I flagged smart bands as one of the tech trends of 2026, based on what I was seeing, so it’s interesting to watch the rollout of the Fitbit Air and the buzz around the (still unconfirmed) Garmin Cirqa. Whoop, which has long been the undisputed leader in this area, now has a ton of competition. Here’s what I see going on, and what I think we should expect going forward.
Google Fitbit Air - Berry with Large Fog Active Band Bundle $99.99 at Amazon $134.98 Save $34.99 Shop Now Shop Now $99.99 at Amazon $134.98 Save $34.99In parallel with that evolution, smartwatches and fitness watches also gained features, and then stagnated while trackers caught up. Garmins started off as bulky GPS units you could strap to your wrist; the Apple Watch was an extension of your smartphone that happened to be able to measure heart rate. Over time these categories merged into a single watch-shaped format that had an AMOLED screen, a heart rate sensor, and as many software features as the companies could figure out how to stuff into them. “Do I want an Apple Watch or a Garmin?” is a reasonable question to ask, since the overlap between fitness watches and smartwatches is an almost-but-not-quite-circular Venn diagram.
Tech companies can no longer grow by reaching out to people who haven’t heard of smartwatches; most everybody who would want one already has one. Companies also have a hard time convincing people to upgrade the devices they already have, since newer models don’t have any killer features that older ones are missing.
Everybody can load an app onto their phone these days, so devices no longer need to stand alone. As a tech company, if all your fitness tracker's features are in the app, and your customers aren't excited about new hardware, you might as well go back to basics and offer a simple sensor on a strap. That's what we're seeing now.
How smart bands found their new niche
“Smart band” hasn’t been a tech category for long. Until recently there was only one major product in this area: the Whoop band. Whoop’s hardware was never all that fancy—just a heart rate sensor on a strap. The clasp and the charger were (and are) both cleverly designed, and the focus is on everything but the electronic internals. You get device for “free”—it’s the app that keeps you engaged, and the app that makes you feel you’re getting $239/year of value out of it.
WHOOP 5.0 with Peak membership $239.00 at Amazon Shop Now Shop Now $239.00 at AmazonBut not everybody wants to pay that subscription fee, or think of themselves as athletes hyper-optimizing their routine. For years, people would pop up on tech forums asking if there was a way to get a similar device without paying Whoop for a subscription, but none materialized.
All three come from companies that already had their own apps that paired with smartwatches. Making a smart band requires no new features of the software, and the manufacturing side must be pretty easy for a company that’s used to making watches. Instead of building a watch with a sensor, you just stick the sensor directly onto a strap and send it out into the world. With that in mind, Polar’s and Garmin’s bands both felt overpriced. Amazfit’s price made a lot more sense, and from what I can tell the demand seems to have outpaced supply. Good luck finding an Amazfit Helio Strap anywhere.
But if the Fitbit Air and its new app live up to Google’s promises, then we have a smart band that's the same cost ($99) as the Amazfit Helio Strap, with a much larger customer base and better name recognition, and a full-featured app that provides analytics and coaching much like Whoop does.
And that’s where we get the next stage of evolution. Similar to the trend I observed in smart rings, smart band makers are realizing that hardware isn’t a cash cow, and people don’t want to pay for subscriptions. The money has to come from somewhere else.
What I’d buy in 2026
So right now—or coming soon—we have a few viable options for smart bands. The ones I like best are:
The new Fitbit Air, with the enormous caveat that I haven’t tried it yet, and neither has almost anyone else. It’s the most affordable smart band (tied with the Amazfit Helio Strap at $99) and works with a full-featured app. It also works with Pixel watches, so you can have a smart band and a smartwatch that feed data to the same app to be analyzed together.
I would not recommend the Polar Loop. It’s overpriced for what you get, and any of the three above will give you a better experience. I wouldn’t recommend the Garmin Index sleep band either, unless you’re a Garmin user who really just wants something comfy to sleep in and doesn’t mind the extra cost.
The Luna band announced at CES has not yet materialized, we don’t know the cost, and there aren’t any smartwatches on the U.S. market that work with the Luna app. Garmin’s Cirqa band—if it’s real, and if it is indeed a Whoop-style smart band—is unlikely to dethrone any of my top picks. But I suppose we’ll have to wait and see.
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