These two ecosystems offer completely different experiences—here's what we recommend for those choosing between them
Choosing between Whoop and Garmin is one of the toughest decisions in wearables right now for a simple reason: it’s really a choice between two completely different philosophies.
There’s also a vast range of factors to consider if you’re to achieve the best fit for your goals.
For those just starting, we think of Garmin here at Wareable as the ultimate activity companion. It puts data on your wrist in real-time, guiding you through workouts with GPS maps, pace alerts, and performance metrics. Whatever your activity, Garmin generally wants to help you track it with advanced insights and features.
Instead of being a real-time player, Whoop is the ultimate passive coach. It has no screen and won’t distract you during a workout. It lives in the background and analyzes your recovery, sleep, and physiological stress to tell you when to work and how hard.
Ultimately, this means that bagging both is a legitimate option for data nerds who want the best of both worlds (and can afford it). However, we understand that most people will be deciding between a Forerunner, Venu, or Fenix and a Whoop 5.0 or Whoop MG.
This guide breaks down the nuances of key areas: devices, costs, activity-tracking features and accuracy, battery life, recovery insights, and more.
Quick verdict: What we recommend
We obviously recommend reading the entire comparison—or jumping to the section you need to catch up on—to get the full breakdown of our specific recommendation. However, if you’re looking for a quick verdict overview, here’s what we recommend:
Who should choose Garmin instead of Whoop
If you’re performance-focused and require real-time feedback. For users who want to see their pace, distance, and heart rate in real-time on their wrist—and don’t want to charge very often—Garmin is the far superior choice for training, race day, and everything in between.
Garmin’s depth of training analysis is unmatched, and the brand offers enough lifestyle, health, and smartwatch features to be rounded enough for most people. It’s also not as subscription- or membership-oriented as other premium wearables ecosystems, like Whoop.
Who should choose Whoop instead of Garmin
If you’re more lifestyle-focused and want to understand how your sleep, stress, and habits impact your body 24/7, there aren’t many better options on the market than Whoop.
It’s a particularly good fit for those who don’t want the distraction of a screen or notifications, and it’s also much more versatile in placement terms than Garmin’s stable of devices.
If you’re willing to pay a monthly fee for a platform that tells you exactly how ready you are to perform, rather than granular insights on your running form, it can be a genuinely life-changing device. And with the 2025 launch of 5.0 and MG hardware, it’s now a far superior health and longevity monitor than Garmin.
Price, subscriptions, and value: Which model we prefer
This is the most significant structural difference between the two ecosystems—and it varies considerably depending on the device or subscription package you choose.
For the uninitiated, Whoop is entirely a subscription-based affair. You don’t ‘buy’ the device; you pay for the service. As part of the rollout if its 5.0 and MG hardware in May 2025, Whoop also introduced three new membership tiers:
- Whoop One ($199/year): Includes the standard Whoop 5.0 device and core access to Sleep, Strain, and Recovery insights.
- Whoop Peak ($239/year): Adds advanced health features like the new Healthspan and Whoop Age metrics.
- Whoop Life ($359/year): Includes the premium Whoop MG (Medical Grade) hardware, unlocking exclusive features like on-demand ECG and blood pressure insights.
We’ve broken these down in more detail in our Whoop 5.0 vs. MG guide, along with the functional hardware differences. Yet these basic details are a good place to start—consider which you can realistically see yourself comfortable paying for, and for how long.
A (slightly) friendlier model
Alternatively, going with a Garmin is a one-time purchase—well, mostly. You pay upfront for the hardware, and the core ecosystem is free forever.
However, the cost of entry varies wildly. A Forerunner 165 starts at $250-$300, while a Fenix 8 can cost over $1,000. And while Garmin Connect is free, the brand has always charged extra for its specific services in golf, boating, aviation, and SOS comms.
Plus, if you want the most accurate running metrics (like the new Running Economy), you’ll need to buy an HRM 600 chest strap ($150+). Or if you pick up a device with satellite messaging (like the Fenix 8 Pro or an inReach Messenger), you’ll need a monthly subscription.
We still prefer this to Whoop’s model, since Garmin’s devices are designed to last and remain relevant for a very long time. Plus, you will always own some level of access no matter what, and that’s hard to put a price on.
- Winner: Garmin
Design: Screen vs. screenless
Whoop has always been a non-watch, screenless wearable—and that hasn’t changed with its latest hardware entries.
The new Whoop 5.0 and MG trackers are screenless, fabric-covered pods that are designed for 24/7 wear and disappear on the wrist (or wherever you wear it; we prefer it on our upper arm).
Its superpower—especially when compared to brands producing more traditional devices like Garmin—is the versatility. You can pop the sensor out of the wristband and wear it in Whoop Body apparel (bras, boxers, shorts), or on a bicep band for improved heart rate accuracy.
These add-ons are Whoop-branded and can be costly, but are also slick and really enhance the experience. They also allow you to wear a classic mechanical watch on your other wrist without looking like a two-watch wearer (like the Wareable team).
Again, similarly to its pricing and subscription model, Garmin’s core focus is on watches—though it also branches out into niche devices for those who want a specialized experience.
Whether it’s the sleek smartwatch-style devices (like the Vivoactive or Venu) or the more rugged outdoor watches (such as the Fenix or Instinct), Garmin’s devices are still style symbols.
They have buttons, touchscreens, and always-on displays, and are tools for daily interaction. If you want to check your notifications, control music, or see a map, Garmin is the move here, but it really comes down to whether you want a screen on your wrist or not.
- Winner: Draw
Recovery, health, and lifestyle insights
This is Whoop’s core strength, but Garmin has significantly closed the gap in recent years.
Whoop simplifies everything into three scores: Strain (how hard you worked), Sleep (how well you rested), and Recovery (how ready you are). The Recovery score (0-100%) is the headline figure, based largely on your heart rate variability (HRV) and resting heart rate.
It is famously sensitive; a late-night drink or a stressful day will tank your score, forcing you to acknowledge the impact of your lifestyle choices. However, it’s still powerful—and has been slightly offset by the 2025 arrival of the ‘Healthspan’ feature, which contextualizes how your behaviors affect your physiological age.
It’s also developed into an advanced health tracker, with the MG hardware capable of ECG readings and blood pressure insights. With Advanced Labs, you can also integrate (and, depending on your region, organize) third-party blood tests into the platform and cross-reference them with your data.
When you strip away the branding of each feature, Garmin actually offers many of the same insights. In the interest of brevity, we won’t list them all here, but some of our favorites can help you create a Whoop-like experience (just with a bit more manual sifting through graphs).
An improving experience, but presentation still lags
Here are some of our favorites that are readily available on most modern Garmin devices (launched after 2023) and can provide training-focused takes on your wellbeing and recovery:
- Body Battery: This is Garmin’s real-time energy score (0-100) that drains with activity and recharges with rest. Unlike Whoop’s static score, Body Battery updates throughout the day, showing the immediate benefit of a nap or a relaxing evening.
- Training Readiness: This blends sleep, recovery time, HRV Status, and stress history into a unified score that mirrors Whoop’s Recovery.
- HRV Status: A traffic-light-style system that look at your nightly HRV compared to your baseline. It’s powerful data, but less user-friendly than Whoop’s traffic-light system.
Garmin is also making strides to help users pinpoint the effects of their lifestyle, launching Lifestyle Logging and Health Status features in late 2025. It’s also a sneakily solid health tracker, with many top Garmin devices including ECG support.
However, we still prefer Whoop in this area; its presentation is more straightforward, holistic, and proven in informing user behavior. Garmin’s features, on the other hand, still feel very secondary to the sports tracking and lack the big-picture view of your long-term health that the best options in this area now offer.
- Winner: Whoop
Sleep tracking compared
We’ve tested and compared these platforms for years. Neither is at the top of our best sleep trackers list—that’s reserved for the likes of Oura and the Apple Watch—but the accuracy is solid enough to power a healthy array of insights that can help you monitor and improve your sleep.
Whoop revamped its sleep tracking with the 5.0/MG hardware in 2025. This reimagines the Sleep Performance score, focusing on actionable hygiene (consistency, sleep stress, and efficiency) rather than just hours vs. need.
It also still acts as a clever sleep coach, telling you exactly when to go to bed to hit your recovery goals—or based on the strain from that particular day, and what you plan to do tomorrow. It’s a bit graph-heavy for daily dives into the tracked data, and, like with any brand, we don’t put much stock into the accuracy of its sleep stages, but there’s a lot here for those trying to make a conscious improvement to their sleep habits.
Not quite as accurate, but with a hidden solution
Garmin’s sleep tracking has improved, and now reports far less poor readings with regard to sleep/wake times, but it’s still not a great analyzer of rest.
Over consistent testing of a number of its flagship watches, we’ve found it can overestimating sleep duration and missing wake-ups that Whoop catches. And, though we’ve just said we don’t put much stock into sleep stages, it feels very likely Garmin’s are less accurate than Whoop’s interpretation; our reporting has often showed virtually no awake periods compared to other devices, meaning sleep scores are often skewed.
Garmin, it would seem, is aware of these gaps in its tracking; in 2025, it launched the Index Sleep Monitor, a dedicated, screenless armband that we found does alleviate these issues with its sleep data. However, again, like with many aspects of the Garmin experience, getting that extra feature or functionality costs extra ($170, in this case). Without it, the wrist-based tracking accuracy and comfort trails Whoop considerably.
Winner: Whoop
Workout and sports tracking
This is a blowout victory for Garmin, which should come as no real surprise. Ultimately, it’s hard for any competitor to match a brand that specializes in creating the most advanced training tools for seemingly endless sports and disciplines.
Whether you’re training for a half-marathon, golfing on a new course, or hiking up an unknown trail, Garmin has a dedicated, detailed mode and feature to make the experience smoother. And there’s generally something for every kind of sport, the most popular—running and cycling—are particularly excellent. Given you choose the correct device, Garmin can offer unparalleled insights into your fitness level, running form, race preparation, training load, and more.
Really, though, even the basic fact that Garmin watches offer gold-standard GPS accuracy, pair with everything imaginable (power meters, chest straps, headphones), and give you infinitely customizable data screens is enough for it to beat out Whoop here.
A basic approach that might work for some
Instead, as we’ve established, Whoop is a passive tracker. It auto-detects activities (often quite well) or lets you manually start them, but it relies on your phone’s GPS for distance and pace.
It has no screen to show you splits. And, crucially, while the Whoop 5.0/MG has improved heart rate sensors slightly, our testing shows it still struggles massively with accuracy (when worn on the wrist; the bicep can alleviate much of this) compared to a Garmin device.
It still has merit for a particular type of trainer. We’ve waxed lyrical, for example, about how Whoop is the only wearable that’s really worth using in the gym for lifting weights. That’s mainly because it’s the best device on the market for interpreting your daily load on your body’s systems.
To put it simply: Whoop doesn’t care how fast you ran, only how much strain it put on your cardiovascular system. For some, that might be all the insight they need. If you’re training in a specific discipline, though, you’re likely to need more feedback from your tracker.
- Winner: Garmin
Whoop vs Garmin: Verdict
As we mentioned above, there’s a strong case for investing in both platforms.
A Whoop 5.0 (perhaps worn on the bicep) paired with a dedicated Garmin sports watch is the ultimate setup for the serious athlete. You get the best workout data in the world and the best recovery coaching in the world, without compromising on either.
But, again, we know most people are here to choose between them—and, ultimately, that makes the most sense from an affordability perspective.
Choose Garmin if…
If your primary goal is performance-based or sports-focused, you should choose Garmin.
If you’re training for a race, chasing a PB, or exploring the outdoors, a Garmin provides the tools, metrics, and real-time feedback you need to execute your training. It’s an active partner on the wrist—often with stellar battery life—and offers solid features and accuracy beyond its core discipline of sports tracking.
Subscribe to Whoop if…
Your goal is optimization in training, sleep, and other lifestyle factors.
If you want to feel better, sleep better, and understand your body’s limits, Whoop is a superior coach to Garmin. The new 5.0/MG hardware and Healthspan features make it a powerful longevity tool that goes far beyond simple fitness tracking.
It’s a passive guide that holds you accountable 24/7. If you can stomach the price, there’s a lot to be gained from the Whoop experience that you can’t get anywhere else.
