Earlier in the spring, Garmin launched a premium subscription plan – Garmin Connect +. To say that it was not well received by the online running community is to put it mildly.
If you poke around r/Garmin, you’ll see people freaking out. They’re afraid that this is the beginning of the end of Garmin Connect, and that eventually all of the features will be paywalled. Until now, the value proposition of a Garmin product has, in part, been built on the idea that you pay a premium for the hardware and you get the software for free.
But Garmin has promised that everything that exists on Garmin Connect today will stay free – and only new features will be put behind a paywall.
In some cases – like when you’re talking about generative AI – it makes sense to paywall things. Those services cost money, especially at scale. But some of the other features do seem a little bit like a money grab.
We’ll see how things progress. For now, I was interested in trying out the subscription. I didn’t have high hopes – which I shared a month ago – but I figured I can’t form an honest opinion without giving it a go.
So I signed up for the free trial. I used it for a month. I can now honestly say: this is a complete and utter waste of money. Keep reading for a rundown on some of the individual features.
Improvements to LiveTrack: Kind of Worth It
Let me start with a high point – the improvements to LiveTrack.
I love the idea of LiveTrack. When my wife is waiting for me to run by in a half marathon or a marathon, I want her to be able to see where I’m at.
But until now, I’ve never actually used it. For me, the big hold up was that you still had to carry your phone – and that hasn’t changed.
However, I’m getting more used to wearing my FlipBelt, so I decided to give it a go for my last marathon.
I tested things out the morning before. I went for a quick four mile run by the Reservoir, and I turned on LiveTrack.
When you’re live, someone can see the map of where you are and where you’ve been, along with your individual splits. Something interesting that I noticed is that it automatically does one mile splits – even if you’re manually lapping things on your watch. There’s also a pace graph – which you can toggle between a few metrics – that tracks throughout the entire run.
With this test, I did notice that the GPS can be a little off. When I look at the actual activity in Garmin Connect, the GPS is fixed and mapped to the path. But in LiveTrack, it cuts straight across at one point. So be aware that it can be a little funky.
Here’s the LiveTrack activity from my marathon. You can see in the pace graph where things fell apart. But that first half was definitely great!
You can use this feature without Garmin Connect+ – but there are two added benefits for subscribers.
First, by default you can only send out emails to your friends when you start an activity. To send out text message alerts – along with a link to follow along – you need to be a subscriber. Considering sending text messages isn’t free, I’m not all that mad that this feature is behind a paywall.
Second, only subscribers get a permanent URL that they can share for all of their LiveTrack activities. This really eliminates the need to text an alert to someone anyway, since you can just send them the link ahead of time.
One of the annoying things about LiveTrack is that you can’t share a link ahead of time. The individual activity link is created when you start an activity.
But this landing page – which you can customize with your own URL – is pretty nifty. This is definitely a useful feature for public-ish runners. If you want to share your races live with an audience – you can’t do it very well or easily without Garmin Connect +.
Active Intelligence: A Complete Waste
And now for the low point: Active Intelligence.
This is Garmin’s foray into AI. It’s reminiscent of Strava’s Athlete Intelligence – which definitely wasn’t well received. You’d think Garmin might have learned something from that … but clearly they didn’t.
When you open up the Garmin Connect App, there’s a section for Active Intelligence. It’s empty for a few seconds while it contacts the server to generate a mesage – and then the message appears.
Often, that message is a summary of your most recent activity. Here are two screen shots that give you a flavor of what it says.
Basically, it picks a few stats, churns them into a text summary of four to five lines, and spits it out. There’s usually some positivity and there’s no actionable advice.
For example, the left run was an easy day – 6 miles @ 8:40 pace. Active Intelligence called this a “good pace.” The right activity was a slow day on the trails. Five miles is also shorter than usual. Still, Active Intelligence said I maintained a “strong pace” and that this “focused on building endurance.”
It was basically an easy recovery day.
Frankly, the graphs and stats that Garmin shows in the app offer all of the summary you need – and if anything, this makes it harder to identify real insights that help you understand your training. Because it often mixes in unimportant stats, like cadence.
At first, I thought all it did was summarize your recent workout. But then I realized if you open the app first thing in the morning, it’ll also summarize some of your key metrics.
So it’ll highlight things like your heart rate variability status and your body battery. It’s basically a more wordy version of training readiness and/or the at a glance cards that you’ve set up.
Again, I find this to be less useful than the information that’s already available. I love Morning Report on my watch. It quickly gives me everything I need. But this gives me a mix of useful and useless information, and I need to digest a lot of words to get to it.
And here’s a great example of just how useless this feature is.
I ran the Jersey City Marathon and the race was set as my primary race in Garmin Connect. Garmin also knew my goal time (3:00:00).
If you’ve read my race report, you know the race didn’t go well. The first half was amazing, and the second half was horrible. I averaged ~6:51/mi for the first half – right on target for three hours. And the second half slowly unraveled. By mile 18, I was alternating between running and walking until I made it to a portapotty.
But Active Intelligence told me that I “maintained a moderate pace for an extended period.” Like, umm, what is this supposed to do for me?
There are so many ways that this could be better. At present, it doesn’t do anything useful.
There’s absolutely no reason to pay for this. If Garmin wants to implement AI, they should eat the cost of it for now until they can figure out how to actually make it useful.
Performance Dashboard: Eh, This Is Cool-ish
Next up is the performance dashboard.
Garmin Connect offers a pretty limited set of reports that you can access. In some cases you can see your data over the last month or the last year. But there’s not a lot of flexibility about what to graph or how to graph it.
With performance dashboard, you can put a bunch of graphs together on a dashboard and customize how the data is displayed. You can also change the time period of the dashboard, and it’ll filter all of the charts. Cool.
Here are some of the standard graphs in the pre-built running dashboard.
“Total Distance Comparison” gives you miles for the current year and it compares it to last year. I like this. It’s a good way to visually see how you’re tracking against a previous period.
The HRV status graph is a little odd. I don’t think the format makes sense, and a colored bar similar to the history of training status would make more sense. But it is nice to see this graphed over a long period of time – and summarizing it by week helps eliminate the outliers.
Here’s an example of how you can customize things.
You can select which activities to include – in case maybe you want to include running but not include trail running or treadmill running. You can switch between how to summarize things – day, week, or month. You can also overlay a second type of information, in this case I put elevation over the distance.
You can also set a specific date range for a graph – or leave it the same as the dashboard. One limitation here is that you can’t zoom out further than one year. It’d be interesting to see a longer time range – like 16 months. Especially if you want to compare both the build up to and recovery from an event, like, say, a marathon you run every year.
Here’s an example of how the existing reports are better than this dashboard. This is the HRV Status report that everyone has access to.
It makes much more sense to see the data presented in this format – instead of the chart above.
There are some cool features here, and in some ways the performance dashboard is an improvement over the standard reports. But as a data professional, I can’t help but notice all of the limitations of this dashboard.
If I’m going to pay money to access a dashboard, I expect a lot more power and flexibility. This isn’t it.
Live View of Workouts: I Guess This Is Useful?
Another feature of Garmin Connect + is that you can view a workout in the app while you’re tracking it in the app.
Once you start an activity, it’ll show up as a “Live” activity in the Garmin Connect app. If you click into it, you’ll see some details in the app.
I tried this out this morning with a yoga activity.
Highlight: it shows the animation. I always thought the yoga animations on your wrist are stupid because … how am I supposed to look at my wrist while I’m doing yoga?
But it’s small enough on the screen that this isn’t a huge help. It would be helpful if there was a voice to read out the steps – but that doesn’t happen.
What could be useful, depending on the kind of workout you’re doing, is that you can look ahead to future steps. For example, if you’re doing a complex track workout and you’re taking a break, you can look at the rest of the workout to see what’s coming.
I think this feature has some potential to be useful. But as it is, I don’t really get it. It’s been a month, and I had to force myself to look at it, and it didn’t really help me at all.
Garmin Connect + Badges: Who Cares?
Finally, who cares about badges?
I couldn’t even find clear information about how Garmin Connect + changes badges. It sounds like there are some unique badges for subscribers, but they’re not clearly labeled as such.
I’ve also seen some people complain that the subscriber badges offer more points – so it lets paying subscribers advance through the levels more quickly. I’ll be honest, I didn’t know what level I was at (apparently, 5), and I don’t care how fast I’m progressing.
I guess this could appeal to people who use Garmin as a social app. I don’t. For me, it’s strictly a training log. Strava is my “social” running app, where I connect with my running friends. I literally have zero connections on Garmin Connect.
Regardless, this feature is a complete waste to me.
So Is Garmin Connect + Worth It – Or a Waste?
I signed up for the free trial fully expecting to cancel this at the end of the month. And that’s exactly what I just did.
Of all of the features, I found the Live Track to be the most useful. You can use Live Track without a subscription, but the permanent landing page is really nifty.
I don’t use LiveTrack nearly enough to justify paying a subscription for it. But I think there’s a legitimate use case here for a small group of people who might find value in that feature.
The AI is straight garbage. It’s beyond useless. It adds zero value to the app, and it’s basically burning cash for Garmin.
The most frustrating part is that there are ways that AI could be very useful when combined with the Garmin ecosystem. I’m going to save that for a separate post, but I’m really kind of disappointed in just how lazy and unimaginative this implementation is.
The rest of this is meh. The performance dashboard is kind of nice, but nothing I’d pay money for. It’s got its own limitations, and if I was paying for a dashboard I’d want more flexibility.
If you ask me, Garmin Connect + is a total and complete waste of money. At least as it currently exists. Maybe they’ll figure this AI thing out in the future, but if this is any indication of how they’re approaching the problem – I doubt it.
Save yourself the time and skip the free trial. You won’t miss anything. Unless you’re really interested in LiveTrack.