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It’s so annoying. You’ve just spent hundreds of dollars on a new Garmin Fenix 8 or Forerunner 970, only to find out you might have to hand over even more money to get the full Garmin experience. Earlier this year, Garmin introduced Connect+, a subscription element to its Connect companion app earlier. It stirred up its user base in the worst possible way. I visited Garmin’s headquarters in Kansas not long after the announcement and it was clear; Connect+ is here to stay, and there’s a team now dedicated to bringing more features to sit behind that paywall.
Currently, anyone can try Connect+ for free for a month before deciding whether there’s anything worthy of the $7 monthly subscription, or $70 yearly fee. I’ve been using Connect+ for five months now, while testing pretty much every new watch Garmin has launched in that period.
With seven core features currently available, I’m going to tell you about the ones I actually found useful, highlight the ones I didn’t, and tell you whether you really need another subscription to add to your monthly outgoings. If none of these appeal, be sure to check out our guides to the Best Fitness Trackers or the Best Smartwatches for more.
AI Insights
Photograph: Michael Sawh
Let’s start with Active Intelligence, which is the most prominently featured of all Connect+ features inside the app. These are personalized training insights and recommendations that you’ll spy at the top of the home screen tab. These are powered by AI, and analyze data like workout history and performance metrics captured by your Garmin device.
The idea here is that the more data that can be analyzed, the more personalized those insights should become. In the first weeks of using it, Active Intelligence’s insights were pretty rudimentary. My last swim improved my aerobic fitness. Great. I could see that simply by looking at the data from that logged swim.
Five months later, I’m getting a better sense of what I think Garmin hopes this feature can be. I’m now told that my ground contact balance during runs is suboptimal and I should consider some strength training and to work on my running form. However, the app doesn’t suggest what that training should entail, or the exercises that could help to address that suboptimal GCT. Maybe that’s to come. Given this is the one Connect+ feature tagged as a beta, I imagine it could look different in a year’s time.
Real-Time Advice
Photograph: Michael Sawh
If you’re on exercise equipment that’s lacking a display, or you don’t want to pause a workout to look at your watch, Live Activities lets you mirror real-time metrics from your watch to your phone. It’s especially useful for strength training sessions, to make editing reps less fiddly.
What’s good about it is that it starts working as soon as you hit the start tracking button on your watch as long as you’re using one of the ten supported indoor training modes. That includes jumping on an indoor bike, rower or elliptical. While the Active Intelligence insights are more visible, this was the feature that I used the most.
Garmin Coach is the core part of Garmin’s personalized, adaptive training plans, and it currently remains free for basic Connect users. With a Connect+ membership, it will now look at more of your performance data to make more informed decisions about your training schedule. There’s also access to additional videos to better explain the benefits of sessions and to get to grips with some of the technical jargon.
If you like the idea of knowing what jet lag or not banking enough recovery time will do to your marathon training, you will appreciate Garmin Coach’s additional features.
Safety and Outdoor Features
Photograph: Michael Sawh
Garmin’s safety features in general are great, albeit massively reliant still on needing your phone nearby. An upgraded LiveTrack Mode lets you send your progress updates through text messages and will definitely appeal to solo adventurers.
You can also create a page of previous LiveTracked outings, for those keeping a close eye on your multi-day events to help see how you handled similar challenges previously. Now that Garmin is beginning to roll out LTE support to its watches, this is a feature that should hopefully greatly benefit from it.
The rest of the features are a bit of a mixed bag. The Performance Dashboard is designed to show off training data in graphs across a single page. To do that, you’re pushed out of the mobile app and onto the website. Seeing a graph of heart rate data or activity totals is not quite compelling enough to exit the mobile app.
Garmin Trails lets you quickly send trail routes to compatible Garmin watches. This would be useful, except it’s only supported in the United States, Austria, Germany, Liechtenstein (?), and Switzerland. I don’t live in a country that supports it.
I know that for some the idea of unlocking virtual badges is a great motivator to stay active. So Connect+ will let you chase more of them, for doing things like hitting huge elevation or walking mileage in a month. The last social feature gives you the ability to add a frame to your profile picture in the Connect app. I don’t have a huge amount to say about this except that I don’t particularly want to pay for this feature, either.
Should You Pay for Garmin Connect+?
After five months of using Connect+, would I pay for it? Right now, my answer is no. Active Intelligence has the potential to be interesting, but right now, I only use Live Activities. Even then, I’m not sure I’d miss it if I cancelled my subscription. I liked seeing my real-time stats on a bigger screen for some workouts, but this is a feature that many other fitness trackers offer for free.
It’s also worth noting that Garmin already offers many other training features and subscriptions on top of Connect+. For example, for a richer mapping and navigation experience, you can subscribe to Outdoor Maps+. For personalized coaching, and you may already be a dedicated, long-time user of other fitness apps, like Nike Run Club or Peloton.
Most will absolutely be able to live without Connect+ in its current state. The only problem arises if or when Garmin’s staple features will be paywalled behind the subscription. Either way, it’s a tough sell to someone that’s already spent a lot of money on hardware that only seems to be getting more expensive with every new launch.
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