Price: Fitbit Is Far Cheaper Over Time
The Fitbit Air costs $99. Without a subscription, it provides access to your basic health data, such as activity and sleep details, in the Google Health app (formerly the Fitbit app). The Premium app experience costs an extra $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year (after a three-month free trial with the Air), and unlocks Google Health Coach, which offers fitness plans, sleep advice, and health and wellness overviews. With a Premium membership, you’ll pay 198.99 for the first 15 months (the cost of the device plus the subscription after three months), then $99.99 for each subsequent year.
The Whoop 5.0 isn’t priced like a normal device because you can’t purchase it without a subscription. Instead, it's included with Whoop's Peak membership for $239 per year. This price includes the Whoop 5.0 with a black SuperKnit band and a wireless power pack that lets you recharge the tracker while it's still on your wrist. The Peak membership is Whoop's best offering, as the lower One tier ($199 per year) comes with the older Whoop 4.0 that suffered accuracy issues in testing, and the higher Life tier ($359 per year) comes with the "medical grade" Whoop MG, which doesn’t add enough to the experience to warrant the premium price.
(Credit: Whoop)For the first year, the price of owning the Whoop 5.0 or the Fitbit Air with Google's Premium app experience is relatively comparable. After the first year, you’ll be paying less than half the price of the Whoop to maintain a Premium membership with Fitbit.
Winner: Fitbit Air
Design and Comfort: Utility Over Style
The Whoop 5.0 tracking module measures 1.37 by 0.94 by 0.42 inches (LWD) and is rated IP68 for submersion to approximately 32 feet of water for up to two hours. The Fitbit Air sensor measures 1.4 by 0.7 by 0.3 inches, so the two are comparable in size. Google doesn't list the Air's water-resistance rating, but says it can withstand submersion to 164 feet.
In testing, the Whoop 5.0's SuperKnit band felt comfortable to wear for weeks at a time, and never irritated my skin. It’s a hardy material that held up well to my sweaty gym routine and the rigors of everyday life. Overall, the Whoop 5.0 is very utilitarian in appearance, and while it fit in well at the gym, it detracted from my look when dressing up for a night on the town. On the plus side, Whoop offers various band styles and apparel with a pouch that you can slip the sensor into.
The Fitbit Air comes in multiple colors, and like Whoop, there are multiple band styles available, including the durable cloth Performance Loop and the rugged plastic Active Band. While still utilitarian at a glance, the more colorful included cloth options add some vibrancy that’s missing from the Whoop 5.0.
I even wore the basic Performance Loop with a nicer outfit, and it didn't detract from my look. Moreover, the band proved incredibly comfortable to wear throughout my testing. It never interfered during my gym routine, and I often forgot I was wearing it thanks to its lightweight feel.
Winner: Fitbit Air
Sensors and Features: Advanced Tracking Across the Board
The Fitbit Air and the Whoop 5.0 share a similar set of sensors and track activity, exercise, sleep, and stress. Specifically, Whoop has a built-in accelerometer for movement tracking, a photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor for heart rate measurements, and a skin temperature sensor. It can also measure blood oxygen saturation (SpO2), heart rate variability, and respiratory rate. It tracks a wide range of exercises, from gym activities to sports to household chores, and lets you log strength-training exercises like back squats and bench presses.
The Fitbit Air uses an optical heart rate monitor, a three-axis accelerometer, a gyroscope, a temperature sensor, and red and infrared sensors for health tracking. It monitors heart rate, movement, and SpO2 and can detect atrial fibrillation (AFib, an irregular heartbeat). The Air also has a wide range of trackable activities and exercises in its repertoire. Both devices lack a built-in GPS, so you'll need your phone for distance and pace stats for outdoor activities like biking, running, and walking. With Google Health Premium, you can import the data from other services like Peloton, or even just snap a picture of the daily workout on a gym whiteboard and let the AI parse the details.
Like the Whoop, the Air supports both automatic and manual workout tracking. The Whoop proved more reliable at automatically tracking workouts in testing, though the Air makes up for this to an extent with its ability to import data from pictures.
Winner: Tie
Battery Life: Whoop Still Sets the Standard
The Fitbit Air lasted for just over eight days on a charge in my testing, and recharged from 0 to 100% in 70 minutes. That battery life puts the Air well ahead of Fitbit’s last tracker, the Charge 6, which only lasted three days in our testing with the always-on display enabled.
While a week of power between charges is impressive, the Whoop 5.0 doubles that. It lasted over two weeks on a charge in my testing, and it comes with a wireless rechargeable battery pack that can juice up the device while you’re wearing it. In other words, you never need to take it off. The Whoop 5.0 remains unmatched on the battery front, both for longevity and convenient recharging.
Winner: Whoop 5.0
Activity and Exercise Tracking: AI Coaching Gives Fitbit an Edge
Whoop offers three holistic scores to help you quickly assess your activity and health: Sleep (grading your shut-eye), Strain (which combines activity and stress), and Recovery (based on your Strain, sleep, and resting heart rate). In its app, you can tap any of these scores for details, including how it was calculated. Whoop tracks long-term metrics like physiological age (which may differ from your chronological age) and your pace of aging.
The Fitbit Air offers holistic health scores similar to Whoop's, including Daily Readiness (which indicates how hard to push that day based on your recent workouts and recovery status) and Cardio Load (which reflects the total strain on your body from activity and exercise).
In testing, both the Fitbit Air and the Whoop 5.0 provided accurate heart rate data for CrossFit and running workouts. For outdoor workouts, both track key stats like pace and distance using your phone's GPS. That said, neither offers the level of detail you can get from GPS-equipped wearables, which typically measure more exercise-specific stats, such as cadence, oscillation, and power for running.
Pairing the Fitbit Air with a Premium subscription gives you access to the AI-powered Google Health Coach. The Gemini-based coach can chat with you about your stats and create a customized fitness plan with workout recommendations that adapt to your schedule. The Health Coach offers unmatched flexibility with those workout plans and responds fluidly to many idiosyncratic prompts and schedule needs.
Winner: Fitbit Air
Sleep Tracking: Data vs. Guidance
The Whoop 5.0 is a capable sleep tracker that monitors sleep duration, time spent in each stage, efficiency, and overnight stress. With these metrics, it calculates ongoing sleep debt and recommends a bedtime to help you catch up. Its recommendations and assessments of your needed rest take up the bulk of its sleep page. It doesn’t show individual values for your overnight respiration, skin temperature, or even your average heart rate on its sleep page, though it monitors all three.
The Fitbit Air measures sleep duration, quality, and overnight heart rate. It provides a holistic sleep score and shows contributing factors, such as time to and duration of sound sleep, as well as restlessness, interruptions, and time spent fully awake. The Google Health Coach offers sleep advice, but this guidance is less detailed and more rudimentary than its fitness plans. Overall, the Fitbit Air delivers accurate, thorough sleep stats, but Whoop's prescriptive guidance is more helpful if you're looking to improve your shut-eye.
Both trackers have haptics built in, so they can wake you up in the morning with a gentle vibration, but I don't like Whoop’s implementation of the smart alarm feature, which aims to rouse you once you've hit your nightly recovery goal. To enable this, you need to set a wide time frame for when it can wake you up, and I was always already out of bed before the alarm activated. The Fitbit Air's alarm worked better in testing; it allows for a more precise range, and reliably started buzzing once I began to stir during the set window. I was also able to silence it with a double-tap, whereas Whoop's controls proved more finicky.
Winner: Tie