Garmin vs. Fitbit: Compare devices, features and discover which is best for you (2024)

Garmin and Fitbit are two premier fitness wearable brands, meaning deciding between them can be tricky. But while they may seem similar on the surface, there are some major differences.

This decision ultimately comes down to the type of data you want. Once you work that out, picking between the two becomes much more straightforward.

Garmin is a natural choice for those who want to track sports, with its features generally geared around delivering tip-top accuracy in the outdoors and detailed training feedback. Compared to its rival, Garmin also has a broader range of watches and price points, which can be handy for those seeking a device to grow into.

Fitbit, meanwhile, has moved beyond basic step tracking in the last few years, yet it’s still the better choice for those more interested in their overall health and well-being than hardcore fitness. It has an intuitive app, lots of motivational features, and is generally available at more entry-level prices, meaning it’s the perfect brand if you’re at the start of your fitness journey.

That’s the skinny. But there’s a lot more to cover, so, below, we’ve covered the key areas—hardware, features, apps, and fitness tracking—to help you understand how the two compare.

Discover the Garmin or Fitbit range from our reviews:

• Best Garmin watches
• Best Fitbit smartwatches and trackers

An overview of Fitbit smartwatches and fitness trackers

Fitbit has six main wearables – all with clear remits:

Versa and Sense smartwatches

The Versa 4 smartwatch and the Fitbit Sense 2 are the brand’s latest smartwatches, released in 2022. They’re also the last Fitbit smartwatches, with Google quietly confirming in 2024 that there won’t be any new models produced.

However, they are still available (for now) and are solid wearables to consider. Think of them as Fitbit trackers in a watch form factor rather than top smartwatches in their own right, since they don’t come close to offering the features of an Apple Watch or Google Pixel Watch.

The Versa 4 and Sense 2 look identical, but the latter offers serious health sensors such as ECG, skin temperature, and a specific EDA sensor that tracks stress. The Versa 4 still has SpO2, GPS, and heart rate monitoring, but is simpler and cheaper.

It should also be noted that all Fitbit devices will now scan for heart rate rhythm irregularities using the optical heart rate monitor, which means there’s less emphasis on ECG.

Google Pixel Watch 3 – the unofficial Fitbit

Google has incorporated Fitbit’s tracking into the new Pixel Watch 3 (and the previous generations).

This is a ‘proper’ smartwatch, with an AMOLED display and access to the Google Play Store’s third-party apps and the brand’s services, such as Wallet and Maps. It packs in all the sensors and analysis of the Sense 2 and is the true Fitbit smartwatch option.

The downside? It only has a day of battery life if you choose the 41mm version, though the bigger 45mm model offered at least double that in our testing (even with the always-on display enabled.

Charge, Luxe & Inspire trackers

These are the classic, wristband-style fitness tracker devices Fitbit is best known for.

The Fitbit Inspire 3 is its entry-level tracker. It’s brimming with features, including heart rate, SpO2, temperature sensor, and a color screen. It offers plenty of bang, for a sub-$100/£100 buck.

The most advanced is the Charge 6, the flagship fitness tracker. It brings all the features from the Sense 2 (GPS, ECG, stress tracking, skin temperature), puts it in a wristband form factor, and adds integrated Google services (Pay/Maps) over its predecessor.

Then there’s the agingFitbit Luxe, a fitness tracker that’s a bit of a throwback to the Fitbit Alta with its slim, fashion-focused design and is the only Fitbit fitness tracker to include a color touchscreen display. It also features core fitness tracking features, a heart rate monitor, and a SpO2 sensor.

An overview of Garmin’s watches

Garmin has nearly 30 different sports watches, and the differences can be quite obscure. As you ascend in price, you get more sensors and more complex data and analysis. Its watches cover options designed for runners, swimmers, triathletes, and even outdoor adventurers.

Garmin Forerunner: These running and triathlon-focused watches range are available between around $150-$600 / £150-£600. As the prices rise you get more features, insights into your sports, and longer battery life.

The entry-level Forerunner 55 is still a solid entry-level running watch, while the Forerunner 165 (above) offers a step-up for those who want a better display and a few more features. The Forerunner 265 (below) and Forerunner 965 are AMOLED screen-packing watches aimed at more advanced runners and triathletes interested in granular sports science and recovery data.

Garmin Fenix: The Fenix family is Garmin’s all-action sports and outdoor watches. They have all the features and metrics imaginable but cost top dollar. The Fenix 8 is the latest generation, available in AMOLED or Solar editions, in multiple case sizes, and with various upgrades on offer materials and watch bands.

The price, as we say, is whopping. So, if you want a cheaper alternative, the last-gen Fenix 7 Pro and Epix Pro (Gen 2) still boast the brand’s latest HR sensor and solar/flashlight features across every model.

Garmin Venu 3:The company’s premium smartwatch. The Garmin Venu 3 (above) is a fantastic addition, with a sleek design, awesome screen, and great tracking accuracy and wellness insights.

Garmin Vivoactive 5: A pared-back Venu with tonnes of trackable sports and smartwatch features, and good battery life but tracking lacks the detail of pricier models. The design, screen, and heart rate tech aren’t as good as Venu 3, but the Vivoactive 5 features are mostly the same.

Garmin Vivofit/Vivomove:Vivofit is the company’s fitness band, while Vivomove is a hybrid smartwatch with analog hands but fitness tracking in the background. Also, Garmin Lily 2 (and Lily 2 Active) is the company’s 34mm fitness watch aimed at women.

Garmin Vivosmart 5: The company’s latest fitness tracker. The Vivosmart 5 adds a slightly larger screen and boasts all of the main Garmin health and wellness metrics, with sleep, stress, blood oxygen, and energy levels monitoring. There’s no GPS built-in, however.

Then there’s a myriad of others: Approach golf watches, Instinct outdoors watches, and many others.

Fitness and wellness tracking

Garmin’s fitness tracking is excellent, with steps, sleep, and activity minutes all logged by its devices. But in the last year, its wellness tracking has soared too.

It has brought Body Battery energy tracking across its range, with newer devices (Venu 3/Vivoactive 5/Forerunner 965/265/165) all getting a vastly improved version of Body Battery. It will also keep tabs on your heart rate 24/7 – just like Fitbit.

And HRV is also a new focus, with the slightly opaque HRV Status rolling out across its range. Training Readiness is a top feature, which tells you how well-prepped your body is to train, but it’s only available on Fenix/Epix/965.

Of course, fitness tracking is Fitbit’s bread and butter – and it’s pulled out in front.

Updates to the Health Metrics dashboard, now open to non-premium users, make the Fitbit ecosystem way more interesting regardless of your fitness. The dashboard shows your resting heart rate, body temperature, SpO2, and HRV, and how it compares to your baseline during the previous night’s sleep. If you have a Pixel Watch, you can also enjoy features like Cardio Load.

It’s a great touchpoint for wellness and a true indicator if you’re sick, overtired, or ready to perform. Garmin doesn’t have anything nearly as wellness-focused, though it does have an equivalent – Training Readiness – on some pricier models.

Fitbit is still our preferred ecosystem to track your general activity levels, but the gap is narrower than ever.

Winner: Fitbit

Heart health

In terms of general wellness, we think Fitbit has the edge here thanks to the simplicity of the data and the way resting heart rate is presented – although you won’t miss out on any data if you choose Garmin.

The Fitbit Sense 2 and Charge 6 now have an ECG sensor that offers medical-grade reading. It also packs a temperature sensor and offers additional insights to make it a potentially valuable health monitoring device.

And Fitbit has added a new continuous Afib detection feature, that will scan your heart rate for signs of atrial fibrillation, and alert you if you need to get checked out without the new to-spot check. That’s going to most devices across its range, even the entry-level Inspire 3.

Certain premium Garmin watches offer ECG if you live in the right region, but it’s not a feature that’s as well integrated as Fitbit.

However, Garmin has the upper hand (by some distance) when tracking heart rate during exercise, as we’ll detail more below. More emphasis is placed on accuracy, heart rate zones, and VO2 max – while more advanced data spins this into training effect, load, stress, and recovery data.

Winner: Fitbit (for general wellness features)

Sleep tracking

Fitbit certainly has the edge when it comes to nightly tracking. Fitbit’s sleep tracking accuracy is one of the most reliable and is much more than just a record of how well/badly you slept.

Users can also see oxygen variation (which could reveal sleep apnea symptoms), and the excellent Health Metrics dashboard is populated by nighttime biometrics.

Garmin used to lag badly in sleep tracking, but it has caught up somewhat. It will show light, deep, and REM sleep, and factors in respiration rate and skin temperature (depending on the device). Most watches will let you track blood oxygen at night, too, and Garmin has also added nap tracking in recent models.

Our testing has found Garmin’s tracking slightly generous in calculating sleep duration and less sensitive to wakeups. We’d say Fitbit still has the edge when it comes to sleep.

Winner: Fitbit

Stress and recovery

What’s also interesting to note is the two companies’ approach to stress tracking.

Fitbit uses Relax, which takes advantage of the onboard heart rate monitor, plus HRV monitoring to detect changes in heart rate and offer personalized breathing options.

The Stress Management Score is also offered across its devices, offering a single score generated from resting heart rate, sleep, and activity logged.

Fitbit’s Sense 2, Charge 6, and the Google Pixel Watch 2/3 up the ante with an EDA sensor and scan app that can detect electrodermal activity, which may indicate your body’s response to stress. It will also flag any instances of high stress that you can tag – and long-term use may reveal trends about stressful triggers. However, we do question how useful and user-friendly this is.

Garmin’s stress tracking is available on every current smartwatch and tracker. It’s less intrusive is a simple stress score in any given moment and shows physiological stress across the day. However, the data isn’t meaningfully presented and becomes another score out of 100. We found the data rather meaningless.

Fitbit has jumped ahead again with the Daily Readiness Score (Premium only), which melds workouts, daily activity, sleep, and heart rate data to tell you how rested you are and ready for another workout. And it will even take it further and suggest workouts suited to your physiological state.

Garmin has also aped this with Training Readiness – which does much the same thing. This score is only presented on its top-tier watches, such as Fenix/Forerunner. Some watches also have HRV Status, which looks to see if the biometric is affected by overtraining. It requires quite a bit of user knowledge to interpret, though.

Winner: Fitbit

Female health tracking

Garmin and Fitbit offer female health tracking features, allowing users to log cramps and headaches.Fitbit uses that data to analyze where you are in your menstrual cycle and will be able to predict when the next one will come around.

Garmin lets users track their cycle, log symptoms, receive cycle predictions and fertile windows, and get educational insights from their Garmin Connect app. It will also track daily physical and emotional symptoms to pay closer attention to fluctuations in sleep, mood, appetite, and athletic performance.

Garmin has also launched a pregnancy mode, which adds context to the physiological changes your wearable will record.

Winner: Garmin

Sports tracking compared

As you may have already gathered, those with ambitions to track a wider range of activities and receive deeper insights should knock on Garmin’s door. But how big is the gap between the two groups when tracking various sports?

GPS tracked workouts

Garmin has always been the king of GPS, but the feature is no longer exclusive to its devices.

Fitbit’s Versa 4, Sense 2, and Charge 6 fitness bands all have GPS – and Fitbit has been busy adding the feature over the past few years. However, we have found accuracy issues with the Fitbit Charge 5 and Charge 6.

The post-workout feedback aid is more basic and the Fitbit app isn’t the best place to absorb your performance. It will connect to Strava, though, so you can view activities there.

Almost every Garmin device has GPS – except lifestyle devices such as the Vivomove 3, Vivosmart 5, and Garmin Lily 2.

In addition, you’ll find GPS-based sports profiles such as hiking, trail running, open water swimming, ultrarunning, and triathlon on some of its devices.

And if you push into the upper echelons of Garmin’s range, you can adjust the accuracy and frequency of GPS activities to get up to 70 hours of tracking. Garmin Connect is geared toward evaluating your workouts – this is its strongest feature.

Winner: Garmin

Swimming

Fitbit Charge 6, Inspire 3, Luxe, and Versa are all set for the pool – and devices can be calibrated to specific pool lengths. However, data is more basic and there are no open water options.

Garmin’s entire range is water resistant and even basic running watches have a pool swimming mode. If you’re into pool sessions, Garmin tends to be more reliable accuracy-wise for longer sessions, more metrics, and swimming-focused features.

Winner: Garmin

Heart rate in workouts

Heart rate is a staple of both sets of devices, but there’s no arguing with Garmin in sports tracking.

Both Fitbit and Garmin track your heart rate through sessions and offer information on the zone you’re in and improvements over resting heart rate – an indicator of improving fitness. Score draw here.

Fitbit and Garmin devices will also track VO2 max, called Cardio Fitness Score in Fitbit devices – although our testing found it to be a little high. Advantage Garmin. However, you will get more data with the Garmin mid-range Forerunners (or Fenix).

That VO2 max score will feed into things like Training Effect and race predictors, a step above for those training for half and full marathons.

All Garmin watches let you hook up a chest strap, which is not an option on Fitbit trackers. That lends to more accurate data and improved latency, especially during HIIT sessions.

Top-end Garmin’s can also adapt your heart rate zones by using your Lactate Threshold scores determined from fitness tests with a chest strap – a level of detail beyond most users’ needs, and also Fitbit’s skill set.

Winner: Garmin

Fitbit appfor iOS and Android

Fitbit still offers one of the more rounded and easy-to-use fitness platforms.

This is particularly the case for beginners, who can dive into trends, dedicated workouts, sleep tracking, and social aspects, such as linking with friends and challenges.

The app is much more pleasing, easy to digest your stats, and given a redesign in 2023.

Some features are still behind the Fitbit Premium paywall, such as the wealth of fitness workouts and guided breathing content. That’s something that Garmin can’t match.

However, Health Metrics – the feature that shows deeper health stats such as heart rate variability, blood oxygen, temperature, resting heart rate, and breathing rate in one place – is now available to all Fitbit users. This data can show if you’re getting sick or under the weather.

Many third-party apps will shake hands with Fitbit, allowing you to pass data for workouts, calories, and other information. Strava is a good example of this, letting you feed your runs into your daily Fitbit stats, while any Fitbit activities will also show in the Strava app.

However, under Google’s ownership, the company has been stripping Fitbit smartwatches of their smartest features, including music playback and app integrations. It seems Google sees that as a threat to its Pixel Watch, which features Fitbit tracking built in.

Garmin Connect app

Garmin Connect is the home for your data. It’s rich with graphs and stats, but not quite as easy to digest. It’s certainly one for athletes and purists. That said, Garmin has given Connect a lick of paint (see above).

Garmin has a Coach feature, which will offer workout suggestions for various goals – and you can follow these live on almost all of its sports watches. The workouts will adapt to your training load and fitness, or be turned off if you don’t want them.

Then there’s the Connect IQ, the store for you to pick up (basic) apps, new watch faces, and new data fields for sports tracking. As with Fitbit, we’ve dived deep into how to run better with Garmin Connect and a Garmin Connect IQ app store guide.

The companion app, compatible with all Garmin devices and available on desktop, offers a place to plan, track, and review your workouts. It’s not a great place to visualize wellness data, but Garmin Connect is far better for workout analysis, as you might expect.

Verdict: Which is best?

Why choose Fitbit?

Fitbit’s Versa 4 and Sense 2 are weak compared to Garmin’s hardware. That means it’s the Inspire 3, Charge 6, or Pixel Watch 3 that should be in your consideration.

For classic-style activity bands, Fitbit rules the roost. The Pixel Watch 3 is a proper full-fat smartwatch with apps and payments – but a day of battery life is all you get. If you want more, you’ll have to look at Garmin.

With Fitbit, you’re receiving a more 24/7, lifestyle option that can weave between the different aspects of your daily life.Chances are, if you’re looking to dip into this area, you’re more focused on health and wellness than personal bests.

The Health Metrics Dashboard is a great daily wellness companion, andthe company’s excellent sleep tracking (and sleep apnea and atrial fibrillation detection) makes for a solid experience.

While Fitbit is diminishing as a hardware brand under Google’s ownership, but still offers excellent health and wellness features. But Garmin has hugely closed the gap.

Why choose Garmin?

If you’re looking for a smartwatch for fitness and workout tracking, Garmin now seems the best choice.

When it comes to working out, Garmin is still lightyears ahead. Yet, improved sleep tracking and features such as Body Battery means that fitness tracking is closer to Fitbit’s offering than ever before.

But there’s so much choice, and if you like to get sweaty, we guarantee you’ll dig the post-workout analysis here much more than on a Fitbit.

Garmin has more charts and numbers, but the app is less user-friendly. What you do get is more analysis and credit for clocking up workouts.