I tried Garmin Connect Plus, but Strava Premium is still better

I’ve been a Strava user for as long as I can remember — or at least since I started taking fitness seriously again at the tail end of college. Shortly after, I upgraded to Strava Premium, hoping it would give me a better training plan than I was getting from Nike Run Club. Since then, I’ve watched Strava evolve, picking up new mapping features and adding social elements like messaging, and I’m impressed by what it’s become.

However, I also find myself using fewer and fewer of the platform’s latest features, either because I’m not traveling to as many new places or because I don’t need Strava DMs to keep in touch with my friends. So, I let my membership lapse and decided to try Garmin’s new Connect Plus service. Here’s how it’s going so far.

As a new premium service, you might not be entirely sure what Garmin’s Connect Plus platform offers. After all, Garmin has never offered a paid subscription for features like its Body Battery before, so it’s easy to worry that previously free features will suddenly get locked behind a paywall. As far as I can tell, that’s not the case. Instead, Garmin Connect Plus adds more detail to safety features like LiveTrack and new social options, like badges for completing challenges from one month to the next.

However, Garmin’s new set of performance-focused metrics encouraged me to try something new. Connect has always been about offering insights into your data, forecasting your race performances, measuring your sleep, and more, and I was curious to see how Garmin would take it further. With Connect Plus, you now get a tab of Active Intelligence, which is powered by AI, and a Performance Dashboard that offers 123 different metrics, of which you can view 18 at any one time — both of which seem more valuable to me than Strava’s new spinning thumbs up animation when you deal some kudos.

How you interpret those metrics is up to you, as Garmin doesn’t offer insights in the dashboard itself, just raw data. That said, it does work them into its Active Intelligence blurbs on a rotating basis, as I’ve had Garmin applaud the consistency of my HRV over the last few weeks of sleeping. Garmin also says that Connect Plus offers expert guidance in its training plans through coach-led videos, but I don’t know if I’ve been following mine for long enough to receive direction just yet.

The simple answer for switching from Strava Premium to Garmin Connect Plus is that I wanted to try something new. With Strava’s recent price increases and the natural stopping point of the end of my annual payment, I figured there was no harm in losing the additional features, even for a month or two. Besides, all my running shoes are already logged in my gear list, and I want the dopamine that comes with each new kudo anyway.

So, I allowed my little Strava Premium icon to disappear and quickly started my free month of Connect Plus. Yes, my first hiccup with Garmin’s new service — which costs $6.99 per month — is that you only get a one-month trial. Given how much Garmin watches cost, I’d love to see that trial get extended in the future, though I imagine many people will make up their minds after just a few weeks.

Either way, I’d have to call my experience through the first week or so incomplete. Like most Garmin features, Connect Plus and its Active Intelligence rely on a strong base of data to work with, which means being more regular about sleeping with the same watch each night and syncing it to the same phone each day. It’s not something that will be difficult for most people, but it can be a bit of a challenge when my job involves switching phones (and watches) so often.

That said, I did jump into a new training plan to mark the start of my Connect Plus journey, which has me slowly but surely preparing for the Baltimore Running Festival in mid-October. I know I’m much too far out to start marathon-centric workouts, but I was curious to see how Connect Plus would handle a longer build-up, especially with adding strength workouts to the mix. So far, this has been one of the brighter spots of my experience, as my Fenix 8 AMOLED is pretty good about delaying workouts from one day to the next when I don’t feel like sprinting in the pouring rain or choking humidity.

Also, because I haven’t been traveling much — or at least not to too many new cities — I figured I wouldn’t need Strava’s mapping or route-building features for a little while. I don’t love that Garmin’s replacement is just downloading GPX files to your watch, but it’s slightly better than nothing.

As much as I love my Garmin GPS watches and will always recommend them above alternatives from Coros, Suunto, and Polar, I’m not sure that Connect Plus has yet found its place in my heart. Yes, I like that it puts a ton of data into my hands through the Performance Dashboard, but I think I’ve realized that Strava makes many of those metrics more digestible. It’s a little quicker to compare one workout to the next and offer insights into segments that you ran faster than before or ways that you managed your heart rate just a little better.

Also, I had decently high hopes for Garmin’s Active Intelligence, but I think I like Strava’s AI-powered workout recaps a bit better. They’re a little simpler, pulling information about your heart rate and overall effort rather than giving you a quick tip about one of your many health metrics. Does either one feel essential at this point? No, but I find that Strava is more willing to praise my efforts.

One last point in favor of Strava Premium is that it simply has a much larger base of users to work with. Almost all of my friends use Strava, which means they contribute to the community heatmaps, which then make planning runs safer for everyone. If I want to create a route in Garmin, I often have to find a preexisting one and import it rather than simply opening the map in Strava and setting my workout parameters. I’m sure if I wanted to, I could learn how to create and download the maps I want, but it’s so hard to compete with Strava’s fleshed-out network.

So, at least for now, I’m going to head back to the app I’ve already supported for so many years. I’m excited to see how Garmin Connect Plus grows and develops over the next few updates, but Strava’s current set of features is just too much better. If you’re going to do the same, make sure you sign up for the annual Strava Premium subscription rather than the monthly one — $79.99 for 12 months is much, much better than $11.99 per month, no question.