Xiaomi Smart Band 9 Pro or Active? It's an easy choice for me

What’s in a name? We’ve asked it probably a hundred times in the last year with the way terms like Pro, Max, Active, and Plus get added to tech products, but what do those names really mean? Sometimes, they mean quite a lot, like giving you an additional sensor, a bigger display, or better materials. Other times, however, those names add confusion to an otherwise simple set of devices.

Xiaomi’s Smart Band 9 series (also known as the Mi Band 9 in some markets) has become one of those cases. Its affordable fitness tracking lineup has grown to include three wearables — the Smart Band 9 Pro, Smart Band 9 Active, and the standard Smart Band 9 — and all three cost well under $100. So, with little room to differentiate between the three, how are you supposed to know which one to buy?

The regular Smart Band 9 has been one of our favorite value fitness trackers ever since it launched in mid-2024, but the Pro and Active are new additions that I’ve been testing for a few weeks. Though, if I’m being honest, it actually took me about a day of using the Pro and Active to decide which I’d recommend between the newer pair, and here’s why I’d only ever go Pro.

Simplicity is (mostly) bliss

When I first unboxed the Xiaomi Smart Band 9 Pro and Band 9 Active, I’ll admit they threw me for a loop. I’m new to the Xiaomi Band ecosystem (my colleague Kaitlyn usually tests these), and I’m so used to the feature-rich, button-packed Garmin experience that holding a simple, buttonless fitness tracker in each hand confused me. I wasn’t sure how to turn on either fitness tracker, let alone pair it to my Pixel 9. And yet, a small part of me appreciated the simplicity — or at least would enjoy it once I figured it out.

After a little while, I finally picked up on the fact that both the Smart Band 9 Pro and Active only turn on when connected to Xiaomi’s proprietary, two-pin USB-A charger. Not the most obvious of instructions, but I suppose most people plug their devices in to charge when they first get them, which makes sense. Anyway, once I got both fitness trackers powered on, I headed out to a coffee shop to do a little work outside the comfort of my apartment and finish setting up my Smart Bands while there.

Unfortunately, I also didn’t know that the Smart Band 9 Pro and Active would power off after a certain amount of time left unplugged if not paired with a phone. By the time I’d settled down at the coffee shop, they had done just that. So, I ran back home, grabbed a charger, and started the process again, pairing both wearables to my trusty Pixel 9. At long last, I was ready to explore my first Xiaomi wearables.

And, as I eased into both fitness trackers, I found that Xiaomi’s swipe-based navigation was pretty simple. The 1.74-inch Smart Band 9 Pro and 1.47-inch Smart Band 9 Active offer similar slides, giving you quick control over the music on your phone, as well as access to the weather and a sleep report from the previous night. The two wearables keep their slides to a minimum, though, so you’ll have to swipe up from the bottom edge to access an app drawer for everything else, including workouts besides running, a closer look at your heart rate, and a glance at your calendar appointments.

That said, while the basics of the Xiaomi Smart Band 9 Pro and Smart Band 9 Active are the same, using the two feels quite different. The AMOLED face on the Smart Band 9 Pro feels much larger and more responsive than the TFT face on the Band 9 Active, and the square, smartwatch-like design (let’s be real, it looks like an Apple Watch) allows the more premium tracker to organize its apps in rows of three rather than the seemingly endless single column.

The finer parts of both watches are opposites, too — from the build quality to how you attach and replace watch bands. Where the Smart Band 9 Pro frame is aluminum alloy, the Active is plastic. Where it connects via quick-release bands that look and feel quite a bit like those for an Apple Watch, the Smart Band 9 Active is more like a pill that you slot into a plastic and rubber frame. It’s simply a difference in polish that makes Xiaomi’s more expensive fitness tracker feel much better.

There are a few differences under the hood, too. Most notably, the Smart Band 9 Pro packs a 350mAh battery (up from the 289mAh of the Smart Band 8 Pro), which is quite a bit larger than the 300mAh of the Smart Band 9 Active. Xiaomi claims that the former will give you 21 days of battery life with average usage, while the latter tops out at 18 days — both of which I’ve found to be pretty accurate. I’ve been wearing the Smart Band 9 Pro for outdoor runs for over two weeks, and it’s still around a 60% charge. The Smart Band 9 Active hasn’t joined me on too many adventures for a very important reason that I’ll come back to, so it’s still at a nearly full charge.

Even the heart rate sensors themselves are different. The Active sports a fairly simple row of three dots, the top and bottom of which are green LEDs. Xiaomi’s Smart Band 9 Pro, on the other hand, has a much larger, circular sensor with two green LEDs and two white LEDs for further coverage.

When I eventually drain one of these cheap fitness trackers, I’m not looking forward to charging it. Like most wearables, Xiaomi’s Smart Bands rely on a proprietary charger, this time a magnetic rectangle with two small pins. The magnets’ strength is fine — they stay in place without issue — but I can’t say that I love that there’s a right and wrong way to connect the charger.

Unlike a Garmin watch, which can connect to its four-pin charger in either direction, or a Galaxy Watch, which just sits on its magnetic pad, the Smart Band 9 Pro and 9 Active have to be lined up just right before they’ll charge. When connected, the Smart Band 9 Pro is the significantly faster of the two to charge, taking about 75 minutes, while its Active companion takes closer to a full two hours.

On the bright side, Xiaomi’s slick, simple design continues to its Mi Fitness app — a must-have for pairing any of the Smart Band 9 models. It’s set up with large, simple cards for your daily sleep and heart rate, as well as other metrics like blood pressure and blood oxygen, though the most helpful graphic might be one that Xiaomi borrowed from Apple. Rather than a series of rings to close, Mi Fitness presents you with an empty rainbow of steps, calories, and active minutes to fill, each with its own animation once you hit your goal. Just make sure to pair Mi Fitness with Strava if you plan to share workouts — I forgot to sync the two for about a week and missed out on quite a few kudos.

Eat, sleep, workout, repeat

Of course, a fitness tracker is only as good as the fitness that it, well, tracks, so let’s move on to what it’s like to work out without buttons. Thankfully, it wasn’t nearly as confusing to me as the original setup process, only taking a swipe and a tap to get to the outdoor running interface. However, once you get past going for a run, the differences between the Smart Band 9 Pro and Smart Band 9 Active open up considerably once again.

For the most part, Pro simply means more than Active. Xiaomi’s more powerful fitness tracker offers almost triple the number of activities of its budget counterpart, around 150 compared to the 50 of the Smart Band 9 Active.

Don’t get me wrong — I don’t think anyone will ever use every single activity on either fitness tracker — but sometimes more truly is more, especially when the sports that the Active surrenders include most types of swimming, some of the ball sports, and about half of the gym-based workouts. Also, I can’t figure out why the Smart Band 9 Active comes without swimming support, as it’s still 5ATM water-resistant. Anyway, I’ve mostly relied on the outdoor run mode as I get back into regular running following a hectic fall marathon season, but the fact that the Smart Band 9 Pro supports tracking for things like darts, tug of war, Bridge, and fencing is simply incredible.

I mentioned above that Xiaomi’s Smart Band 9 Active hasn’t exactly found its way onto my wrist as a regular fitness companion, and the reason is that it doesn’t come with a GPS as standard. Instead, it relies on your phone’s connected GPS, meaning that you have to run with multiple devices at once. For some people, that’s standard practice, especially if they want to listen to music, but I tend to run with as little as possible, making it tough to grab the Smart Band 9 Active and jump out the door.

The Smart Band 9 Pro, however, does come with a GPS, so I’ve been able to strap it on one wrist while my ultra-accurate Garmin Fenix 8 occupies the other as a control device, and I’ve been pretty surprised by a few of the results. I took both watches for an easy five-mile run around Baltimore’s harbor and found that while the distances weren’t spot on (Garmin gave me an extra tenth of a mile), I felt like Xiaomi’s map behaved better through a few of the taller buildings in Harbor East.

In the map above, both wearables handled my trip along the waterfront and return leg along Thames Street just fine, though Garmin would have you believe I ran right through the parking garage on Point Street in a rush to get home, while the Smart Band 9 Pro accurately kept me outdoors. Xiaomi’s map wasn’t perfect — it did throw me through the side of Ceremony Coffee — but generally stuck to the roads slightly better. Other slightly wider-open runs have put the two wearables practically on top of each other regarding GPS accuracy, so seeing Xiaomi account for tall buildings slightly better is pretty impressive.

Digging into my heart rate across both wearables, however, tells a different story. Garmin’s tracking (shown in purple) is much more consistent than Xiaomi’s, peaking a few beats per minute lower at 166 while keeping a tighter range across the entire segment. I keep my Fenix 8 paired with my reliable Polar H10 chest strap for almost all runs, so to see the wrist-based Smart Band 9 Pro track me at nearly 170 beats per minute while both Garmin and Polar had me right around 160 isn’t great news for Xiaomi’s optical sensor.

There’s more to health tracking than simply going out for a run, though — the Xiaomi Smart Band 9 Pro and 9 Active also offer useful sleep metrics. The amount of data provided varies slightly depending on which fitness tracker you pick up (only the Pro gives you an overall sleep score), but I’ve found that both offer a breakdown of my sleep stages (fairly common among fitness trackers) and assign me a Sleep Animal after seven days of consistent wear.

What’s a Sleep Animal, you ask? Apparently, it’s an animal with similar sleep habits as you do, including sharks, owls, penguins, and sheep. As far as I can tell, the brown bear is the best sleep animal, as it gets lots of deep, restful sleep — especially when compared to something like the owl, which stays up late and sleeps fitfully. I’ve yet to earn my animal, though, as I keep wearing my Smart Band 9 Pro for three or four days in a row and then forgetting about it with either the Fenix 8 or no wearable on my wrist for a night.

Fitness is the function

If there’s one drawback to a cheap fitness tracker, however, it’s the lack of overall smartwatch features. There’s just not much you’ll be able to do with the Xiaomi Smart Band 9 Pro or 9 Active outside of logging sleep, tracking runs, and checking notifications. This didn’t surprise me with either budget-friendly wearable, but it’s still worth pointing out if you were hoping they’d feel more like the Apple Watch that so clearly inspired Xiaomi’s designs.

More specifically, that means you can’t download third-party apps like Spotify, Google Maps, or even Strava to any of the Smart Band 9 models. What you see when you fire up the fitness tracker is pretty much what you get — basic apps to control music (only play/pause, though), a compass, a remote camera shutter, and some semblance of a flashlight that just turns the display to a bright white color. It’s not very good on the Smart Band 9 Active’s TFT panel, but it’s there, I guess.

Unlike the Chinese models of the Smart Band, which come with a Xiaomi assistant, the global models don’t have any smart assistant support for commands. If you want access to Google Assistant on something like a rival Fitbit, you’ll have to spring for the Sense 2 or Versa 4, which cost significantly more than Xiaomi’s budget-friendly trackers. Personally, I don’t much mind the lack of an assistant — I’m not usually James Bond talking into my watch anyway — but I’d appreciate even a tiny speaker that chimes as I knock off a mile or a kilometer rather than the haptic feedback that makes me check for a notification.

Perhaps more annoyingly, a few features on the Smart Band 9 Pro and Smart Band 9 Active are less than universal on Android phones. Although both models have a remote camera shutter app, its compatibility is “only some models,” and event reminders are restricted to Xiaomi and Redmi devices. Interestingly, the camera shutter and event reminders work fine across all devices running iOS 12 or later.

Last, and possibly least convenient, is that neither cheap fitness tracker has an NFC chip. At this price point, it would have been asking a fair bit anyway, but I love the flexibility to stop for coffee and pay without my phone, and it’s a bit annoying to know that the Chinese models again have an advantage here as those do have NFC support.

Xiaomi Smart Band 9 Pro vs Active review verdict: The choice is simple

So, given the choice between a fitness tracker with 150 activity modes, a much brighter AMOLED face, faster charging, and a built-in GPS and one that has, well, pretty much none of that, I think the answer is easy. I’d happily recommend the Xiaomi Smart Band 9 Pro to someone in the market for a cheap, approachable fitness tracker that looks quite a bit like a much more premium smartwatch.

Granted, there’s pretty much no contesting the fact that the Smart Band 9 Pro is the better wearable than the Active — it costs twice as much, so it should be twice as good. But, when we’re still talking about two wearables that will run you less than $100, a little bit more value goes a long way. Sure, you could buy the Xiaomi Smart Band 9 Active and still have a chunk of change left over, but you have to ask if it’s worth the smaller, dimmer display, the need to take your phone with you any time you want to track activity outdoors, or the slightly simpler sleep analysis.

And then, there’s the other obstacle standing in the way of recommending Xiaomi’s Smart Band 9 Active: Its other sibling. Yes, Xiaomi has the OG third model in the Smart Band 9 series, the vanilla Smart Band 9 ($54.7 at Amazon), which also offers quite a bit more for your money and is much, much closer to the Pro than the Active. It shares a metallic frame, three weeks of battery life, a crisp AMOLED face with its more expensive sibling, and a staggering number of activities to track. The most that the Smart Band 9 shares with the Active, by comparison, is its long, slim design — that’s it. That said, it still lacks connected GPS, so if that’s a dealbreaker then the Pro is worth the extra cash still.

Of course, if you’re in the US, you might have a tough enough time tracking down the Pro in the first place. Xiaomi’s regular Smart Band 9 model and the Active are widely available on Amazon via sellers, but the best of the three isn’t available yet. In that case, the best alternative right now is probably the Fitbit Charge 6 ($159.95 at Amazon), as band-style fitness trackers don’t seem to be quite as popular as they once were. The Charge 6 looks and feels a bit like the Smart Band 9 with all the extra premium features of the Pro, but adds helpful integrations with Google Wallet, Google Maps, and YouTube Music, which makes it much more enticing to those in the Google ecosystem.