Which action camera is best for cycling? GoPro 13 vs DJI Osmo Action 5 vs Insta360 Ace Pro II mega test

So, you want to make videos on your bike... but which camera should you choose? Well, we’ve picked four of the latest action cameras – the top of the range models from Gopro, Insta360, DJI and SJCam – and pitted them against each other to find out which action camera is best for cyclists in 2025.

There's no doubt about it, action cameras have come a long way since road.cc began back in 2008. The video above from 2010 is far more jumpy and pixelated than even cheap cameras can capture these days, although that's not surprising when you consider we're 12 generations further along. We’re not 100% sure, but we *think* that footage was from the very first GoPro Hero action camera, and in this test we're looking at the latest Hero 13. 

It's worth mentioning that this feature and video is focused on action cameras for cycling, and while all of our three can be used for capturing a near miss, close pass or collision, there are arguably more suitable cameras on the market designed to do that specific job. Head to our in-depth article covering everything you need to know about bike cameras if this is more what you're after, and check out our guide to the best bike cameras. 

With all that said, let's get comparing our three action cams... 

The best action camera contenders

GoPro Hero 13 Black Edition

It wouldn't be an action camera test without a GoPro, and this Hero 13 Black edition is as state-of-the-art as GoPros get. It has a 27-megapixel sensor that can shoot at 5.3K at 60 frames per second, it's got GoPro’s latest HyperSmooth 6.0 image stabilisation, it’s waterproof to 10m straight out of the box, and it comes with a 1900 milliamp hour enduro battery.

Insta360 Ace Pro II

5.3K is a lot, but the Insta360 Ace Pro II ups the ante. This little thing will shoot in 8K, meaning you can do a 4x digital zoom and still get full HD footage. It has a Leica lens with a super-wide 157° field of view and the built-in microphone has an integrated wind guard, which should improve sound on the bike. Even though it has a flip-up screen, it’s still waterproof to 12m.

DJI Osmo Action 5

DJI is on version 5 of its Osmo Action camera, and although 4K is the highest shooting resolution, you can have that at up to 120 frames per second. It’s a great quality camera, and DJI was first to the party with the dual-screen set-up that three of the cameras now use.

It uses the same 1/1.3-inch CMOS sensor that’s in the Insta360 Ace Pro II and has 47Gb of internal storage, so even if you forget your SD card you can still go filming. Not that we’d ever do that...

Bonus inclusion: SJCAM SJ20

Alongside the three big names, we wanted to see if you can get the same kind of image quality from a lesser known and therefore cheaper camera. Taking that place is SJCAM, a well-established camera maker that’s been in the game for a while now, making well-regarded units in lower price brackets.

The SJ20 rocks two lenses, one specifically for low-light shots. It’s also modular, with a separate battery that’s removable and interchangable with a battery selfie stick. It shoots in 4K, up to 30 frames per second.

That's already quite a lot of information, so here's a table showing how the stats for each camera stack up:

Without the removable battery, the SJCAM is the most compact of all the cameras here, with the DJI and GoPro in the middle. The Ace Pro 2, which is chunky for an action cam, is at the other end. Pop the extender battery on the SJCAM and it’s about the same size as the Insta360.

Daytime shooting

There’s loads to go over, but unless a camera takes good footage there’s not much point delving further, so let’s kick off there.

For shooting video out and about in the daytime, we don’t think it’s unfair to say that the SJCAM SJ20 is propping up the pile. The stabilisation crops into what is already a tighter lens than the other three, meaning you get a reduced field of view, and the sensor produces an image that just isn’t as good: the compression is more obvious and there’s less dynamic range. The fact that it has by some distance the lowest bit rate of any of the cameras on test at 25mbps is also pretty obvious during daytime filming.

Bit rate is key metric for image quality, because it defines how much information the camera can write to the SD card. The Insta360 at 180mbps has the highest bit rate, and I would say that of the three it produces the best daytime footage. There is noticeably more detail if you punch into a single frame as we have above - it's most noticeable on the railings and cobbles.

The fact that you can shoot in 8K on the Insta360 in theory means that you could digitally zoom to 2x and still have a 4K image, but 8K footage is VERY resource-intensive to work with. We tended to shoot in 4K on all of the cameras, and at that resolution all the cameras except the SJCAM will shoot at 120 frames per second. The SJ20 maxes out at 30.

We were also impressed by the ability to double tap on the screen for a 2x zoom on the Ace Pro 2. Of the three cameras that allow you to zoom video, it’s the only one I really used day to day.

The Hero 13 and Osmo Action 5 deliver impressive image quality during daytime filming, but we think are just pipped by the Insta360.

Resolution

The lens and the sensor are both limiting factors when it comes to quality and detail, and to see what each camera can resolve we stuck up a test card in the studio and took some stills with each camera.

We did one with the card centred in frame, and one with it right in the corner of the shot.

Looking at the centre shot, it’s the Ace Pro 2 that resolves the most information (just about) with the GoPro and DJI just behind and the SJCAM a little way back. The cleanest picture is the Hero 13.

At the edge of the lens the Insta360 camera isn’t as sharp. The DJI is probably the pick there, and the GoPro is almost as good. The SJCAM seems to be a bit sharper at the edges than it is in the middle.

For outdoor shots, all the cameras feature some sort of high or wide-dynamic range processing to get more detail in the shadows. In the case of the DJI and the Insta360 cameras, it’s working a bit hard out of the box and the resulting image feels a bit washed out. You can turn it off though.

The GoPro is probably the best, with the SJ20 a bit dark and contrasty ('contrasty' is now a word).

Slo-Mo

Slow motion video can add a lot to your edits and help to capture those easy-to-miss moments. All four cameras are capable of filming slo-mo video, but we've dropped the resolution on all the cameras to get the best combination of resolution and speed.

For the DJI and the Insta360 that’s the same: 240 frames per second at 1080p. The GoPro, however, will do that speed at the higher resolution of 2.7K, and can even do 120 frames per second at its full resolution for 5-second bursts - which a lot of the time is as much as you need.

The GoPro also offers up to 400 frames per second at lower resolutions, which the others don’t offer. For slo-mo shots, the GoPro is easily the standout in terms of options. The SJCAM tops out at 120 frames per second at 1080p, which is still useful slomo but not quite on a par with the others.

Stabilisation

All of these cameras have image stabilisation, and all of them are quite good. That smooth image you get from a modern action camera is one of the main reasons they’re so much more effective than older models, and it makes the footage so much more usable that we rarely turn it off.

The DJI, GoPro and Insta360 cameras all have two levels of stabilisation; the SJCAM is on or off and, although you definitely want it on, the payoff is the cropped image we see throughout the footage. It’s just not as wide as the others, and that makes it easier to get a shot that’s not framed very well.

The other three crop the image too, but they’re cropping less from a wider lens to start with; the DJI and the GoPro field of view is comparable to the Ace Pro 2, although at 157° that camera is still the widest. Which stabilisation is best? Probably the GoPro, just, although the other two are also excellent.

Night footage

Action cameras have historically struggled with low light, but sensors and optics are improving all the time.

The GoPro is the only one of these cameras that doesn’t have a specific night mode. The SJ20, of course, has its separate low light lens. The Ace Pro 2 has a setting called PureVideo for low light, and DJI has a SuperNight setting on the Osmo Action 5 Pro.

The smaller sensor size of the GoPro compared to the DJI and the Insta360 is more obvious when it’s really dark: there’s just not enough light getting in.

In normal low-light situations it’s okay, although it’s definitely eclipsed by those two cameras, of which the Insta360 is the best overall for shooting at night.

The SJCAM fares okay here. The low light lens is certainly better than the day lens at shooting after dark, although I found the footage a bit blurry.

Even with its dedicated lens it’s not as good as the Ace Pro 2 or the Osmo Action 5 Pro.

Sound quality

Sound is important on video, and of course all these cameras have built-in microphones. In the video above, you can see sound comparisons from all four cameras both with and without the wind reduction modes turned on.

First things first: the SJCAM’s wind reduction algorithm is dreadful and makes the audio tinny and basically unusable, although the sound without it is okay. The Insta360 is my pick of the four straight off the camera: the sound is well balanced, and it has a built in wind shield that means for the most part you can do without the wind reduction algorithm. The GoPro picked up a lot of wind noise in our test, although it’s much better in selfie mode when the mic is facing you against the wind. 

All four cameras can use external mics. SJCAM offers a USB-C lapel mic that you can plug in, and that’s also an option for the other three if you buy some kind of adapter. The GoPro and the Insta360 can also connect to your bluetooth headphones.

If sound is really important to you though then the DJI takes the spoils here. For a start, it makes really excellent mics like the DJI Mic 2 that we use for sound on lots of videos on the road.cc channel.

Ease of use and mounts

OK, we’ve covered quite a bit about the quality of footage you can get out of these cameras. But what are they like to use?

Well, they’re all ostensibly the same in terms of controls: you get two buttons and a touch screen, or in the case of the Osmo Action 5 Pro, two touch screens because you can control the camera from the front screen too, which is handy if you’re recording yourself.

The Insta360's flippable screen also gives you that option, and if you’re framing selfie vids then it’s easily the best because the screen is bigger, and also the same shape as the frame. You can also angle the screen which is great for low level shots. The downside is it’s much harder to switch between recording yourself and other people, if you want to see what you’re doing.

On the SJCAM that’s also true: you can’t have both screens on at the same time, which is a bit of a pain.

Another thing that’s definitely a pain is the SJ20’s add-on battery, which realistically you’re going to use most of the time. You can’t charge it unless it’s on the camera, and you can’t open the charge port when it’s fitted. So you have to take the battery off, open the port, replace the battery, charge it, take the battery off again, close the port and fit the battery for a final time. It’s a pretty daft state of affairs.

Mounting

All these cameras use the same action camera mount standard that’s ubiquitous these days, and offers you a staggering range of accessories.

The SJ20 doesn’t have a mount on the camera itself, so you need either the frame or the fully waterproof dive case to fix it to stuff.

The DJI and Insta360 cameras both come with a clip mount that magnetically locates, and that makes it easy to fit and remove the cameras to a bike for example.

The Hero 13 Black also has a magnetic mount available but there’s a legacy mount that folds into the body, so you’re covered both ways so it’s the pick of the lot so far as mounting is concerned. Obviously the magnetic mounts aren't interchangeable, because of course they’re not. 

Menus

The four cameras have different menu setups and ways of accessing shot modes and functions, and this article is already long enough without a deep dive into how they all work.

The SJCAM’s menus feel a bit like the menus you get on budget action cameras but just with more options, which isn’t an endorsement. The other three are more premium-feeling, and all work differently but more or less equally well.

GoPro’s optional labs firmware allows you to change settings on the camera just by pointing it at a QR code, which is super handy if you’re working with multiple cameras or you have specific settings you need to apply, because there are a LOT of things you can change.

Start-up time

You can set all the cameras to power on and shoot with a single press of the record button, and the DJI is the quickest to actually get going with less than two seconds between the button press and the start of the video. The GoPro and Insta360 are about four seconds, the SJCAM more like seven.

All the cameras have a pre-record function too, so if the camera’s powered on it’s always recording, and when you hit record it’ll write the previous minute or so to the card. The Ace Pro 2 will actually pre-record up to 90 seconds, a minute for the Osmo Action 5 Pro and 30 seconds for the other two.

The SJCAM and GoPro will also work as motion sensor cameras, although you’ll need the GoPro Labs firmware to do that on the Hero13 Black.

Overall ease-of use

The SJ20 is once again lagging behind. The situation with the add-on battery is a bit ridiculous, the menus are poor and the control layout is inferior to the other cameras. It just doesn’t feel like it’s really in the same ballpark.

And as for the other three? They’re all fully featured and there’s a lot to like, and a lot of the time they’re comparable, which probably isn’t a surprise.

We don’t necessarily think one is better than the others, but would say that the GoPro feels more like a prosumer camera in terms of the way it approaches things. The Insta360 feels like it’s set up to be simple to use, and the DJI is somewhere in the middle. The Osmo Action 5 Pro was probably our personal favourite during testing, but there really isn’t much in it.

Battery life and charging

All four of these cameras have similar battery specs, assuming you’re using the SJ20 with its extender battery.

The Ace 2 Pro battery is the smallest at 1800 mah, then it’s the SJ20 at 1850, then 1900 for the GoPro and 1950 for the Osmo.

We ran all four cameras at the same time and the same video resolution, and just left them running until they stopped. The Ace Pro 2 was the first to give out, at 1hr 44mins, with the Osmo Action 5 Pro and SJ20 stopping within three minutes of each other about half an hour later. The GoPro held on until 2hrs 39 mins, and was the only camera that actually made it to its stated runtime.

The Ace Pro 2 was a bit disappointing, and it wasn’t just in this static test. It tended to be the first camera to run down whatever we were doing out and about as well. In normal use the GoPro didn’t seem to be as far ahead of the others as the static test would suggest. The DJI and GoPro were often about the same.

The SJCAM came with a 'Volta grip' which has a huge 4800mah battery in it that extends the battery life by ages, but it’s not waterproof and it’s a bit bulky. GoPro also offers a battery grip, the Volta, that doubles as a tripod. DJI has one too.

Our DJI adventure pack came with a three-battery caddy, which is handy if you know you’ll be shooting more than one battery’s worth of footage.

When you’re charging up, again the Osmo Action 5 is the best, giving you a nice easy-to-read charge percentage on the screen all through charging, even when it’s turned off. With the others it’s much less easy to tell the charge state.

App control

We’re not going to do a deep dive into these, but all these cameras have an app and can connect to your phone to do stuff, because it’s 2025! 

GoPro’s Quik app has been around years, and the key functionality is about making quick edits to stuff... oh, and trying to get you to buy a premium subscription. There’s a lot of that! If you want quick vids for social media when you’re out and about it works well, and of all apps we're trying out here it's probably the best for throwing vids together in a hurry.

The Insta360 app caters for all of its cameras, but there are still very solid editing facilities, lots of templates and even an AI function where you can upload clips for a makeover. You get three of those free a day. Like the GoPro Quik app it’s set up for firing out social edits and does a good job.

The DJI Mimo feels a bit more classic in terms of the output you get from the automated features, and there’s quite a detailed editor backend, so if you want to get a bit deeper into your edit on your phone it might be a good choice. There’s also a full tutorial section on the camera, although that’s just linking to Youtube vids which you could watch there.

The SJCAM app has some editing functionality too, although it promises things like templates which don’t actually load, and the experience as a whole is a bit glitchy. You can throw an edit together in there though.

On top of that, all the apps allow you to stream a live view of the camera and fiddle with the settings, which can be handy if the camera’s somewhere you can’t get to it easily.

Accessories

A lot of the camera accessories available are interchangeable, but there are a few things to note, such as the remote control capability on all of these cameras. Insta360 now offers a GPS preview remote with a live view, which is the pick of the bunch, and DJI has a GPS remote too. The GoPro has GPS built in.

The Ace Pro 2 and the Hero 13 Black both have a bayonet mount that the lens cover sits on. At the moment a neutral density filter set for shooting in bright conditions is the only thing that fits on the Insta360 camera, but the GoPro has a range of lenses, including an adjustable focus macro lens that’ll give sharp footage down to about 11cm, and an anamorphic lens for a cinematic look. The ability to shoot close on the macro lens really does allow you to extend the range of shots you can do.

The DJI has push-on ND filters and lens mods, which will be fine for most conditions but aren’t fully waterproof. Water can get under them in extreme conditions, and if your camera is wet or dirty you’ll need to be more careful.

Prices

GoPro Hero 13 Black Edition: £399 RRP with one battery, charging lead, single 2-piece mount. We also have Macro lens and ND filter set

DJI Osmo Action 5: £329 with one battery, protective frame, quick release mount, adhesive base, charging lead, lens cover. We have Adventure combo which includes three batteries in a charging case and a selfie stick (sorry, 'extension rod').

SJCAM SJ20: basic kit around £200. We have the Pro kit with battery grip 4800mah

Insta360 ACE Pro II: £389.99 for the basic kit with a single battery, Wind Guard (pre-installed by default), standard mount, mic cap and charging cable

So, which action camera is best?

Let’s get the SJ20 out of the way first. It’s lining itself up as a competitor to the other three in this test and, well,  it doesn’t make the grade. The build quality isn’t as good, the picture isn’t as good and the experience isn’t as good, and even with a second lens specifically for low light stuff it isn’t even winning there. Oh, and the extra-battery charge port thing is a usability nightmare.

Okay, it’s not as expensive, but we think that if you don’t have the budget for the other top-end cameras here it’s worth looking second hand: GoPro footage has been better than this since at least the Hero 6, and that’s been around for seven years now.

As for the other three? Well we’ve scored them out of five on 10 criteria in this article that we can tally up for a lovely percentage score, and here’s how they got on:

Overall then, you can see that aside from the SJ20 there’s very little in it. Any of these three cameras would be an excellent companion for your cycling adventures.

The GoPro edges it on points over the other two, but in reality which one you pick is going to be dependent on the kind of filming you do, and each of them has strong and weak points.

Dave, who conducted the majority of the testing, said: "Personally I don’t think I’d pick the GoPro, because it’s outperformed in low light situations by the DJI and Insta360 cameras, and that’s an important consideration for me. It ain’t always sunny here and I do quite a bit of filming after dark. For many cyclists though, it's the best rounded action camera that you can buy in 2025."

If you're trying to decide between the GoPro's main competitors, then it's worth noting that the Osmo Action 5 Pro picture isn't quite as good in terms of pure detail as the Ace Pro 2; but although the 8K is a draw on paper, you’ll probably find like us that you don’t end up using it much.

The ability to sync two good mics to the Osmo will be a major plus for many prospective buyers, so is both the battery life and the fact you can get the handy 3-battery case for longer shoot times.

If you’re doing short form stuff and editing on your phone, the Insta and GoPro cameras are likely to suit you better: the apps are more set up for sharing, and the cameras have better video presets for square and vertical videos. The GoPro’s proper interchangeable lenses might also be a big draw for making more varied action cam footage. We really liked the macro lens, and it’s a big step forward in terms of add-on-lens quality.

If you forced Dave to pick, he reckons he'd probably go for the DJI: "I like the way it works, the sound options and low light quality are important for the stuff I do, and also it’s a bit cheaper. But your mileage may vary."

Let us know which action camera you would choose in the comments below!