If you love making videos with your phone but want a smoother, less bouncy, more professional look, a smartphone gimbal can elevate your content creation for not a lot of money.
A gimbal is a mechanical stabilizer that, through a combination of sensors and electric motors, keeps your phone steady regardless of how you move your hand, arm, or body. Modern gimbals even have apps that can track a subject, keeping you or someone else in frame—while you’re both moving—for a professional-looking shot.
Of all the gimbals we tested, the Insta360 Flow was the easiest to use, had the best app, and reliably stabilized our video, making it the go-to choice for more cinematic smartphone shots.
Our pick
A clever, compact design and a full-featured app combine to make this model the best gimbal for most people.
The Insta360 Flow is a compact and easy-to-use phone gimbal with a great app. One of the Flow’s best features is its small size—it’s the smallest gimbal we’ve tested. But despite its compact stature, it has a huge battery, a built-in tripod, and three-axis stabilization, which keeps your camera as still as possible even if you’re moving.
The Flow can extend over 8 inches to double as a selfie stick, and you can manually tilt the head to get better low- or high-angle shots.
Its large, 2,900 mAh battery should let you record all day and can charge your phone and other devices.
The Insta360 app (for iOS and Android) provides detailed tutorials to teach you all the many features of the gimbal and the app itself. It has extensive editing capabilities, too, so you can quickly trim, sequence, and post a social-media-worthy video.
Its only major drawback is a slightly limited tilt range in comparison with larger, heavier gimbals like the Zhiyun Smooth Q4 and 5S, but for most people this won’t be an issue.
Budget pick
While larger and not as slick as our main pick, this gimbal works nearly as well and has two useful apps.
The Zhiyun Smooth Q4 isn’t as compact, stylish, or cleverly designed as the Insta360 Flow, but it’s still a great gimbal for not a lot of money. It resembles older DJI gimbals, feels a little cheaper overall, and lacks the handy removable phone clamp that our other two picks offer.
The two available apps—the main ZY Cami app (iOS, Android) and the more advanced StaCam app (iOS, Android)—are very good, though a bit less polished than the Insta360’s. Specifically, they’re not quite as easy to use, and you can unlock some features only by paying a subscription fee.
For a little more money, the Zhiyun Smooth Q4 Combo includes a nice hard-shell case plus a clever removable and reversible LED fill light. The bundle is well worth the small price difference.
Also great
This compact gimbal offers a comfortable grip and an app packed with useful editing tools. But it has a shorter battery life, and due to limitations with the Android app, we recommend it only for use with iPhones.
The DJI Osmo Mobile 6 is a well-designed gimbal with an ergonomically pleasing grip and well-placed buttons. Collapsed, it’s only a little larger than the Insta360 Flow.
DJI’s app works similarly to Insta360’s, offering lots of editing features and great object tracking. This model’s battery is a lot smaller than that of our top pick, though, and the Osmo Mobile 6 lacks the Flow’s clever built-in tripod.
The main issue with the Osmo Mobile 6 is not the gimbal itself but the app—or rather, the ability to download it. For several years Google has denied DJI access to the Google Play store, for reasons that remain unclear. As a result, Android users must go to DJI’s website to download the app and then disable protections on their phone to allow installation of outside apps. This is not ideal, to put it mildly.
In light of that issue, plus some other Android-compatibility problems, we recommend the Osmo Mobile 6 only to iPhone owners who want a more ergonomic alternative to the Insta360 Flow.
