Keep All Your Data in Arm’s Reach With the Best Garmin Running Watches

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While there are plenty of companies making great GPS running watches—including Apple, Polar, and Coros—it’s hard to ignore Garmin’s industry-leading presence. The brand has been making wrist-mounted run trackers since 2003 when it launched the Forerunner 101, a giant pill-shaped watch that did little more than track your distance, time, and pace. In the two decades since, the brand has built out an entire lineup of models for every kind of runner.

The Best Garmin Running Watches

• Best Overall: Garmin Forerunner 265

• Best Value: Garmin Forerunner 55

• Best Splurge: Garmin Fenix 7X Pro Sapphire Solar

• Best for Road Navigation: Garmin Forerunner 965 Solar

• Most Stylish: Garmin Venu 2

What to Consider

Do I Need a GPS Running Watch?

While you can get through your runs with nothing but a good pair of sneakers, GPS running watches can help you track your training progress, understand body metrics, and stay in contact with loved ones if you’re going off-grid. Modern GPS watches, even the most affordable models, do far more than the old Forerunner 101. In most cases, you’ll get route tracking and a heart rate monitor, but nicer watches also come with a slew of techie bells and whistles.

Some models display your phone’s notifications so you don’t have to reach into your pockets to check a text, for example. As the price of a watch goes up, you tend to get more features and data, some of it incredibly advanced—think blood oxygen sensors, music streaming, and GPS tracking so accurate that it can tell which side of the street you’re on.

The Best Garmin Watch Features for Runners

Watches at the top end of the spectrum, like the Fenix Series, are packed with altimeters, barometers, and maps to help you navigate trails and off-the-grid destinations. If, however, you’re more interested in health metrics and you know your routes by heart, you may want to save some cash and pick a model that gives you more health-specific metrics and personalized workouts.

Every Garmin on our list will track your heart rate, but if you’re looking for a deeper understanding of your fitness, look out for watches with stats like sleep score, recovery score, and estimated VO2 max.

How We Selected

Our staff of experienced test editors has used each of these watches for several months, evaluating the devices’ features, accuracy, battery life, connectivity, and usability. The award-winning watches we recommend satisfied our data-tracking needs and delighted us with intuitive user experiences, as well as apps and features that added dimension to our data instead of cluttering it up.

These Garmin running watches represent the best of the best—read on to see where and how we found each one shines the brightest. Looking for another running watch brand? Check out our roundup of the best GPS running watches.

An immediate follow-up to Garmin’s Forerunner 255, the Garmin Forerunner 265 offers a few key upgrades atop the reliable bones of its predecessor. This watch exhibits noticeable improvements for the sake of readability, usability, and practicality—touch controls, training readiness metrics, and universal music streaming capabilities, to name a few.

The 265’s most immediately significant upgrade, however, is its screen. Departing from the 255’s dimmer, more battery-efficient screen, the new model features a bright AMOLED display that will assuredly end your days of squinting to look at your stats. This does take a chunk out of this watch’s battery life compared to earlier models, but it’s nothing too drastic. Plus, it ultimately promises a much more approachable user experience.

While this watch might seem like a simple device, Test Director Jeff Dengate sees anything but. “When I first started running more than 30 years ago, I’d log every run in a paper journal, measuring distance with a car and keeping track of duration by looking at my parents’ microwave clock before and after each run. I graduated to a fancy Timex Ironman that could remember 50 splits. The Forerunner 55 is lightyears ahead of that, even though it’s touted as a basic or beginner watch.”

The 55 is slightly smaller than the other Forerunner models, but it still packs some handy features: A respectable battery life that will get you through a week of runs between charges, a wrist-based heart rate monitor, and smartwatch functionality.

To save money, you’re giving up advanced sensors like the pulse oximeter and the barometer, plus advanced training analytics like a virtual partner, live segments, and running dynamics—stride length, for example. Then again, we couldn’t tell you the last time we used any of those features on the Fenix, so maybe this is as much watch as any of us truly need.

The Fenix has always been a rugged, indestructible timepiece for the backcountry that we’ve used for trail running and everyday running as well. The biggest reason is because of the watch’s seemingly never-ending battery—it’ll last 89 hours with just GPS active and 16 hours if you’re streaming music.

It also has one of the biggest screens you’ll find on a GPS running watch, one that’s capable of showing you up to seven different metrics on a single display. The biggest change for this version, however, is the introduction of dual-frequency reception, which Garmin calls “multi-band.” In our testing, we’ve found the resulting maps after our runs to be completely snapped to the actual course we ran—no more errant zig-zagging as the watch loses signal.

A bonus feature on the 7X model, which seems insignificant until you actually use it, is a flashlight. Whether your headlamp battery expires before you do, or you’re just navigating your dark house on your way to bed, you’ll find it helpful.

The Garmin Forerunner 965’s predecessor, the 955, was updated to be more accurate than ever, thanks to multi-band reception. This allowed the watch to receive two signals from a satellite and filter out the noisier, less accurate data. It led to better pace estimates on your run and cleaner maps when you upload to your favorite digital training platform. The 965 hangs onto this nifty feature, and with an updated and upscaled AMOLED display, you can get a lot more out of it.

This watch’s color maps, also available on the Forerunner 955 and Fenix models, are another handy feature, now amplified to be clearer and more detailed than ever. Displayed on the watch, they help you find your way around new cities without getting lost. You can even generate round-trip courses on the fly, no computer required.

Most cheap sports watches look like cheap sports watches. Or at least, they used to. But now we’re seeing more stylish and versatile options—no doubt spurred by the crossover success of the Apple Watch—including affordable models like the Venu series.

As a running watch, the Venu 2 ticks a lot of boxes. You get accurate GPS tracking, along with most of the same basic run-tracking features you find in the Forerunner 55—cadence, optical HR, customizable data pages, VO2 max estimates, and the ability to mark laps automatically or manually. But it’s a step above the 55 and even comes with a Pulse Ox sensor, which measures your blood oxygen levels.

Simply put, buy this watch only if you’re into multi-day adventures where you won’t have any opportunity to recharge your watch along the way. The Garmin Enduro 2 is effectively a Fenix with some functionality stripped away to extend battery life. You can get some serious runtime out of this watch: It gets up to 150 hours of battery in GPS mode, thanks in no small part to the watch face’s built-in solar panels.

Runner’s World video producer Pat Heine wore the original Enduro on his FKT of Pennsylvania’s Mid State Trail, charging it just once (for three hours) during the 327-mile run. That’s mighty impressive, especially since the watch was recording Pat’s GPS position every second—extended settings reduce the frequency of those samplings to save battery life.

To make that run time so impressive, Garmin did away with perks like mapping and music, which may be a deal breaker for some of us.

If having the latest version of a watch isn’t a necessity, we wager you’ll enjoy the time-tested functionality of the 255. It’s still one of the best-performing GPS running watches we’ve tested, and it’s a phenomenal value for anyone who doesn’t want to make the $100 jump to the 265.

It’s almost the same watch—the only major sacrifice you’re making is in the display, which is a dimmer MIP screen instead of the 265’s AMOLED screen. The upside? Since its screen doesn’t use as much energy, the 255 actually has a longer battery life than its younger sibling. That’s always a plus to us.

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