Tested by Keeping track of your pace, distance, time and heart rate doesn’t need to cost the earth. The best cheap running watches cost less than £200 and can help you to get more out of your training sessions.
Sure, more advanced running watches are designed to optimise every area of your training, including recovery, but not everyone wants or needs the bells and whistles that come with these high-end gadgets.
So, if cheap but cheerful is what you're after, you’ve come to the right place. Keep scrolling for the best affordable running watches we’ve tested and would genuinely recommend below.
What everyone's reading
The Pace 3’s suite of comprehensive training insights and an ever-improving app make it one of the best money-can-buy budget watches. There’s also a bigger and better battery life – 24 days daily use and 38 hours continuous GPS – it's got dual-frequency GPS, which stays impressively stable, and there's mapping features, including a route planner where you can either build your own custom route or search for a destination and sync it to the watch within the Coros app.
The Watch SE offers all the essentials you’d expect from a modern smartwatch: activity tracking, heart rate monitoring, notifications, and even a feature to help you stay mindful with guided breathing sessions. It doesn't have all the more expensive features of the Series 10 (like the always-on display or advanced health tracking, such as ECG or blood oxygen), but it delivers impressive performance at a much more reasonable price.
While its run tracking insights can’t match for Garmin, Polar or Coros, there’s a lot here for the price. This includes all your usual mid-run metrics, plus post-plod readings for training effect, training load, VO2 Max estimates, and recovery time recommendations. The Active is light, compact and easy to wear 24-7 and the 1.32-inch AMOLED touchscreen is good for this price, easy to read and nicely responsive.
A great entry-level watch, the Forerunner 55 comes with built-in (and accurate) GPS, optical heart rate monitoring, 20 hours’ GPS run time on a single charge and a general usage battery life that’ll see most runners through at least a week’s training. Beyond the run, you also get fitness, stress and body battery energy level tracking. And if you’re training for a triathlon, there’s swim tracking too.
On paper, Amazfit’s rugged, budget adventurer has the tech, tracking tools and insights to rival other top-tier trackers — just at a third of the price. It packs 177 sports modes, an impressive 42-hour runtime battery life, accuracy-boosting dual frequency GPS, plus offline maps and navigation, all brought to life on a bright and bold, 1.5-inch smartwatch-style touchscreen.
The Polar Pacer is an entry-level run tracker designed for beginners or runners who want the basics at a more affordable price. You get 35-hour GPS battery life, a 1.2-inch, non-touchscreen display and handy tools to guide your training, like Training Load Pro which helps you keep your longer term training balanced.
Behind its impressive, snappy AMOLED display, the Forerunner 165 serves up a pretty comprehensive array of Garmin’s regular run-tracking tools, though there's no accuracy-boosting dual band GPS. The optical heart rate performance was relatively reliable, though.
A 53-time marathon finisher, 14-time ultramarathoner (including a top 100 position in the Marathon des Sables) and cofounder of The Run Testers, a YouTube running gear reviews channel, Kieran has been testing the latest running gear for more than a decade. A sub-3 marathon runner, you'll find him covering everything from virtual reality and smart scales to the latest health trackers. Kieran is also passionate about using the latest technology to hack his health in search of marginal gains and you'll always find him with a running watch on either wrist.
