If you want a bigger sensor: the DJI route
Both DJI picks use a 1/1.3-inch sensor, which has noticeably more area than the HERO13 Black’s 1/1.9-inch chip. More sensor area means more light collected per frame, which translates directly into cleaner footage at dusk, indoors, and in the shade — the conditions where every action camera struggles most. If a lot of your shooting is late-afternoon mountain biking, evening skating or anything under tree cover, this is the single most useful difference on the page.
The DJI cameras also change how a long day works. A published 240-minute runtime on the Action 5 Pro and 64 GB of internal storage mean a forgotten memory card is not a wasted trip, and the magnetic quick-release mount is faster to live with than a finger-mount system. What you give up is resolution ceiling — 4K120 rather than 5.3K60 — and the sheer breadth of third-party mounts, which remains GoPro’s strongest card.
If you want to talk to camera: a flip-up screen
Action cameras are terrible vlogging cameras for a dull reason: you cannot see yourself. The Insta360 Ace Pro 2 is the exception here, with a 2.5-inch screen that flips up to face you, so you can frame a talking-head shot without a phone propped up beside it. Combined with a 1/1.3-inch sensor co-engineered with Leica and 8K30 capture, it is the pick if your footage is half action and half you narrating it.
The trade is physical. At 177 g it is the heaviest standard-shape camera here, and a flip screen is one more hinge on a camera whose job description includes hitting things. If you genuinely only mount it and never speak to it, the DJI is the sturdier choice.
If stabilization is why you wanted a GoPro: go mechanical
HyperSmooth is electronic: the camera crops into the frame and shifts the image to cancel motion, which is extraordinarily good and costs you a little field of view. The Osmo Pocket 3 takes a different approach entirely — a mechanical 3-axis gimbal physically moves the camera, which produces smoother walking footage than any electronic system and does not crop the frame to do it. It also carries a 1-inch sensor, the largest on this page by a long way.
It is not an action camera and should not be bought as one. It is not waterproof, it does not mount to a helmet, and the fixed lens and small screen make it a walk-and-talk tool rather than a crash-and-burn one. But if the reason you were looking at a GoPro was smooth handheld video rather than surviving a river, this is the honest answer, and gimbal versus in-body stabilization explains why the mechanical version wins.
If you want to never miss the shot: 360
The Insta360 X5 points two lenses in opposite directions and records the whole sphere, so you decide where the camera was looking afterwards in the app. For anything fast, unrepeatable or impossible to aim at — a trick, a wipeout, a car passing — that is a genuine advantage no single-lens camera can match, and the invisible-selfie-stick effect is a real creative tool.
Two honest caveats. The headline 8K figure describes the sphere, not your final clip: once you reframe to a normal flat video you land nearer 4K. And every single shot needs app work before it is watchable, which is a workflow most people underestimate. If you want to film something and post it, this is the wrong camera. If you want to film everything and edit later, nothing else competes.
How we compared these
Against the three things GoPro is actually best at, in this order: waterproof depth without a housing; stabilization approach and how much frame it costs; and mounting. Then on the two axes where GoPro is beatable: sensor size, and published battery runtime. Every figure quoted is the manufacturer’s own published specification with the date it was read, including each company’s own battery test conditions, which differ between brands and are not directly comparable — we quote the conditions rather than pretending they are. We have not tested any of these cameras; here is exactly what we do instead, and there are no scores on this page because a score would imply a measurement we did not take.
