I want to be clear about what this article is and is not. This is not a spec sheet comparison. If you want to know which watch has a 1.69-inch display versus a 1.83-inch display, there are a hundred other articles for that. What I am going to talk about is what these three brands are actually like to use every day, what their apps do and do not do well, and whether the health tracking on any of them is worth paying attention to.
My honest starting position: all three brands are playing in the same Rs 1500 to 5000 range for most of their popular models. At that price point, none of them are competing with Fitbit or Samsung or Apple. But they are not trying to. The question is which one gives you the best experience for what you are actually paying.
Noise:
Noise has been India’s top-selling smartwatch brand by volume for a few years now, and that dominance is not accidental. Their ColorFit series especially hit a very good spot between build quality, display brightness, and battery life. I have used a ColorFit Pro variant for several months and it does a lot of things right at the hardware level. The display is readable outdoors, the raise-to-wake works reliably, and Bluetooth calling is stable enough for daily use.
The NoiseFit app is more mature and data-rich than boAt’s Crest app, and health tracking on their ColorFit Pro and Pulse series consistently gets better reviews for heart rate monitoring accuracy and SpO2 precision than competitors in the same price range. That part is true. The heart rate readings are not wildly off most of the time. Sleep tracking gives you a basic breakdown of light sleep, deep sleep, and time awake, and it is consistent if not clinically accurate. Step counts are roughly in the right range. For casual tracking, Noise gets this part reasonably right.
But here is where I have a serious problem with Noise right now. The NoiseFit app has moved several basic features behind a Gold membership paywall. This includes things like custom watch faces, monitoring streaks, and viewing your own statistics. Users who bought watches with these features working freely now find them locked unless they pay. You bought the watch. You paid for it. And now the brand wants a monthly or yearly subscription to let you use features that were free when you purchased. Multiple users on the Play Store are calling this out directly, with one comparing it to being charged a subscription fee to use the camera on a phone you already own.
This is a trust problem, not just an inconvenience. If a brand can lock features you previously had access to behind a paywall after you have already bought the device, what stops them from doing it again? I think Noise makes some of the better hardware in this segment, but this decision actively puts me off recommending them to people right now. If you buy a Noise watch today, you should know going in that the software experience is subject to change in ways that may cost you more money later.
boAt:
boAt is interesting because no Indian consumer electronics brand in history has done branding quite like them. The products look good. The colorways are fun. The marketing is all over the place in a good way. And for a long time, the actual product was a bit of a gamble. The hardware quality on boAt watches has genuinely improved over the last two years. Their Ultima series brought AMOLED displays into a sub- Rs 3,000 bracket that felt unreachable before. The boAt Chrome Horizon, for instance, now offers VO2 Max tracking, a feature previously reserved for lab tests or watches costing Rs 20000 or more, along with auto-activity detection that logs walks and runs even if you forget to start a session manually.
The Crest app has also gotten better. You can now set a video from your gallery as a custom watch face through the boAt Crest App, which is actually a more creative personalization option than anything Noise or Realme offers at this price point. But here is where boAt loses ground: the health tracking accuracy has historically been inconsistent, and the Crest app still trails NoiseFit on depth of health data. The heart rate monitoring frequency is capped at 5-minute intervals in some models, which is quite low if you are trying to get a continuous picture of how your heart rate moves through the day. There is also no way to set continuous SpO2 monitoring on certain models, which is a limitation the app does not make obvious upfront. On Amazon, user feedback on boAt watches shows mixed results: some users praise the sensors while others report inaccurate SpO2 readings and faster-than-expected battery drain. Strap durability also comes up repeatedly as a concern.
My personal view on boAt: if you are buying primarily for looks and notifications and Bluetooth calling, they are a solid choice and the new AMOLED models offer good value. If health tracking is your primary reason for buying a smartwatch, boAt is not where I would put my money. The hardware is capable on paper but the software does not make full use of it, and the data you get from the app is not as organized or actionable as it should be.
Realme:
Realme entered the smartwatch space with a clear advantage: they already had a loyal user base from their phones, and people wanted accessories that worked well within that ecosystem. The TechLife Watch lineup is their main range in India, and on paper the specs are fine for the price. In reality, Realme’s smartwatches have always had two consistent problems: software and tracking accuracy. A full review of the TechLife Watch R100 noted a roughly 10% error margin on step tracking and heart rate monitoring, which the reviewer acknowledged is common in budget watches but still pointed out as a limitation. The overall conclusion was that the health tracking indicators are not that accurate. Ten percent sounds small until you realize that on a day where you walk 10,000 steps, that could mean a 1,000 step discrepancy. And if you are using this data to track a fitness goal, that gap compounds over time.
The bigger issue is the Realme Wear app. Multiple users on the Play Store report the app showing a blank screen after a few days of use, requiring a full reinstall. This is not a one-off complaint, it comes up often enough to be a pattern. For an app that is supposed to be your daily health dashboard, this kind of instability is genuinely frustrating. One specific limitation worth knowing: the watch does not have built-in GPS. For outdoor running, it relies on your phone’s GPS, but the connection does not always lock properly. When you start a run directly from the watch without the phone nearby, it tracks based on steps only, which means the distance and route data will be off.
Realme also has a cloud sync problem. The Realme Wear app does not have a cloud sync feature, which means if you switch devices, you lose all your historical health data. Your steps, sleep history, heart rate logs, all of it is gone. In 2026, this is a basic expectation from any fitness platform and Realme has not addressed it. I will say one positive thing about Realme watches: the build quality for the price is decent and the circular dial designs look more like a traditional watch than the typical rectangular smartwatch. If you are buying one as a gift for someone who just needs notifications and a step counter and does not care about tracking accuracy, the TechLife range at Rs 2500 to Rs 4000 is passable. But for anyone who actually wants to track health, Realme falls behind both Noise and boAt.
On the Health Tracking Question Specifically
None of these three brands produce medically accurate health data. That is important to say clearly because the marketing on all of them uses words like precision and accurate monitoring fairly freely. What they are good for is relative tracking. If your resting heart rate usually shows up as 72 and one day it shows 88, that is worth paying attention to, even if the absolute number is not hospital-grade accurate. Step counts are motivational tools, not precision instruments. Sleep tracking shows you rough patterns over time, not a clinical sleep study.
If health tracking accuracy is your primary reason for buying a smartwatch in this price range, Noise currently has the best sensor implementation of the three, specifically in their ColorFit Pro and Pulse series. That advantage shrinks, though, when you factor in the subscription model that now limits how you access and view your own data. boAt is improving fast on this front, especially in their Rs 2,500 and above range. Realme is the weakest of the three for actual tracking and has the most unreliable app experience.
My Final Take
If I had to recommend one brand today, and someone told me their primary use was notifications, Bluetooth calling, and basic step and sleep tracking, I would say boAt in the Rs 2000 to 3,000 range. The Crest app is not perfect but it has not started charging for things that should be free, and the hardware quality has clearly improved. If someone specifically wanted the best health tracking experience at this price point and was willing to deal with the subscription situation, Noise ColorFit Pro is still the more accurate watch. And if someone asked me about Realme, I would ask them to reconsider, unless they are specifically an existing Realme phone user who wants a basic notification companion at the lowest possible price and will not be relying on the data for anything meaningful.
All three brands are making progress. But right now, none of them are at a point where the software experience matches the hardware ambition. That gap is the most honest summary I can give you.
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