NordicTrack RW900 and RW300 Review

NordicTrack sells two rowing machines that share a badge and almost nothing else. The RW900 is a roughly $2,000 machine built around a 24-inch pivoting touchscreen — the largest screen on this site — and NordicTrack states on its own listing that a $39-a-month iFIT Pro membership is required to use its connected features. The RW300 is a roughly $899 machine with a plain 5-inch LCD and a shelf for your own tablet, and it rows perfectly well with no membership at all.

That single split — subscription required on one, optional on the other — is the whole story of this review, and it is unusually honest for a brand to offer both within one product line. Most connected-fitness companies sell you the screen and the fee as a bundle you cannot separate. NordicTrack, on the RW300, gives you the hardware without the recurring cost, and then lets you add iFIT later if you want the classes. On the RW900 it does the opposite and says so plainly.

We have not rowed either machine. Everything below is read from NordicTrack’s published specifications and its own Amazon listings, cross-checked and dated, and the recommendation between the two is an argument about money and honesty rather than a verdict from a test session.

Same resistance, same silence, very different screens

Both machines use magnetic resistance, and that is the quiet part of the pitch — literally. A magnetic rower has no fan, so there is none of the broadband whoosh an air machine pushes through walls. NordicTrack publishes no decibel figure and neither do we, because no manufacturer on this site does, but the mechanism is one of the quietest there is. Both machines also need mains power, which is the trade for the screens and the digital resistance.

What separates them is what you look at. The RW900 carries a 24-inch pivoting HD touchscreen that turns to face the floor for off-rower classes, and 26 resistance levels with SmartAdjust changing them automatically as a workout runs. The RW300 carries a 5-inch LCD and a shelf for your own phone or tablet, with 26 manual resistance levels you set yourself. The stroke is the same; the interface is a chasm.

The screens come with mass and height. The RW900 is 145 lb and stands 52.7 inches tall with the panel up, on an 80-by-22-inch frame; the RW300 is lighter at 108 lb but wider at 25 inches, 81 inches long and 44 inches tall. Neither is a machine you move casually, and both are tall enough with the console raised that they read as furniture in a room rather than kit you tidy away. The RW900’s extra 37 lb is the screen and the hardware behind it — you are lifting the panel every time you reposition the machine.

The RW900 and the membership it requires

The RW900 is a screen-led machine, and NordicTrack does not pretend otherwise. Its own listing states that an iFIT Pro membership at $39 a month is required to access all iFIT content and connected features. That is refreshingly direct, and it is also the number that should decide the purchase.

A 24-inch screen is a wonderful thing to follow a class on, but it is only as useful as the classes it shows, and those live behind the fee. Buy an RW900 and skip the membership and you have spent around $2,000 on a silent magnetic rower with a large, mostly idle panel and SmartAdjust switched off. Over five years the membership alone is roughly $2,340 on top of the machine — more than the hardware costs — which is the sort of total that a $39 monthly line never quite feels like. We put every rowing subscription in one table for exactly this reason.

NordicTrack does not publish a user weight limit on the RW900 listing, which is an odd gap at this price. If you are near any reasonable ceiling, ask before ordering rather than assuming — we do not fill an unpublished capacity with a guess.

The RW300: the honest one

The RW300 is the machine for people who resent recurring fees, and it earns that description on a technicality that matters enormously: iFIT is optional on this model. It has a standalone 5-inch LCD and 26 manual resistance levels, so it rows completely without a membership. iFIT only adds SmartAdjust and the class library on top of a machine that already works.

That is a genuinely different proposition from the RW900. At around $899 you own a 108-lb magnetic rower that does its job the day it arrives and never sends you a bill. If you later decide you want guided classes, you supply the screen with the device shelf and add iFIT — or you do not, and put a tablet with a free app there instead. The recurring cost is a choice rather than a condition of use.

The RW300 does give up things. A 5-inch LCD after you have seen the RW900’s 24-inch panel is a plain instrument, and it too has no published weight limit. But for anyone whose objection to connected rowers is the subscription itself, this is the one on this page that answers it.

Run the same five-year sum the RW900 forces and the RW300 barely registers on the recurring side: buy it outright at around $899 and, if you never add iFIT, the subscription column is zero. That is the entire appeal — a connected-looking rower whose ongoing cost you control, on a machine that already rows without asking for anything monthly.

The screen-versus-shelf trade, honestly

The real decision here is not RW900 against RW300 so much as integrated screen against device shelf, and it is the same decision the whole connected-rowing category keeps asking.

An integrated screen is bigger, brighter, and purpose-built, and it pivots for floor work. A device shelf is a piece of plastic that holds a tablet you already own and can replace when it ages. The integrated screen is the better experience and the worse deal; the shelf is the plainer experience and the one that never becomes obsolete hardware. NordicTrack sells you both philosophies under one brand, which is why comparing these two machines is really a way of deciding which kind of buyer you are. If your ceiling is $1,000, the RW300 is the one that fits and the RW900 does not.

There is a resale dimension to this too. An integrated touchscreen ages like any consumer electronics — the panel that looks sharp today is the part most likely to feel dated in five years, and it is welded to the machine’s value. A device shelf sidesteps that entirely: when your tablet ages you buy a new tablet, not a new rower. For a purchase you intend to keep, the RW300’s plainness is quietly the more durable choice, and the RW900’s brilliance is the part with the shortest shelf life.

Which one, and what we did not do

The RW300 for most people, and especially for anyone who dislikes subscriptions: it rows without one, it costs less than half the RW900, and you can always add iFIT later. The RW900 only if the 24-inch screen and the iFIT library are genuinely the point and you have accepted the $39-a-month cost that NordicTrack states up front — in which case the big pivoting panel is the better home for the classes you are paying for.

We have not rowed either machine. Everything above is read from NordicTrack’s published specifications and its own Amazon listings, on 24 July 2026, and dated. Where NordicTrack does not publish a figure — the user weight limit on both models — we have left the gap rather than estimate it. The method is here.