Fitbit Air vs. Apple Watch/Pixel Watch – Which Should You Buy?
Why you might not want to get the FitBit Air over a smartwatch – and why you might want to.
By Josh Teder
Fitbit Air vs. Apple Watch vs. Pixel Watch: Which Should You Buy?
The Fitbit Air takes on the Apple Watch and Pixel Watch — fitness tracker vs. smartwatch, battery life, sleep tracking, and who each one is really for.
I’ve used an Apple Watch and Pixel Watch for well over six months. Now that I’ve spent a few weeks with the Fitbit Air, I’ll take you through which one I think you should buy — and at the end, which one I’d personally go with at this point.
What the Fitbit Air Gets Right
A More Frictionless Experience
The most surprising thing about the Fitbit Air, for me at least, has been how frictionless the whole experience is. Once you pair it to your phone, you just strap it on your wrist and go. There’s no unlocking it when you put it on, and when you do put it on, it feels so much better than a smartwatch.
The Fitbit Air weighs around 12 g, while an Apple Watch or Pixel Watch can weigh anywhere from 30 to 50-plus grams depending on the model and band you choose. The larger Pixel Watch 4 in particular can feel really bulky in my experience. I find its circular shape weirdly digs into my wrist a bit more when wearing it at night. The Fitbit Air is by far the most comfortable option for sleep tracking.
† A paired iPhone or Pixel phone can handle fall detection, crash detection, and altimeter on its own. ‡ Snore and cough detection is a Pixel smartphone feature, not a Pixel Watch feature. †† Advanced running metrics include vertical oscillation, stride length, and ground contact time.
Battery Life That Actually Lasts
Another thing that makes the experience frictionless is battery life. Unlike the Pixel Watch or Apple Watch, whose batteries only last about a day, the Fitbit Air can last up to a week, depending on your activity level. Mine has lasted around six and a half days so far with moderate activity levels.
It automatically detects when you’re working out, and you can tell it what your workout was after the fact or reclassify it entirely. So far, for things like walks and weightlifting, I’ve found it to be pretty accurate at identifying those workout types.
What It Tracks
The Fitbit Air can track quite a few metrics. The two that have really stood out to me so far are 24/7 heart rate tracking and step count. The heart rate data is what drives metrics like heart rate variability, resting heart rate, and sleep tracking. Combined with step count, those two things can give you a much better sense of your overall activity and health.
“The Fitbit Air is ridiculously comfortable. Its battery can outlast a smartwatch and it costs way less.”
No Screen, No Distractions
The Fitbit Air does something very differently from a smartwatch: it has no display. No screen, no notifications, zero distractions. There is an LED light that shows up when you double-tap it to give you the current battery level, and when the battery runs low, it lights up as a reminder. You also get haptics for alarms, which is a fantastic feature.
Compared to the Apple Watch or Pixel Watch, the haptics are pretty light, though you can adjust their intensity in settings. I kept mine on the lower setting. I actually really like how light it is because it’s barely audible, which makes it a great solution if you sleep with a partner and don’t want to wake them up with a phone alarm or clock.
Price and Platform
Another thing that sets the Fitbit Air apart is price. It’s less expensive than a Pixel Watch or Apple Watch, which starts around $249 and goes up from there.
Unlike the Pixel Watch or Apple Watch, the Fitbit Air is also platform agnostic. It works with both iOS and Android. Data syncs are a bit faster on Android in my experience, taking about 5 to 10 seconds on iOS. On both platforms, you get the Google Health app, which now includes the optional Health Coach AI for Google Health Premium users.
Google Health Premium: Is It Worth It?
You can absolutely buy a Fitbit Air, have it track all of your metrics, and never pay for a Google Health Premium subscription. The subscription features are genuinely extra — they’re not basic stuff you need for a fitness tracker. For context, if you get a Pixel Watch, it uses the same app and the same optional premium subscription, just without iOS support.
Nuanced AI analysis (adjusts based on how you feel, illness, etc.)
No
Yes
Adaptive recommendations and check-ins
No
Yes
Deeper sleep metrics
No
Yes
Workout library
No
Yes
I’ve been using the premium option for a few weeks, and I actually think it’s pretty impressive. It can help build workout plans for you, gives you a more nuanced analysis of your data, and takes into account information you give it about how you’re feeling. For example, it noticed my wrist temperature was up at night, my sleep was poor, and my step count was down. When I told it I was sick, it remembered that, completely changed its recommendations for the week toward rest and recovery, and kept checking in on how I was feeling. That’s an experience I’ve just never had in any fitness app before.
What You Give Up With the Fitbit Air
No Screen, No Smartwatch Features
The most obvious trade-off is time on your wrist and complications on the watch face if you only want to wear one thing. That said, going with the Fitbit Air does give you the flexibility to wear a non-smartwatch and switch up your look based on the occasion while still tracking your fitness data. You’d need to be okay wearing the Fitbit Air on one wrist and a regular watch on the other — though some people are now making watch bands for non-smart watches where you can pop the Fitbit Air in and wear it on that part of your wrist instead, which could be another option.
You also lose access to notifications and specific apps entirely. Things like the Hearing Health app on the Apple Watch, or a dedicated media player like Pocket Casts, which I use constantly. You can’t use it to unlock a smart lock either.
Finding Lost Devices
Another thing you lose is any way to locate your phone from your wrist if you’ve misplaced it. Both the Pixel Watch and Apple Watch have features to help you find your phone, with Apple’s being the most advanced on the Series 9 and later, which uses an ultra-wideband chip to give you precise step-by-step directions to your missing phone.
On the flip side, if you lose the Fitbit Air itself, it doesn’t integrate into Google or Apple’s Find My Device network, so it’s pretty much gone. There are third-party Bluetooth scanning apps you could potentially use to spot it since it does emit a Bluetooth signal, but there’s no built-in speaker, so there’s no audible alert to help you find it even if you’re in the right area. Both the Pixel Watch and Apple Watch also save their last known location before the battery dies, which you can view in their respective apps — something the Fitbit Air can’t do.
GPS, Cellular, and Sound Level Monitoring
The Fitbit Air has no onboard GPS, so it relies on your phone’s GPS for route tracking. This will matter to a lot of runners who don’t want to carry their phone during a run. Unlike the Fitbit Air, both the Pixel Watch and Apple Watch can be configured with cellular data as well. There are also apparently some differences in how smoothly the phone-based GPS works, with Android being a bit more optimized versus iOS. Some users have reported more frequent signal drops due to iOS background restrictions, so that’s worth keeping in mind.
“If these are starting to sound like major deal breakers, hold on — there’s a third option that might give you the best of both worlds.”
The Fitbit Air also can’t measure ambient sound levels, something I use a lot to confirm whether an environment is actually too loud. When I was at Disney, for instance, I realized some rides were pushing well over 90 dB. Being able to glance down, get that confirmation, and then pop my Loop Buds in to protect my hearing while still enjoying the ride — I found that feature really useful. I do tend to have more sensitive hearing than the average person, but it’s made a real difference.
There are also things like crash detection, loss of pulse detection, and more that these smartwatches can track that the Fitbit Air simply can’t.
Should You Wear Both?
Couldn’t you just wear both? Is there actually a use case for picking up a Fitbit Air and wearing it alongside your Apple Watch or Pixel Watch?
Maybe. I think there’s a stronger case if you’re in the Pixel ecosystem, because you can swap out the Fitbit Air with your Pixel Watch and track everything in the Google Health app. Google has actually optimized the app for that particular use case. For the Apple Watch side, I’m not sure the case is as strong. While the Google Health app can pull data from Apple Health, the reverse is not true. Data logged in Google Health from your Fitbit Air does not flow back into Apple Health outside of a third-party app or workaround. So if you wanted to wear both but keep your fitness data centralized in one app, you’d need to be okay with that app being Google Health.
So Which One Should You Buy?
Go with the Fitbit Air if you just care about general fitness tracking, want something light and comfortable that doesn’t break your budget, don’t want to worry about charging it every night, and want something that covers a lot of the basic health tracking metrics. The optional subscription that adds an AI fitness coach, deeper sleep metrics, and a workout library is a genuine bonus if you want it. And at around $99 here in the US, it’s a strong value proposition.
Go with a smartwatch if you think you’ll want a screen that tells you the time, you want more metrics tracked, you tend to lose devices, you need to locate your phone from your wrist, or you like the idea of controlling music and podcast playback right from your wrist without touching your phone.
For me personally, things like complications on the watch face synced to my calendar, being able to see the current UV index at a glance, the now playing screen for media control, and the Hearing Health app keep me reaching for a smartwatch. I just really like having that data on my wrist so I don’t need to pull out my phone as much and get distracted by something else on it.
That said, if I were primarily using a Pixel Watch and wanted to keep tracking sleep, I would absolutely pick up a Fitbit Air for around $99 just for that purpose — plus the haptic morning alarm so I wouldn’t have to wear my watch to bed.
![Apple Watch Series 11 [GPS 42mm] Smartwatch with Jet Black Aluminum Case with Black Sport Band - S/M. Sleep Score, Fitness Tracker, Health Monitoring, Always-On Display, Water Resistant](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/31ybzrJZckL._SL160_.jpg)
![Apple Watch Series 11 [GPS 46mm] Smartwatch with Jet Black Aluminum Case with Black Sport Band - M/L. Sleep Score, Fitness Tracker, Health Monitoring, Always-On Display, Water Resistant](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/312K597M2uL._SL160_.jpg)
