 steps each hour.

The Fitbit Sense also has stress management features. It allows you to log how you’re feeling at a given moment to to track your stress throughout the day. If you subscribe to Fitbit Premium, you will have access to even more features that break down your stress management response.

Fitbit Premium is $10 per month or $80 per year. When you purchase a new device, it comes with a six-month free trial to test it out. The subscription includes content from numerous Fitbit partners, including Popsugar, Aura, and more.

It also provides users with more detailed sleep tools, advanced insights into your health, better stress and mindfulness tools, and additional games and challenges to keep you motivated. Premium subscribers get access to information like their breathing rate, heart rate variability, skin temperature, oxygen saturation, and more.

One area where the Fitbit Sense stands out from equivalent Garmin products is in its sleep tracking. While the Garmin struggled to keep up with irregular sleep patterns (especially if I woke up in the middle of the night and go back to sleep), the Fitbit Sense’s automatic detection was much more accurate. It calculates an overall sleep score based on how much I sleep throughout the day. If I only get six hours at night, but take an hour long nap later in the day, it updates the score to reflect that.

With a six-day battery life, I never worried about it running out of charge throughout the day. It only takes a short time to fully charge the Fitbit once it dies.

One of the most useful features is the ability to tap any health metric and get more information on what it means. So many fitness wearables have their own names for each section that it can be hard to keep track, but Fitbit makes it easy to know what you’re looking at.

For example, “Zone Minutes” is the number of minutes you spent in the Active Zone, or the heart rate range that counts toward exercise. The American Heart Association recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise each week, and the Sense helps you track your progress toward that goal.

If you previously owned a Fitbit, your information is still available. When I activated the Sense and started tracking data, I found information from 2015 and earlier — the last time I wore a Fitbit. Of course, some of the information was lacking (the earlier models didn’t have the same trackers as the ones I wear now).

One final feature to note is that the Fitbit Sense integrates with Alexa and Google Assistant. With a tap of a button, I can give voice commands to my smart assistants from my wrist — a far easier alternative than pulling up the respective apps while on the go.

The Fitbit app includes a Community tab that lets you find a sort of social network for nearly any type of fitness you can think of. It suggests groups based on your activity within the app; for example, it recommended the Sleep Well and Vegetarian groups for me. The Sleep Well group is full of people posting their previous nights’ sleep scores and comparing progress in achieving a good night’s rest, while the Vegetarian group includes pictures of meals and recipe ideas.

You can link your phone’s Contacts with Fitbit to search for any friends who are on the app. You can also individually add people through email or by their username. Keeping in touch with your friends on the app can help keep you motivated.

Other great motivational and social aspects are the Badges and Trophies. These are awards you get for meeting specific fitness goals. For example, the Sneakers Badge is awarded if you walk 10,000 steps in a day. The Penguin March Badge is earned if you walk 70 miles in a lifetime, and the Lighthouse Badge is earned if you walk up more than 50 flights of stairs in one day.

These can be earned more than once and put on display on your profile.

Trophies are earned by completing challenges against other people. You don’t have to be connected with others to participate; instead, the app compares your progress to everyone else in the challenge. The Daily Showdown Challenge, for example, awards the trophy to whoever walks the most steps in one day in a given time zone.

The Fitbit Sense streamlines vital health tracking into an approachable platform, and its automatic detection makes it perfect for anyone trying to improve their sleep habits. While the interface can seem a little confusing at first, it’s actually easier to navigate that some of the comparable platforms on the market (like Garmin and its two separate apps).

Is there a better alternative?