Tonal vs. Speediance

Many of us have promised ourselves we’d exercise more, whether out of vanity or medical necessity. Some of us have even stuck it out long enough to see results. But it’s too easy for too many things to get in the way. Bad weather and high fees might keep you out of your local gym. The cost or large footprint of home gyms could keep you from investing there, as well. And soon, you find yourself weeks or months removed from the last time you broke a sweat.

In a vast sea of home gyms, a handful of recent players stand out for their use of electromagnetic weights that bring an immense variety of exercises into your home without taking up very much space. These smart home gyms could solve some of the problems keeping you from regular training. But does it solve the cost concern, and does this style of resistance create the same potential to get a good workout?

Tonal and Speediance are undeniably two of the most popular names offering so-called “digital weight.” They take somewhat different approaches to the same goal, and we’ll spend this comparative review exploring those differences — and the companies’ similarities — to help you decide which one, if either, is right for you.

Our recommendation: Speediance Gym Monster 2

For the vast majority of potential users, the Speediance Gym Monster 2 will deliver everything they could need from a smart home gym, with smooth magnetic resistance, a bounty of workout modes, comprehensive fitness programs, helpful videos, robust safety features, and a convenient and portable design. What’s most important is that it does so for a much lower price than Tonal. In fact, because Tonal charges a monthly membership fee for about 95% of its features, and Speediance has no monthly membership fee, the cost to purchase and use a Speediance machine is less than half the amount you would pay for a Tonal 2 after just three years of ownership. For anyone invested in live fitness coaching, folks lifting heavy who need the extra resistance Tonal offers, or tall users (at least six feet) who don‘t want to modify certain exercises to fit the Speediance’s slightly shorter profile, Tonal is likely the better option. For everyone else, Speediance is the way to go.

At Innerbody Research, we extensively test and research all of the products and services we review, including Tonal and Speediance equipment. For this review, our team leveraged more than 1,000 hours spent researching the science and techniques involved in resistance training to compare the potential that these two machines offer their users.

We also relied on the expertise of trainers and athletes who have extensively used either one or both of these machines to discover critical aspects of their interfaces and function over a long term of use. Additionally, like all health-related content on this website, this guide was thoroughly vetted by one or more members of our Medical Review Board for accuracy and will continue to be monitored for updates by our editorial team.

Over the past two decades, Innerbody Research has helped tens of millions of readers make more informed decisions about staying healthy and living healthier lifestyles.

Our comparison of the Tonal 2 and Speediance Gym Monster 2 looked at a host of variables. We’ll break them down as we move through this guide, but here’s how the two machines compare head-to-head in the most important aspects:

While we looked at numerous variables to compare Tonal and Speediance’s flagship models, we’ve boiled the essentials down to the following chart:

To evaluate Tonal and Speediance, we specifically pitted each company’s latest model against the other, namely the Tonal 2 and Speediance Gym Monster 2. Both companies have other products to consider, and we’ll touch on those a bit later in this review, but our primary comparison involved their flagship smart home gyms.

We compared these products to one another using seven specific criteria:

• Effectiveness: how well each machine is likely to work for the average user
• Safety: the type and quality of safety measures to protect users
• Cost: the start-up costs and continued use costs (with and without memberships) for each
• Convenience: how easy either one is to install and use
• Interface: everything from the screen quality to workout library and customization
• Build quality: how durable each machine seems, and how well the electromagnetic cable system functions
• Accessories: types and quality of available accessories for each

Further down the page, we’ll break down some of these criteria in greater detail, like which is better specifically for building muscle or burning fat. For now, let’s take a closer look at these parameters to see which machine is superior.

Effectiveness

Advantage: Tonal

While both Tonal and Speediance use reliable electromagnetic resistance that’s responsive to your personal strength level and capable of providing a workout that can undoubtedly induce hypertrophy and produce muscle growth, Tonal’s machine design offers more opportunities for growth for more people.1 The central difference is that Tonal can create more resistance — 250lbs (125lbs per cable) versus Speediance’s 220lbs (110lbs per arm).

Another part of the advantage for Tonal is born of a disadvantage in its design: it’s immobile. It mounts firmly to your wall and lives there forever — or until you have Tonal-approved technicians move it. You can always move it yourself, but that will void your warranty. By comparison, Speediance is portable. It folds up when you aren’t using it and tucks away wherever you see fit. A consequence of Speediance’s design choice, specifically the need to keep it compact, is that there’s a certain limit in the machine’s range of motion, especially in the highest height setting for its pulleys.

One of our testers is over six feet tall, and everything from lat pull-downs to tricep extensions posed a problem for him. He could effectively perform these exercises from the bench or his knees, but that sacrifices certain aspects of form, stability, or spinal loading, depending on which alternative you choose. There were no such sacrifices in our experiences with Tonal.

Our testers also found that Tonal’s predictive weight and dynamic weight modes were more accurate and more challenging during eccentric portions of a lift. Over time, that difference could result in noteworthy improvements in strength.

Safety

Advantage: Speediance

This may have been the tightest race between the machines. Both Tonal and Speediance offer outstanding safety features, including digital spotter assistance and effective Bluetooth controllers for loading and unloading weight.

Tonal definitely offers superior build quality and stabilization. Even with the locks in place on the Speediance machine, we noticed some trembling in the frame at heavier levels of resistance. This never occurred with Tonal. The Tonal also has a camera that can track your movement and give you pointers on how to improve form and technique to ensure you’re lifting safely.

Also, because Tonal offers more placement options for your pivot point, there are fewer modifications you need to make to hit your workouts the way you want. For example, a tall enough person doing rope tricep pulldowns might have to kneel or awkwardly use the bench to get a full range of motion in the rep. That can potentially reduce your stability or at least add a discouraging step to your setups in the middle of a workout flow.

In Speediance’s defense, its Bluetooth ring is a better device for loading and unloading weight. It’s generally easier to access than Tonal’s handle-based buttons and bar attachment, and it features a simple knob you can twist to increase or decrease resistance between moves, adding safety and convenience.

But what ultimately pushed the category in Speediance’s direction is that its spotter is not exclusive to paid members; it’s free for everyone. With Tonal, if you stop paying for your membership, you lose the digital spotter. Not only are spotters an important safety tool, but research also indicates that the presence of a spotter can improve performance.2 For Tonal’s part, that speaks to a certain level of either greed or disregard for customers that prevents us from considering its other safety features as superior.

Cost

Advantage: Speediance

This was definitely the easiest criterion for us to consider in our guide, as everything about Speediance is less expensive than Tonal, from the cost of the machine to things like accessories and memberships. This was true even before Speediance decided to offer a free lifetime membership to its customers (previously, it charged $25 per month, which was still less than half of Tonal’s $60 per month membership). Now that it’s free, a Speediance membership is one of the machine’s top selling points.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the cost to own each machine for the first two years (the length of each machine’s warranty), as well as a look at costs over the next five and ten years. We’ll assume consistent membership costs for the time, even though they’re likely to increase as the value of the dollar evolves:

As you can see, if you owned each machine for ten years, you’d have paid more than three times as much for the Tonal 2 as you would have for the Speediance Gym Monster 2.

Convenience

Advantage: Speediance

Aspects of both Tonal and Speediance are undeniably convenient, but many of them cancel each other out. Both use magnetic resistance, so there are no weights to lug around. Both rely on simple Bluetooth apparatuses to connect to the machine and signal for loading and unloading weight. Both also offer plenty of convenient training sessions and modes for various workout needs.

But Speediance has one big advantage that sets its convenience apart: you can move it around. It’s a little heavy, but it has wheels and folds up to an incredibly thin package, allowing you to reorganize your home gym or just change your mind about where it should go. If you want to make a change like that with Tonal, you could either move it yourself and risk voiding the warranty or pay several hundred dollars and wait for a professional team to come move it for you (presumably leaving some pretty big holes in your wall where it used to hang).

Speediance also comes fully assembled. You just have to unpack it, plug it in, set up the interface, and get to work (some accessories need minor assembly, like the bench). By comparison, you have to make an appointment for delivery and installation with Tonal. Sure, there’s still nothing to assemble, but it’s definitely less convenient.

Interface

Advantage: Tonal

The interfaces on both the Speediance and Tonal gyms are bright, responsive, and useful. You’ll find a wide variety of workouts on each, with trainer videos and real-time feedback on your sessions. Ultimately, Tonal’s interface is a little more polished, which makes sense considering the company’s early intention to compete with the likes of Peloton.

That comparison also leads us to another key difference between the two that grants a point to Tonal if it’s something that would motivate you: live sessions. Like Peloton, Tonal retains a staff of professional trainers who host live training sessions you can join as your schedule permits. These can be incredibly motivating for people, providing an appointment to their workouts that they can’t miss. Speediance provides prerecorded sessions that are about the same in terms of workout library, positivity, and training quality, but the fact that they aren’t live means they give you less social incentive to do your workout at a designated time, leaving room for you to skip sessions and fall off track. To be clear, Tonal also has prerecorded sessions, which are convenient for anyone with unpredictable schedules, but the addition of live sessions helps justify its membership cost.

Of course, if you choose to abandon your Tonal membership after the mandatory first year, you lose so much functionality that the interface win immediately shifts to Speediance. Without a membership, you can still use the Tonal, select specific exercises, and customize resistance, but all of the tracking features, exercise programs, and just about everything else about the interface go away.

Build quality

Advantage: Tonal

This category was the closest thing to a tie we had in our consideration. Both machines offer incredibly smooth resistance without any of the jitteriness you can sometimes feel on cable machines loaded with mechanical flywheels or traditional physical weights. What tilted the scales in Tonal’s favor was that the machine can reach a higher level of resistance with its smoothness.

As we touched on in the Effectiveness section, Tonal 2 provides up to 250lbs of total resistance, and Speediance tops out at 220lbs. It’s almost a semantic argument, but Tonal’s smoothness between 220 and 250lbs is undeniably superior to Speediance because the latter simply can’t reach those heights.

Our testing didn’t cover a long enough period to know how the resistance feeling might change over time, but long-term users have indicated to us that both machines maintain that high level. However, as we’ll discuss a little later, Speediance makes replacement cables available and is an easier machine to fix on your own if you’re outside your warranty.

Accessory quality

Advantage: Speediance

While Tonal takes the cake for build quality, the accessory quality easily goes to Speediance. Here’s a quick rundown:

• Speediance offers a higher number of available accessories, at 19 compared to Tonal’s 11.
• The Speediance Bluetooth ring includes a little controller button that rotates like the crown on a watch and allows you to change resistance on the fly. With Tonal, you have to unload weight and leave your stance to change the resistance on the screen.
• Speediance’s screen angle is adjustable. That allows you to see it when doing more exercises, like bench presses.
• The Speediance bench is adjustable (if you opt for the more expensive Works Plus package). Tonal only offers a flat bench.
• Speediance offers a rowing accessory that converts the Gym Monster into an effective rowing machine.

Another important accessory that Speediance sells is a set of replacement cables. That allows you to replace the most likely parts of the machine to break down from normal wear and tear. It speaks to a high level of consideration for the customer, whereas Tonal’s warranty doesn’t even cover cable replacement outside of a manufacturing defect.

Tonal and Speediance are two companies selling smart home gyms designed to pack as many workouts as possible into as little space as they can. They achieve this by relying on magnetic resistance instead of traditional heavy plates or flywheels.

Tonal has only one model in its catalog, the Tonal 2 — an upgrade over the company’s original Tonal machine. Speediance has several machines in its catalog, including two total gyms, a partial gym using magnetic resistance, and an exercise bike. The Speediance Gym Monster was the company’s response to the original Tonal, and its Gym Monster 2 is its response to the Tonal 2.

Both the Tonal 2 and the Speediance Gym Monster 2 have large interactive touchscreen displays that allow you to track workouts, access various programs and instructional videos to fine-tune your form and technique, and do basic things like set resistance levels and adjust settings. They both also have built-in sound systems you can use to access music online or through a connected smartphone.

At the heart of each machine is a magnetic resistance system, which might take some getting used to, as the force it creates is more consistent and challenging than regular weights would be. Let’s dive into this technology a little further.

Tonal and Speediance both rely on magnets to create resistance. That might not seem sensible at first, but it works very effectively. Imagine you’re holding a big enough magnet that you have to grip it with your whole fist. Then imagine you’re standing on a thick metal surface, and the magnet begins pulling down on your arm, attracted to the metal beneath you. It would take a lot of force to keep that magnet from reaching the ground. If you sent a current through that magnet, you might be able to control the amount of force, setting it to be equal to, say, 20lbs. Then, you could simply curl the magnet and get a bicep workout in.

In practice, the process is a lot more technically complicated, and the magnets involved don’t move that far from each other; rather, you put that effort into pulling a cable coiled around a sort of magnetic spool.

This allows you to set specific resistances that are smooth and consistent throughout your motion, with no opportunity to use momentum to cheat yourself out of hard work. It also allows you to let the machine act as a spotter, automatically relieving the weight if you get into trouble during a move.

Tonal and Speediance create home gyms for people who want certain features others simply don't offer, namely:

• A complete gym experience that takes up very little space
• A built-in video interface for inspiration and education
• The various benefits of magnetic resistance

Other home gyms might check off one or two of these features, but very few hit all three. Among them, Tonal and Speediance have the longest track records of success with the best-made machines on the market. Some other high-quality options out there that lean more toward things like yoga than a full-body total gym experience, but these two options remain among the best available for serious, weight-based workouts.

Who might want to look elsewhere?

While the Tonal 2 and Speediance Gym Monster 2 are both outstanding pieces of exercise equipment, they have some drawbacks and limitations that could have you reconsider whether they’re right for you. The most obvious among these is cost. You’ll spend nearly $4,000 at the low end just to get one of these machines in your house, with Tonal’s higher price tag and expensive monthly membership adding up to a significant amount of money after just a few years.

Space will also be a concern for some, even with the relatively small footprints of either machine. If you don’t have at least 40 square feet of space, you won’t be able to perform all of the available exercises. And if you’re a renter, a Tonal installation could cause significant damage to walls and risk your security deposit, not to mention the cost of having Tonal come out to uninstall, transport, and reinstall the machine to a new space if you ever move.

Advantage: Tonal

Building muscle is all about hypertrophy, which describes the growth of individual muscle cells in response to stress and minor damage incurred through resistance training.3 Still, there’s a lack of consensus regarding the best way to maximize hypertrophy with the most efficient exercise methods.4

One alteration to traditional resistance training is eccentric overloading. When your muscles contract, they can exert a certain amount of force depending on a handful of variables like muscle size and strength, ATP and glycogen stores, and more.5 Fascinatingly, you can actually exert more force when you’re extending those same muscles; essentially, that means you could support more weight on the second half — or negative phase — of a lift (i.e., when you’re lowering the weight).6

This eccentric overload idea has serious limitations, though. Short of having a spotter who could slip an extra plate on your barbell halfway through your rep and then remove it again before your next rep begins, there’s not much you can do to achieve it. Fortunately, Tonal and Speediance have an answer for this.

Both the Tonal 2 and Speediance Gym Monster 2 feature eccentric modes that can increase the amount of resistance the machines generate during the negative phase of a lift. You could lift 20lbs in each hand for the positive phase of a curl, and the machine will increase the resistance by up to 50%, letting you support 30lbs on the way down. That should fast-track hypertrophy and contribute to greater muscle growth.

So, that’s probably the most important way that either the Tonal 2 or Speediance Gym Monster 2 can build muscle more effectively than other workout approaches. But how does that compare between the two machines? Well, Tonal gets the edge here because it can simply create more resistance.

Imagine you’re deadlifting, a move in which most people can support well over 100lbs. You can set the resistance on the Tonal to around 166.5lbs and still get the full 50% increase in eccentric resistance (249lbs). With the Gym Monster, you can only do just under 147lbs if you want the full 50% increase to 220lbs. Over time, that means you have access to more muscle-building potential with Tonal.

Advantage: Speediance

Aerobic and anaerobic training have both been shown to burn fat, with resistance training helping to maintain lean muscle while losing weight.7 Both Tonal and Speediance have found ways to introduce more aerobic aspects to their training methods, as well.

Those training methods include cardio-centric programs that make more use of your space than they do the machine itself. You could find yourself doing burpees, mountain climbers, or even box jumps with an included bench.

And each machine has a specific benefit over the other for fat burning. For example, Tonal 2 has introduced AERO, its outstanding high-intensity interval training (HIIT) workout program — an approach that involves significant aerobic and anaerobic effort.8 (Speediance also offers HIIT programs, but we found Tonal’s to be superior in variety and intensity.) But Speediance takes the advantage here because it offers a rowing accessory you can attach to the Gym Monster frame to turn it into a rowing machine. There’s even a dedicated pivot point for the cables labeled with a little rowing icon, so there’s no risk you’ll get the setup wrong.

Rowing provides a nice balance between strength and aerobic exercise, engaging a large percentage of the body’s muscle groups.9 It’s great for core and back strength, in particular, and it’s excellent for fat metabolism.10

Given the inclusion of HIIT workouts and the availability of the rowing machine attachment, Speediance easily gained the win here.

Advantage: Speediance

At the end of the day, whichever of these machines is more likely to give you the tools and motivation you need to succeed in your fitness goals is going to be the better investment. But the machines are so similar in their offering, and Speediance is so much less expensive, that it’s hard to deny that the Gym Monster 2 is the better investment.

In our cost section earlier, we broke down the cost to own either machine over the course of a decade, and there are essentially five things that make the Tonal 2 an inferior investment:

• Higher price point
• Accessory package sold separately
• Expensive monthly membership
• Charge for shipping and installation
• No warranty coverage for wear and tear

By comparison, the Speediance Gym Monster 2 offers:

• Lower price point
• Accessory package built into the price
• No monthly membership
• Free shipping
• Minimal coverage for wear and tear, but replacement parts available through website

Ultimately, you’ll spend a little under $4,000 to get your hands on a Speediance Gym Monster 2, and that’s it. With Tonal, you’ll end up spending several times that amount over the course of a decade. It not only costs less to get the Gym Monster into your home, but it also costs less to own and maintain it through the years, making Speediance the clear winner as an investment.

Advantage: Speediance

Safety is paramount with any home gym equipment, and just because these machines don’t have big, heavy weights attached to them, that doesn’t mean they don’t need just as much consideration. Both do an excellent job of ensuring that you have a safe workout experience, including effective Bluetooth controls to load and unload weight. But one critical shortcoming with Tonal gives this category to Speediance.

That difference is based on either machine’s digital spotter. In a gym, if you have a spotter, they can help you power through one or two of your last reps and make sure that you don’t push so hard that you hurt yourself or get trapped under a heavily weighted barbell. With digital weight, you’re less likely to get trapped, but are still at risk for an injury like a muscle or ligament tear if your form and technique fail due to overload.11

To prevent this, each machine has a digital spotter mode that can sense if you’re struggling and help you through your reps. But Tonal’s spotter mode goes away (along with most other features) if you suspend your membership for any reason. That could put users in a dangerous situation, and there’s no reason that Tonal couldn’t leave that minimum functionality in place to protect its users who aren’t active members.

Now, to be fair to Tonal here, if you keep your membership, you keep your spotter, and the Tonal 2 has some safety features that the Gym Monster 2 lacks. Chief among these is a built-in camera that allows the machine to observe and offer corrections for your form. Form and technique are critical for exercise safety, so this is a big boon to novices who are learning new moves. Of course, not everyone wants to introduce another camera into their home; that’s a personal preference issue. And it’s worth noting that, like the digital spotter, Tonal’s camera feedback is a members-only feature.

Both Speediance and Tonal have either animations or live videos of people performing every move, so you’ll have a reference point no matter which machine you get.

While Tonal and Speediance offer what are likely the two best smart home gyms on the market, there are alternatives out there that may offer certain advantages that could make them better fits for your workout goals. Let’s take a quick look at some of those alternatives: