The number of people affected by cardiovascular diseases has been rising rapidly. In many of these cases, the condition is diagnosed late and causes damage and even death of the patient. One way to mitigate this and to encourage more people to record their ECG is to have cost-effective heart monitoring systems for the measurement and analysis of Electrocardiograph(ECG) signals. Personal use heart monitoring systems have been available and rely on various measurements, including electro-mechanical and smartphone-based sensor systems. Many of these are costly, suffer from inaccuracies, and are not easy to use individually or with a combination of other measurements. In addition, these devices are sold by manufacturers with proprietary data capture and storage mechanisms on their cloud-based servers, creating a non-ideal situation for patients in terms of data privacy and the non-availability of raw data for analysis. This paper analyzes various hardware design choices for an ECG monitoring system, which can be made using readily available low-cost hardware. Our prototypes use AD-8232 as a signal amplifier and filter, with 3-pin electrodes for capturing the ECG signals. We incorporate various microcontrollers, including Raspberry Pi Pico W, Arduino Uno R3, and ESP 8266. We use both WLAN and Bluetooth to communicate the captured data. The signals are received on an Android application to process, store, analyze, display, and disseminate the data. We analyze our prototypes for performance metrics and compare them. Our Android application can calculate basic ECG parameters like R-R peak intervals and transmit the data to another device if desired. We captured ECG data from healthy volunteers when the participants were sitting, walking, running, and climbing. We found that our prototype can be used to measure continuous ECG signals successfully. Our experimental results show that Raspberry Pi Pico W with WLAN is the best for capturing and analyzing continuous ECG data.