Any of the best Garmins will give you industry-leading health metrics, great battery life, and the most comprehensive wellness picture of any smartwatch on the market, but that doesn't mean they're all right for you.
In 2025, Garmin has an enormous lineup of smartwatches to choose from. Whether you're after a mid-range outdoor champion like the Garmin Instinct 3, an Apple Watch replacement like the Venu X1, or a serious endurance tool like the Garmin Fenix 8, there's something for everyone here. Even for golfers, with the likes of the Garmin Approach S70.
So how do you choose the best Garmin? The easy answer is that you let our experts do it for you. We use them for workouts, hikes, runs and even sleep tracking to put the watches through their paces. We drain the batteries, test connectivity and make use of all the features.
We give each one a comprehensive score based on value, performance, features, and design, rating them out of five for each of these scores before providing an overall score. Only the best make our cut, and you won't find any products here we haven't personally tested and reviewed.
So whether you want a new running buddy, a premium fitness tracker, or an outdoor workhorse, here are the best Garmins on the market right now.
Matt is TechRadar's Senior Fitness and Wearables Editor, which means he's an expert on workouts, smartwatches, and all things fitness tech. Matt's spent years covering the health and fitness beat, is a regular Garmin user, and has personally tested many of the watches below.
The quick list
Want to get straight to the best Garmin watch for your needs? Use our quick round-up below to immediately find a GPS watch that suits you – and you can read more about it by jumping to our full write-ups and explanations using the links.
The best Garmin Watch for most people
The Garmin Venu X1 tops our list because it does everything so well for both lifestyle and fitness considerations. Perfect for everyone from hardcore triathletes to casual fitness enthusiasts looking for an Apple Watch replacement.
The best for new runners
If you're a beginner and don't want to splash on Garmin's top running watch, you can get many of the great features and save a bit of cash by going for the Forerunner 165, which still comes with GPS and great training metrics.
The best Premium Garmin on the market
The Garmin Fenix 8 is a phenomenal bit of premium kit. It's got a hefty price tag, but that'll net you an advanced GPS, a new heart rate sensor, 16 days of battery life, and more.
The best Garmin watch for outdoor sports
New for 2025, the Garmin Instinct 3 supplants the Instinct 2 as our top outdoor pick. It comes with a vastly better display, an updated design, cool colors, a flashlight, and new fitness tools.
The biggest, most advanced Garmin outdoor watch
If you're an elite athlete competing in outdoor sports of all disciplines, the Enduro 2 is our top pick. Its formidable workout tracking and excellent build make it a top pick for triathletes and beyond.
The best Garmin Watch for runners
The Garmin Forerunner 570 is an amazing watch for people serious about their running. With new Hill and Endurance scores, advanced metrics, and gorgeous AMOLED screen, it's perfect regardless of whether you love the tarmac or the trail.
Load the next three products
The best hybrid Garmin watch
The Garmin Instinct Crossover is an excellent watch if you love the aesthetics of Casio G-Shocks, but want a genuine smartwatch. With Garmin Instinct 2 innards and analog hands with Revodrive satellite technology, it's the perfect hybrid.
The best for style
Garmin's MARQ range is designed to echo premium rotary watches, with rotating bezels and classic-looking dive watch-inspired faces. The MARQ Athlete (Gen 2) is the running-orientated model.
The best for golf
A great all-rounder golf watch, full of features including shot detection and full-color maps, for a very good price.
The best Garmin watch overall
The Garmin Venu X1 not only looks like an Apple Watch Ultra, but it's the closest thing to an Ultra rival in Garmin's stable. It's got voice control, a beautifully bright AMOLED screen, Garmin's LED torch, and advanced running features. It's comfortable thanks to its slender case and cambered bezel, and sits nicely on the wrist.
It's the best in this generation of Venu, Garmin's smartwatch-and-sport-watch blend. You still have all the GPS and GLONASS tracking smarts Garmin is famous for, combined with running, cycling, swimming and more sports options. Yet this also tracks lifestyle well with sleep, stress and the ability to link with third-party gym equipment. It'll even let you see who's at your Ring doorbell with an image preview on the super clear AMOLED screen.
On the smartwatch front, there's offline Spotify allowing you to sync all your tracks to listen directly on Bluetooth headphones, no smartphone required. You can view your day's schedule at a glance, check your heart rate, water intake and stress level, log period symptoms, receive smartphone notifications, reply, and more.
This is all made possible by the super high-resolution AMOLED display. It does suffer in always-on display mode as the battery life shrinks down to two days, but without this feature enabled, it easily lasts a week.
This model also features a microphone and speaker, allowing you to take calls from a connected smartphone, and use voice commands to start workouts and open features.
Read our full Garmin Venu X1 review
The best cheap Garmin watch
The Garmin Forerunner 165 is Garmin's new beginner-friendly running watch, and is similar to the 265 and 965 generation of Forerunners in design, sharing the redesigned Run button and lovely AMOLED touchscreen.
Once it's on your wrist, newcomers will discover an array of excellent training tools inside that'll help you monitor your fitness and optimize your training. These include new suggested workouts based on your past activities, which help give your training some structure even if you're not following a dedicated plan, and Garmin's Body Battery functionality. After a workout, you'll also see advice on how long to rest and recover before your next effort.
Garmin's signature GPS accuracy makes it a great entry point for anyone upgrading from a Fitbit to a dedicated sports watch. It's a bit more expensive than a Fitbit Charge 6, and you have to pay extra for the version with onboard music storage, but you can control music on your phone just fine with either version.
Read our full Garmin Forerunner 165 review
The best premium Garmin Watch
The Garmin Fenix 8 was one of the most hotly-anticipated launches from the company in years, and it certainly lives up to the billing. Iterating on the Fenix 7, historically one of Garmin's best offerings, the Fenix 8 features brilliant hardware including an AMOLED display, speaker and microphone for calls, an LED torch.
There's new waterproofing and you can even use the Fenix 8 as a dive watch a-la Apple Watch Ultra 2. In fact, it's rated for diving up to 40 meters, although Garmin reckons it'll manage way deeper than that.
There's improved GPS onboard powering a new "dynamic routing" feature that automatically generates directions to take you home when you're out cycling or running, as well as route alterations if you take a wrong turn. Our stellar review is based on the smashing 47mm version, but there are three total size options 43mm, 47mm, and 51mm. There's also a Solar version with a MIP display and commensurately huge battery life.
While it doesn't deviate too much from historic Fenix designs, it still looks absolutely fantastic and ranks as one of the very best Garmin's we've ever used.
Read our full Garmin Fenix 8 review
The best outdoor Garmin watch
While we've not had the Instinct 3 long enough to give it a full review and a star rating, we've definitely seen enough to confirm it surpasses the Instinct 2 as the best Garmin for the great outdoors in 2025.
New for 2025, the Instinct 3 gets a much tougher and more rugged design, some excellent new vibrant colors, a new AMOLED display option, a flashlight, and more. It's more expensive as a result, but we'd recommend it over the Instinct 2 in 2025.
The display is a vastly improved 390x390 px AMOLED display and Garmin's SatIQ for improved GPS positioning. Battery life is down to 18 days in smartwatch mode, but crucially you'll get more (32 hours) in GPS mode. Otherwise, the Instinct 3's beloved button controls are back, and there's plenty Instinct 2 owners will love.
The headlines though are that very exciting new display, and the brilliant range of colors, including the Neotropic pictured here!
Read our full Garmin Instinct 3 review
The most advanced Garmin watch for athletes
The Garmin Enduro 2 is a big beast, and it's not for people who just regularly train, even if they might run one marathon a year. If you're going to spend this amount of money on an outdoor watch ($1,099.99 / £929.99 / AU$1,749) you're most likely a triathlete, long-distance or an ultrarunner.
For serious athletes with money to burn, the Garmin Enduro 2 is perfect. It comes laden with an impressive amount of features. It's got outstanding battery life for one thing, even in battery-sucking GPS mode while viewing full-color topographical maps on the big AMOLED screen.
It has tons of premium features: Training Readiness score we've mentioned, but one standout is NextFork which alerts you to upcoming splits in the trial, and grade-adjusted pace, which tells you how your gradient pace (i.e. hill climbing) translates to running on a flat surface, to give you some standardized fitness information. Automatic rest time calculates the time you spend at race aid stations. Plus, all the usual features from pretty much all the other Garmin watches released before it.
For it's price, it's hard to justify for casual exercisers. But as a performance tool for ultra-competitors, the Enduro 2 is perfect.
Read our full Garmin Enduro 2 review
The best Garmin watch for runners
The Garmin Forerunner 570 is a fairly iterative update with a bold new look, changing too little about its predecessor, and it loses some battery (no doubt rerouted into power for that new brighter-than-ever AMOLED screen). However, it's still an excellent fitness watch, and suitable for everyone from beginner runners to seasoned triathletes.
It's an excellent running watch by any metric, and packs a lot of features into a compact package, with an impressive range of workout modes, dedicated feedback on your training load, and a new Triathlon Coach feature. Daily suggested workouts, Race Calendar features and running plans via Garmin Connect allow you to train for events more strategically.
If you're primarily a runner and are looking to upgrade your entry-level watch to something more advanced, the 570 is well worth your consideration. Even if you're a regular marathon runner, this will see you right. It's lightweight enough for everyday wear and comes in black (unobtrusive) and various other two-tone, translucent G-Shock style colorways (garish). It's also got a speaker and microphone to take calls on-wrist.
Read our full Garmin Forerunner 570 review
The best hybrid Garmin watch
The Garmin Instinct Crossover is a Garmin smartwatch with all the intelligence of an upgraded Garmin Instinct 2, but with analog hands supported by satellite technology to ensure pinpoint-accurate timekeeping. When you're using the smart aspects, the hands rotate to get out of the way, and the watch connects to satellites when it's time to rotate the hands back to the right time.
It's a fantastic idea and a great mix between a serious outdoorsy analog watch such as G-Shock Mudmaster with satellite and smart tech. The Garmin Instinct 2 the Crossover is based on allows the watch to do things your average G-Shock never could, with recovery metrics such as Garmin's Body Battery ensuring you can get ready for your next race.
It shines on trails with navigational tech such as TracBack, compass, stride length during running, and stroke counting during swimming. Due to its analog hands and sacrifices made to its screen, it doesn't have any topographical maps, which means due to its higher price point, it's tough to recommend if you're looking for a watch to guide you through rough terrain much easier.
However, if you want something more traditional-looking and feeling, which can still offer advanced health and fitness metrics, this is the watch for you. It'll take any knocks you can throw at it and last for weeks, especially if you spring for the solar model.
Read our full Garmin Instinct Crossover review
The best Garmin watch for style
Some Garmin watches are pretty utilitarian in design, but the Garmin MARQ range is designed to look like it wouldn't feel too out of place under a shirt cuff, with an ultra-premium, stylish finish. The MARQ Athlete (gen 2) offers a rotating bezel designed to help you mark target running times, a gorgeous AMOLED screen with sapphire crystal lens, and a grade 5 titanium metal casing.
A stylish, super-premium alternative to the Fenix and Epix models, this is the athletic watch to get if you want to look the business and money is no object. Like the Garmin Instinct Crossover above, it's a good marriage of traditional dive watch and smartwatch. Except instead of a G-Shock hybrid, the Marq is more like a Patek Phillipe.
Read the full Garmin MARQ Athlete (Gen 2) review
The best Garmin Watch for golf
The Garmin Approach S70 was rated our best golf watch overall because it's really, really good. That's all there is too it.
During our tests, our reviewer loved the extensive new features, including PlaysLike Distance, which looks at contextual information to help the wearer understand both the actual distance and how conditions affect this. It's got great battery life, an AutoShot mode that makes life easier on the course, and Green View. Green View allows you to position the pin manually using the large color touchscreen, and shows you the green's contours: essential if you're planning a birdie and want a, well, a bird's eye view of the green to better determine your angle of attack.
All Garmin's usual Garmin Connect smarts are here, so it doubles as a sports watch too. This is the perfect tool for golfers getting active both on and off the course.
Read our full Garmin Approach S70 review
How to choose the best Garmin watch for you
When choosing a Garmin watch, there are three key points to consider: what sport are you interested in, what level are you at, and what is your budget?
If you're starting your fitness journey and want a watch that will help improve your habits, that's fantastic – a watch in the Venu line will suit you perfectly. They're pretty small and discrete, making them great for all-day wear, and offer a good range of general fitness tracking tools. If your budget runs to it, the Venu 2 and Venu 2 Plus are our top picks, thanks to their onboard GPS and fantastic displays.
Suppose you're a beginner or intermediate runner. In that case, the Forerunner 165 or 245 will work very nicely for you. If you also enjoy cycling, swimming or both, the Forerunner 570 and 970 are superb triathlon watches that will serve you well. Worried about scuffs and scratches? Take a look at the Instinct 2; it's built like a tank and has incredible battery life.
If you're seriously into your training and want the most profound insights into your health and fitness, the Fenix 8, Epix Gen 2 and their newer Pro variations are excellent choices. The latter is perfect if you want to explore new routes, as its high-res OLED display is brilliant for mapping. It does come at a cost though, and the Fenix 7 (although not cheap) is a more budget-friendly option as it's older.
Best Garmin watches for women vs men: Is there a difference?
Functionally, there's no difference between Garmin watches for women and men: they're generally unisex. Size, weight and style is a consideration for everyone, and where Garmin watches have multiple size options, we've outlined those options in our full reviews. Generally speaking, smaller sizes and lighter watches tend to be preferred by individuals with slimmer wrists, especially if they're running watches.
Another aspect to consider are the features available, including women's health tracking if it's something you're interested in. Most Garmin watches have the ability to track menstrual cycles using heart rate, skin temperature and other metrics it collects, but even if the watch features those options, you can choose to opt out or turn off the feature in Settings.
How we test
When testing a Garmin watch, we wear it night and day for at least two weeks so it can build up a full picture of our health and fitness and ensure battery scores live up to specifications. We slept, exercised, and recovered with all the Garmin watches on this list to determine which is best for what purpose. We weighed up the accuracy of their GPS tracking, the responsiveness of their heart rate monitors, and the quality of their training tools. We've even evaluated their battery life, display quality, and overall design.
We enable SpO2 tracking if available and track at least five workouts across those two weeks to give us an idea of how long the watch's battery will last in typical use. If the watch supports app downloads from Garmin Connect, we can also use a battery monitor app to check how quickly it drains.
To test the accuracy of the watch's GPS, we take it for several runs on pre-measured courses and compare the results to similar route-mapping software from our phones and a competitor watch, usually an Apple Watch Ultra. If it has mapping capability, we create a new route using Garmin Connect, sync it to the watch, and use it to navigate the route.
We'll test the watch in a variety of situations, from running to indoor cycling, looking at the details of metrics such as heart rate variability and sleep scores. Does the wealth of information available match up to similar watches in its price range? Is the presentation dense or helpful? Check out our how we test section for more details.
