Should You Subscribe to Garmin Connect+? (2025) Leave a comment

It is so annoying. You’ve simply spent a whole lot of {dollars} on a brand new Garmin Fenix 8 or Forerunner 970, solely to search out out you might need at hand over much more cash to get the complete Garmin expertise. Earlier this 12 months, Garmin launched Join+, a subscription factor, to its Join companion app. It stirred up its person base within the worst potential approach. I visited Garmin’s headquarters in Kansas not lengthy after the announcement, and it was clear; Join+ is right here to remain, and there’s a crew now devoted to bringing extra options to take a seat behind that paywall.

At present, anybody can attempt Join+ without cost for a month earlier than deciding whether or not there’s something worthy of the $7 month-to-month subscription, or $70 yearly charge. I’ve been utilizing Join+ for 5 months now, whereas testing just about each new watch Garmin has launched in that interval.

With seven core options at the moment obtainable, I’m going to inform you concerning the ones I truly discovered helpful, spotlight those I didn’t, and inform you whether or not you actually want one other subscription so as to add to your month-to-month outgoings. If none of those enchantment, make sure to take a look at our guides to the Greatest Health Trackers or the Greatest Smartwatches for extra.

AI Insights

Let’s begin with Energetic Intelligence, which is essentially the most prominently featured of all Join+ options contained in the app. These are personalised coaching insights and proposals that you just’ll spy on the prime of the house display screen tab. These are powered by AI and analyze knowledge like exercise historical past and efficiency metrics captured by your Garmin machine.

The concept right here is that the extra knowledge that may be analyzed, the extra personalised these insights ought to change into. Within the first weeks of utilizing it, Energetic Intelligence’s insights have been fairly rudimentary. My final swim improved my cardio health. Nice. I may see that just by trying on the knowledge from that logged swim.

5 months later, I’m getting a greater sense of what I believe Garmin hopes this characteristic will be. I’m now instructed that my floor contact stability throughout runs is suboptimal and I ought to take into account some power coaching and to work on my working type. Nonetheless, the app doesn’t counsel what that coaching ought to entail, or the workout routines that would assist to handle that suboptimal GCT. Perhaps that’s to return. On condition that that is the one Join+ characteristic tagged as a beta, I think about it may look totally different in a 12 months’s time.

Actual-Time Recommendation

If you happen to’re on train tools that lacks a show, or you do not need to pause a exercise to have a look at your watch, Stay Actions enables you to mirror real-time metrics out of your watch to your telephone. It’s particularly helpful for power coaching classes, to make modifying reps much less fiddly.