The Best GoPro For Skiing And Snowboarding 2025
If you’re reading this, chances are you’re about to hit the slopes and you’re looking for the best GoPro for skiing and snowboarding, or another wearable action camera to capture the highlights of your adventure.
GoPro arguably invented the action camera, and they’re certainly responsible for its widespread popularity today. But it’s been 22 years since founder Nick Woodman first strapped a 35mm film camera to a surfboard – and in that time at least a hundred copycats and competitors have emerged.
Many of them bad, but a few worthy of your serious consideration.
In this article we’ll take you through the best GoPros and action cameras for the coming ski season, drawing on over 100 weeks’ experience as professional ski and snowboard guides, and help you to decide which camera deserves a place in your kit bag on your next adventure.
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Table of Contents
- Best action camera for skiing – best overall
- Best GoPro for skiing and snowboarding
- Best 360-degree camera for skiing
- Best budget action camera for skiing
- What makes a good action camera?
The Best Action Cameras For Skiing And Snowboarding
We’ve put together our top choices and gone out on a limb here to include not just the best GoPro but the best action camera overall, because you might surprise yourself and decide the GoPro isn’t actually for you!
Best action camera overall
This hurts to say, but we’ve finally hit a point where we stop recommending GoPro as the best overall action camera manufacturer.
We owned the GoPro 3, 5 and 6 and loved them all. We also owned the 8, 9 and 10 (always the top-of-the-range Hero Black Editon where applicable) but all three of them had endless stability issues.
They froze, they crashed, the SD card would corrupt and you would lose everything. All the buttons would lock up while filming, it would become non-responsive and only a battery pull would fix it. The battery pull would erase the clip you were filming. And have you ever attempted a battery pull while treading water? Not good.
You couldn’t ever mount the camera over USB to transfer pics to a computer. The feature was officially supported, it just didn’t work – not on the four separate Windows laptops, MacBook or Linux machine we tested.
In-body charging didn’t work with most USB-C cables. Tech support said these were all known issues but there were no plans to fix any of them.
GoPro will always have a special place in our hearts for effectively inventing the action camera genre and coming out with some stellar early products, but sadly today we would recommend either of their main competitors: DJI or Insta360.
Both make some excellent cameras, but they’re very different – so we’re going to talk about DJI first, and the Insta360 in a second. We’re also going to come out and say that if you can afford it, the Insta360 X3 that we’ll look at shortly is probably the best action camera on the market today for almost everyone, regardless of your sport or application.
But first – DJI. Their range of action cameras all fall under the Osmo brand, with the Osmo Action 4 as the main action camera. Its most remarkable features are that it shoots 4K at 120FPS (that’s 4X slow-mo); it’s waterproof to 18 meters right out of the box, and it has not one but two large, full-colour touchscreens (one facing forwards).
The image quality out of the Osmo Action 4 is also superb, partly due to its 1/1.3” sensor – about 30% larger than the sensors GoPro use – allowing DJI to make each individual photo-site larger and more sensitive to light.
DJI’s “RockSteady” image stabilisation is almost indistinguishable in performance to GoPro’s; both cameras use the same mounting system so the range of accessories is also effectively identical. At £379 / $399 the Osmo is usually about £80 cheaper than a GoPro, but generous sales often take place for both. The Osmo is just slightly better in every way.
If you’re looking for more of an all-round vlogging or pocket camera than a truly bulletproof, go-anywhere action cam, the DJI Osmo Pocket 3 deserves an honourable mention. This strange-looking camera gives up waterproofing for an even larger, fully 1” CMOS sensor, a cool 3-axis mechanical gimbal and a big, beautiful rotating colour touchscreen.
The 3-axis gimble means the camera can mechanically track and follow you as you move around the room, or say, keep your face in the centre of the frame as you ski. They also allow you to perform perfectly smooth pans, yaws and tilts.
It’s honestly an amazing camera, but 90% of readers headed up the mountain will ultimately want to choose the Action instead simply because the Pocket has moving parts and is not waterproof.
The Pocket series are arguably some of the best cameras for vloggers and city-break jet-setters rather than extreme sports enthusiasts, unless you’re really confident you’re not going to crash.
It’s also getting harder to recommend gimballed cameras as 360-degree cameras become so good. Anything a gimballed cam like the Pocket 3 can achieve mechanically – such as following you around the room – a 360-degree camera can achieve digitally, in post, and lots more besides.
We’ll look at this in more detail as we explore the best 360-degree cameras for skiing in a moment.
Best GoPro for skiing
If you came here specifically looking for the best GoPro for skiing recommendation, we’re sorry to have spent half of this article bashing them! We would love to be proven wrong – leave us a comment below if you own a recent GoPro and genuinely love it. Likewise, GoPro, if you’re reading this, feel free to send us a sample of the latest generation for review!
GoPro’s winter range this year consists of the new Hero 12 Black, the 360-degree Max, and an honourable mention for last year’s model the Hero 11 Black.
Many years ago, GoPro offered three different versions of their camera every year – Black, Silver and White editions, in order of descending quality. Nowadays you essentially choose between a regular action camera (Black) or a 360-degree camera (Max).
We’ve extolled the benefits of a 360-degree camera several times in this article, and in fairness to GoPro, the Max is not a bad one.
Neither is the Black a bad action camera – we just found it to be noticeably less reliable, for slightly more money, and therefore hard to recommend. The opportunity cost of missed shots and corrupted files was by far the worst thing about it – otherwise, in terms of things like image quality, it’s a great camera.
The previous generation (Hero 11 Black) arguably offers you the best bang for your buck right now, with an almost identical feature set to the 12 and around £100 savings (according to GoPro themselves, the 11 actually has more features than the 12!).
If you spot a good offer on a GoPro, it could still be worth it. But if you’re deciding whether to spend more on a GoPro than an Osmo, that’s a tough sell.
It’s also a pretty tough sell against a 360-degree camera, which are coming on in leaps and bounds.
Best 360-degree camera for skiing
🏆 Our top choice – The Insta360 🏆
The best 360-degree camera on the market right now is the Insta 360 X3.
It’s got everything you expect from a high-end action camera – it shoots video at 5.7K or timelapses at 8K; it has two 48mp sensors meaning it can take 360-degree, 72-megapixel photos, and it’s waterproof to 10m right out of the box.
Much like the DJI Pocket it uses large, high-performance 1” CMOS sensors; it has extremely competent image stabilisation and a big, bright, highly-usable touchscreen.
The magic is in the 360-degree image captured by this camera, and the ability to then selectively reframe and track the action in post-production.
Insta360 evidently realise this and also offers a suite of free, AI-powered tools to work with their 360 videos, from simple scripts to track people or pets through to effects that replace the entire sky with a tropical aquarium or an impossible explosion of stars.
In fact, the X3 has a host of incredibly clever features, such as a conference mode where you plop it in the middle of the table and it automatically reframes to whoever is speaking. You can even film yourself in 3rd person, no selfie sticks in sight, using some clever image processing trickery and the overlapping lenses.
It’s perhaps a little corny to say that what Insta360 are doing represents a quantum leap forward in action camera technology, but that’s about the sum of it – and we can say it with a straight face. The X3 is extremely easy to recommend, and arguably the best action camera overall.
Best budget action camera for skiing
GoPro have long been dogged by copycats – arguably, DJI are the worst of them! A quick search for “action camera” on Amazon or, if you like to live dangerously, somewhere like Wish or Temu, will yield minimum 20 other off-brand alternatives.
You’ll notice clusters of the same product under different brands – these are made by single factory and rebadged or “white labelled”. We can’t possibly claim to have tried them all, but we have tested about a dozen different models over the years.
You know what? They were all surprisingly good for the price. That is to say, nowhere near as good as DJI or GoPro, but perhaps half the quality at a sixth to an eight of the cost. Undeniably worse, but in terms of price-to-performance ratio they still blow anything else out of the water.
If you’ve never owned an action camera before they’re a great way to dip your toes in the water without spending much money. Again, we feel bad saying this because they’re literally just GoPro rip-offs, but we’ve reached a point where their quality is similar to a non-flagship smartphone and that’s plenty for most casual users.
Of the few we tried, Akaso cameras stood out as one of the better brands. The Akaso V50 X sells for about £100 / $75, often less, and it’ll shoot very usable 4K at 30FPS; it has a colour touchscreen, decent image stabilisation, an identical range of mounts and accessories to GoPro or DJI…
The worst things about it are that it requires a case to be waterproof, and that the sound quality is poor – so it’s not a great camera for vloggers. Other than that, it’s a perfect example of “at least half as good, at one quarter the price” – and therefore arguably twice as good value as a tier-one option like DJI.
In terms of brands to avoid, the worst one we tried was Campark. The model we tested didn’t have IBIS and the footage was a mess.
Overall, much as we hate effectively supporting copycats, the truth is that cheap action cameras often do represent very good value, if not peak quality. If you’re buying a camera for that one ski trip every couple of years – or if you want a backup cam to a more premium option – some of them are genuinely worth a dabble nowadays.
If you want the best quality, though, there’s no question that the Insta360 X3 or DJI Osmo Action output a dramatically better picture – you just pay a lot more per pixel.
What makes a good action camera?
Here’s a quick tour of our judging criteria – what should you look out for in a GoPro-type camera for skiing and snowboarding, and what makes a good action camera in general?
Camera technology has moved on in leaps and bounds in recent years, and we’re able to fit astonishing features into tiny packages nowadays.
Gone are the days when an action camera meant grainy images and jerky footage – today’s action cameras shoot crisp 4K, have amazing built-in stabilisation and some can even do things like capture a full 3D, spherical image of everything that’s going on around you, rather than a linear image of the thing you’re looking at.
Before we jump into specific brand and model recommendations, we’re going to quickly talk about what we think makes a good action camera and the kind of features you should look out for.
1. Durability and innate waterproofing
You’re going to put your action camera through some abuse. It’s inevitable. It’s pretty much the reason you’re buying an action cam. Moisture ingress is by far the leading cause of death amongst GoPros, so here we include waterproofing prominently under general durability.
Cheap action cameras, or older versions of the market leaders, are usually NOT waterproof right out of the box. They require an external shell to be even remotely water resistant (although with one on, they are usually rated for diving to 30 or even 40 meters).
The shell is made of hard plastic and also protects the camera from knocks and scrapes. Many of them allow you to replace the lens cover if it gets scratched, which is a very nice feature.
This may all seem highly desirable for skiing, but there’s a hidden catch that will ruin your day: the internal surface of the case, including the part covering the lens, will fog up every single time you go from a warm place (like a ski lift) to a cold place (skiing).
There are little dehumidifying, anti-fog inserts that you put in the oven to dry them out, then carefully slip them into the case without covering the lens or any buttons and then close it really fast…
Or you can try only opening the case somewhere really really dry like the chalet sauna, but honestly – you just don’t want an external case for skiing. Leaders like GoPro cracked this early on and since the GoPro 5 have offered cameras that are natively waterproof to about 10 meters and also optional external cases for diving and the like.
In terms of resistance to knocks and drops, all action cameras honestly perform about the same. We know this because we have dropped and broken more than we can count, from top-end GoPro Black Editions right down to $15 Alibaba specials.
Impact resistance literally comes down to luck. One season we dropped a Hero Black 8 off a chairlift onto rocks four times with zero problems.
We used to mount it on the nose of the snowboard then go charging through the powder at 30 miles an hour. I once dropped it briefly into a fire. It didn’t care. Then we dropped it from waist height in the boat yard and it exploded into a million pieces.
Almost all action cameras have at least one large screen nowadays, and despite promises of being made from Gorilla Glass or the like, if you drop it on the screen, it will break 100% of the time. Lots of cameras now have two screens to break.
All this is to say that we don’t believe there’s much to choose between manufacturers in terms of durability, and instead hedge our bets with:
2. Good mounts for your GoPro for skiing
One of the absolute best things about action cameras is the ability to buy a million different mounts for them (both official and third-party, or even 3D-printed) and stick them almost anywhere. You can’t drop your camera if you’re not holding it, and investing in some good mounts for your action camera is essential insurance.
3. Guarantees and replacement programmes
Several manufacturers offer subscriptions whereby if you destroy your camera they’ll repair or replace it for free, or at least at a fraction of the price of a new unit. We used GoPro’s scheme for a couple of ski seasons and received 3 replacement cameras at a total cost of about £200, which is roughly 1/5th the cost of replacing the actual cameras – so if you’re a heavy user it could well be worthwhile.
(Bonus – there are also a handful of cases that offer impact resistance without covering the lens, and are therefore immune to fog, like the GoPro Floaty).
4. Image stabilisation
Sometimes called IBIS, for “in-body image stabilisation”, this is a technology that ensures a stable image even when the camera is moving around – something that happens near-continuously when you’re skiing, snowboarding or otherwise engaged in a sport.
Your authors are old enough to remember action cameras without IBIS, and the disappointment of reviewing your footage only to find you have four hours of blurry nonsense. Thankfully almost all modern action cameras now do have IBIS, but not all stabilisation algorithms are created equally.
We believe top-notch stabilisation is one of the most important features to look out for in an action camera because without it you’re looking at a high percentage of missed and wasted shots, or you’re purchasing an external gimbal and hauling that up the hill, too.
5. Tech specs
Most action cameras nowadays shoot 4K, even the really cheap ones. Some top-end cameras will shoot 6K or even 8K. It’s common to focus on resolution as the most important metric (and it is important) but in truth image quality depends on a dozen different things from the lens optics to the processor set to the quality of the wafer the sensor was cut from.
You can buy an action camera for $50 that will shoot 4K nowadays. But you might also find that an ultra-cheap 4K camera outputs an image that is visually worse than 1080P from a more expensive camera.
For example, we once had a “CamPark” action camera that would output “4K” – we discovered was just shooting 720P and then stretching the video eight times!
In fairness, that’s not a usual experience, and as we’ll see in a moment, there are great action cameras for as little as $50 nowadays.
Either way you definitely want native 4K nowadays – even if you’re expecting to watch your content back on 1080P HD devices like phones, downscaled 4K still looks dramatically better. And it gives you masses of headroom to crop, zoom, pan and stabilise in post.
But also pay attention to frame rate – if you’re filming sports, you’re likely going to want an action camera that supports at least 50-60FPS so you can capture 2X slow motion. 120FPS or 240FPS (frames per second), translating to 4X and 8X slow-mo, are even better.
Many cameras can still only do 30FPS at 4K, so think about whether you need slow-mo 4K because it does reduce your pool of options.
6. Consider a 360-degree camera
In case you’re not familiar with them, 360-degree cameras have two or more wide-angle lenses that, combined, are able take a complete, spherical image of your surroundings.
From there, you can either view that 360-degree image in first person, and freely “look around” it – either on a regular device or with a VR headset – or you can output part of the image as a regular, fixed-point video.
The real magic is in the latter, in our opinion. The point here is that you can now capture everything that’s going on around you and then decide which part to focus on later.
A very simple example: you’re skiing with a camera facing forward and your friend hits a jump behind you. A 360-degree camera captures it, a traditional action camera does not. In fact, with a 360-degree camera could likely capture both the jump and your reaction to it.
You’ve almost certainly seen edits that make use of this. A classic example is that shot where someone jumps off a cliff and the cameraman throws a GoPro after them.
You’re never, in a million years, going to throw a fixed-view camera off a waterfall and accurately track the diver. It’s just not going to happen. With a 360-degree camera you’ll probably get it on the first take, because the tracking and framing happen largely in post-production.
7. Front-facing screens
It’s notoriously difficult to place yourself accurately in the frame when filming a selfie video on an action camera. Many people also feel awkward talking directly to a dead, unblinking lens.
A front-facing screen solves both, allowing you to frame yourself perfectly, maintain that angle while moving around, and focus on your own image when talking to camera. Bonus points for being able to see yourself and check you look alright. Front-facing screens are a relatively new addition to action cameras but they’re a godsend if you ever film selfie videos.
Conclusion – The Best GoPro For Skiing
Action cameras have been coming on leaps and bounds in recent years, and there are now an abundance of good options to choose from at every price point.
The real rising star, in our opinion, is 360-degree video. We didn’t much enjoy reliving the video in first person – with a headset on, we even felt a bit motion-sick.
But the ability to capture everything around you and never miss a moment; then to selectively reframe and then output a linear video – or two, or as many as you want, all from different perspectives, after the fact – it’s simply transformative.
If you buy into that, the Insta360 X3 is extremely easy to recommend. If you’d rather stick with linear for now, or you want to spend about $100 less, you won’t be disappointed with the DJI Osmo Action 4.
Both are brilliant cameras, but we think if you make the jump to 360 you won’t look back.
