Are you looking for the best smart scale? Go up

Best budget scale

Wyze has built its entire business on offering smart home technology at a fraction of the price of other brands, and its products still manage to perform well and be well made. Its latest scale is the Wyze Scale The Bluetooth-only device displays your weight on its LED screen; you’ll need to turn to the Wyze app for additional measurements, 13 in total, including measurements of muscle mass, visceral fat, and BMR.

You can share the scale with up to eight users, and there are even modes for babies, pets, and luggage, so you don’t mess up your stats before you go on your trip. Save the scary weigh-ins for when you return. As with most Wyze products, this is incredible value for money, as sales events have brought the price down to $20.

Best Full Body Scan Scale

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Smart Body Fat Scale (FG2015)

In recent months, a new style of smart scale has appeared on the market. So-called body scanners or body composition scales are designed with a retractable handle that adds two or four additional electrodes located in your hand to the four placed under your feet. Apparently, this gives you a deeper insight into body measurements than you can get from a foot-only analysis, which can’t really “see” above the waist.

In practice, these scales provide the same type of information as simpler scales (Runstar’s FG2015 tracks 20 measurements and supports 24 users), but they also break down the data by body part. Do you want an analysis of the fat in your left arm or the muscle content of your right leg? The Runstar application, functioningwill give you the distribution. How useful is this information? If you’re training to become a professional arm wrestler — or better yet, if you’re trying to lose weight from your gut — you may need this kind of detail. For the average tech journalist just trying to make sure they can still fit into their pants, this may be overkill.

Even if you don’t need all the extra limb information, there’s something to be said for the design, which mounts the data screen on the grips, so you can see it from a few feet away instead of squinting at the ground, where, for me, it’s very difficult to see it. The device is also rechargeable via a standard USB-C cable, freeing you from the tyranny of batteries. A full charge lasts approximately three months. The only real downside is that the device is Bluetooth only compatible.

The scale can be garish to look at, but luckily the unit has silver pads, not gold like they appear in the photos, which is at least a little classier. The price is also right: at $135, it’s cheaper than Withings and cheaper than other body scanners.

Other smart scales

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Renpho MorphoScan for $150: The Renpho MorphoScan full body scanner looks strikingly similar to the Runstar FG2015, including an almost identical screen attached to the handlebars. Well, spoiler alert, they’re basically the same scale. They even use the same app to collect data (and you can even use both scales simultaneously). The only reason this scale isn’t our top pick in this category is that it costs $15 more. You can rest assured that a price war is looming.

Arboleaf CS20W Body Fat Scale for $40: This affordable Bluetooth scale isn’t the most eye-catching one I’ve tested, due to its large silver electrodes and oversized screen that looks a bit garish. While weight is easy to determine, the six additional statistics presented are difficult to read, all displayed at once. I like the Arboleaf app better than the scale, where five additional measurements can be found in addition to the seven above, each with a helpful explanation when you tap on it. It’s a bargain at this price, but it’s probably wise to skip the upsell to get a “smart interpretation report” for $40 more per year.

Hume Health Body Pod for $183: Hume Health’s Body Pod, another full-body scanner with handles, is heavily advertised – at least in the apps on my phone – and is touted (by Hume) as the next big thing in the world of body management. While the app was indeed shiny and inviting, I was shocked to discover how flimsy the hardware was, that it lacked Wi-Fi, and that some features were locked behind a $100-per-year Hume Plus subscription plan. It works quite well, but you can get equally good results with a cheaper device.

Garmin Index S2 for $191: Five years after its release, the Index S2 is still Garmin’s current model, a surprise for an otherwise fitness-obsessed company. It’s still notable for its beautiful color screen, which guides you through its six body measurements (for up to 16 users) with each weigh-in. The screen also shows your weight over time graphically and can even show the weather. The scale connects directly to Wi-Fi and Garmin’s cloud-based storage system, so you don’t need a phone nearby to track your progress like with Bluetooth-only scales. A phone running the Garmin Connect app (Android, iOS) is convenient, so you can track everything over time. Unfortunately, as far as health apps go, Connect is a bit of a bear, so expect a learning curve, especially if you want to make any changes to how the scale works. You can enable or disable its various widgets on the LCD screen in the app, but finding everything can be difficult due to the impressive reach of the Garmin ecosystem. The color screen is nice at first, but ultimately doesn’t add much to the overall picture.

Omron BCM-500 for $92: With its large LCD panel, quartet of integrated buttons, and oversized silver electrodes, the Omron BCM-500 is an eye-catching masterpiece of brutalist design. If your bathroom is decorated with concrete and wrought iron, this scale will fit in perfectly. The Bluetooth unit syncs with Omron’s HeartAdvisor app (Android, iOS), but it provides its six body measurements directly on the scale, cycling through them with each weigh-in (for up to four users). It can be difficult to read the label for each of the data points, in part because the LCD isn’t backlit, but the app is a little easier to follow, offering front-page graphs of weight, skeletal muscle, and body fat. On the other hand, the presentation is rather clinical and the application is surprisingly slow to synchronize. For a scale without Wi-Fi connection, it’s rather expensive too.

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