Garmin Forerunner 245 vs. Apple Watch Series 5

If you’re looking for a truly excellent fitness watch there are two models you should consider: the Apple Watch Series 5 and the Garmin Forerunner 245. I’ve owned both for over 6 months and wanted to share my impressions. If you’re trying to decide which one to get, hopefully this info can help you.

If you’re interested in these watches there’s a good chance you run, ride a bike, swim laps, or do some kind of workout regularly. Or, you may aspire to start doing so. The Apple Watch appeals to both active and inactive people, while Garmin watches are primarily desired by fitness people.

What’s different about them?

These watches are extremely different from one another. Look at the prices. The Apple Watch Series 5 starts at $399 and is rarely sold at a discount, while the Garmin Forerunner 245 starts at $299 but can often be had for around $285. My Apple Watch is the 44mm GPS version, which costs $429, and my Garmin is the Forerunner 245 Music version, which is $350 but often discounted to around $299.

The screens on these watches are different. The Apple Watch has a high-resolution display that’s bright and capable of producing truly stunning colors, deep blacks, and fluid animations. In comparison, the screen on the Garmin Forerunner 245 looks washed out, dull, and altogether unimpressive. The best things you can say about it is that it’s easy-to-read in direct sunlight, and it’s color as opposed to monochrome. There are more big differences: the screen on Apple Watch is square, the 245 is round. Apple Watch has a touchscreen and 2 buttons, the Garmin doesn’t have a touchscreen but has 5 buttons.

The role these watches play in the universe is profoundly different. The Apple Watch is an iPhone for your wrist. It’s a mini-computer. You can make phone calls with it. You can send iMessages with it. You can talk to it without pressing any buttons and it will answer back with a loud, human-like voice. The Garmin is pretty much a one-trick pony. It’s a workout watch that can do a few other things marginally well.

Battery life is also drastically different. The Garmin Forerunner 245 only needs to be charged once a week. If you’re careful with the Apple Watch Series 5, you can maybe go 2 days before you need to charge again. The Garmin’s battery life is far more impressive.

These watches have different weights. The Apple website says the 44mm Apple Watch Series 5 weighs 36.5 grams (case only), but when I weigh mine with its Apple Sport Loop band attached it weighs 47 grams. My Forerunner 245 weighs 39 grams with its included silicon band. The Apple Watch is heavier and more bulbous, and you can feel this when you wear it. The Garmin 245 feels more lightweight and significantly slimmer.

These watches have different requirements. In order to use an Apple Watch, you must also use an iPhone. There’s no way around this. If you’re an Android user and you’re not willing to switch to an iPhone, then you should definitely not get an Apple Watch. The Garmin Forerunner 245 works great with either iPhones or Android phones. The only thing you’re required to do with the Garmin is pair it with your phone via Bluetooth on occasion, or plug it into a computer to sync your workouts to the Garmin Connect website and other fitness platforms.

Is it a good smartwatch? 🧠

The Apple Watch is an amazing smartwatch. It can unlock your computer (if you use a Mac), it can control the playback of podcasts, music, and the volume level of your AirPods, it can automatically detect if you’re working out and get your attention by vibrating to suggest that you start a workout to track your activity. Even though Apple Watch is likely the best smartwatch out there, it’s not completely intuitive to use. It takes a decent amount of time to get used to the controls. It can be a bit confusing, especially for new users.

The Garmin Forerunner 245 only has a handful of smartwatch features. It can notify you when you’re getting a phone call on your iPhone, and you can even hit a button to answer the call (but you need to pick up your phone at that point to talk). If you lose your phone, you can hit a button on the 245 to make your phone play a sound so you can find it. It can tell you the weather, but only in a rudimentary way. It also has a basic timer that you can set. Even though it’s bare bones, I like it better than the timers I set with Siri on the Apple Watch. All told, the 245 is just a basic smartwatch.

Both of these watches can completely inundate you with notifications, if you wish. They can beep and buzz for every email you receive, tweet that gets tweeted, like that gets liked, and so on. The Apple Watch takes it a step further by including images. For example, I have a Nest Hello video doorbell, and my Apple Watch sends me a photo every time a person approaches the door. It’s neat, but after getting notified 500 times a day that my wife and kids were at the front door, I turned it off.

Is it a good workout watch? 👟

The Apple Watch is an okay workout watch, but it’s not great. I find the lack of buttons annoying. There’s something about starting and ending a workout with a touchscreen that feels underwhelming and deeply unsatisfying to me. One of the best features of the Series 5 Apple Watch is its always-on display, but it isn’t useful during a workout. The screen stays on, but it stops updating your real-time stats as you workout, until you intentionally wake it up again. Third-party workout apps like Strava don’t have access to the always-on display at all. The Apple Watch goes into a state where it just shows the time when you work out with those apps. You need to wake it up again by swinging your arm or tapping the watch to see the data you’re interested in.

The Forerunner 245 is a great workout watch. It quickly links to GPS satellites, it shows you all of the data you want to see — and the numbers stay on the screen for the entire duration of your activity. I love that you can customize the data screens right on the watch before you work out. I like doing pre-planned structured running workouts, and the Garmin 245 handles these perfectly. The default watch-face of the 245 shows the total miles you have run in the past week. It’s just a simple motivational widget, but I find it truly compelling. On weeks where I rack up a bunch of miles, I feel proud to have this number on my wrist. During weeks where I’ve been slacking, seeing a low number there is a great motivational kick in the pants.

The 245 gives you a bunch of interesting data points that you don’t get with an Apple Watch. Training Effect is an easy-to-comprehend number from 0 to 5 that tells you how impactful a workout was. It also suggests a recovery time after you work out, which can be helpful, even though the recovery times it suggests usually seem a bit too lengthy.

I own both of these watches and I always grab my Garmin when it’s time to work out. That says it all.

So… Which watch should you get? 🤔

This is tricky. If you are strongly curious about the Apple Watch, I think it’s a good idea to get it and give it a try. It’s the kind of thing that you need to experience for yourself. You just gotta do it.

If you’re not terribly curious about the Apple Watch, and you like to run regularly and perhaps train for races, I think the Garmin Forerunner 245 is the better option. You can use this watch for indoor swimming, bike riding, and a bunch of other sports, but ultimately it’s a runner’s watch, and it does an excellent job of tracking runs.

What about older versions of these watches? 👴

You can still buy older versions of these watches and save a lot of money by doing so. As I explain in the next section, I’ve actually owned all of the older versions of both of these watches, and they’re all quite good.

But… Should you get one? Personally, I believe your timepiece should be slightly indulgent. It’s not just a gadget that helps you stay active, it’s an object that you strap to your body and display to others every single day. This is an area where you should treat yourself a little bit. You don’t need to spend $10k on a super-fancy watch, but spending an extra $100 or so on the current model is well worth it, in my opinion.

The personal satisfaction of knowing you’re wearing the latest model isn’t the main reason to get one. And while we’re on that topic, it needs to be said: that type of satisfaction is vain, shallow, and just plain yucky to even think about. But, it is a real feeling. The vanity is largely self-imposed, because 99.999% of the people you encounter won’t notice or care how new or old your watch is. If you can get beyond this imagined vanity, the experience is transformed. The act of putting on the watch goes from “Oh yeah, I need to put on that thing I bought myself” to “…and now I’ll put on this nice thing I bought myself.” It’s a private psychological daily mood booster, and it has value.

The main reason to get the latest model is that they’re far better devices, period. The only differences between the Series 4 and Series 5 Apple Watches are the built-in compass (yawn) and the always-on display. That first item is almost useless, the second is absolutely essential and makes every penny of the upgrade worthwhile. The Garmin Forerunner 235 is a much-loved watch, but it’s 5 years old. In the ensuing half decade Garmin has improved their technology by leaps and bounds, and when you treat yourself to the current Forerunner 245 model, you will throughly enjoy all of these advances, whether you’re aware of it or not.

Why do I have both?

I’m the type of person that’s committed to making their smartphone and laptop last for as long as possible. I still use a 10 year old MacBook Pro every day, and my last iPhone lasted 4.5 years. However, my inclination for being thrifty with tech falls apart when it comes to wearables. I simply have a weakness for Apple Watch. I have owned the Series 3, Series 4, and now the Series 5 lives on my wrist, on a part-time basis.

It’s the same with Garmin watches. I owned the Forerunner 220, the Forerunner 230, and now I’m a 245 Music owner. I didn’t used to be like this. I started running 5 years ago, and that’s when I became interested in watches. My obsession has not eased, but a few months ago I came close to getting rid of my Apple Watch and only using my Garmin.

There are some things I truly love about the Apple Watch, but as I explained in my hands-on review of the Series 5, it deeply bothers me that its IonX glass scratches so easily. Every time I’ve upgraded my Apple Watch I’ve sold the older one to help pay for the new one. When I went to sell my Series 4 after only wearing it for a year, I was shocked at how scratchy and awful the screen looked. I take good care of my watches, but my Apple Watches have all looked bad after 12 months of use. Sure, you can pay $749 for a stainless steel Apple Watch with a sapphire crystal screen that doesn’t scratch as easily, but that kind of glass is a lot more likely to shatter if you accidentally drop it. 😮

I had mostly convinced myself that I was going to go Garmin only, and then one day the unthinkable happened. While sitting at my desk calmly working from home all day, I looked down at the 245 on my wrist and the screen was somehow cracked. I couldn’t believe my eyes. My old Forerunner 220 and 230 watches never had a problem like this at all. It was awful!

For years I had heard stories about how Garmin support had helped people out in impressive ways. My cracked 245 still had a couple months left on its 1-year warranty, so I contacted Garmin support using the chat service on their website. The first time I tried, they said that cracked screens were not covered by the warranty and it was a $120 repair, but they would do it for $60. I didn’t accept that. I waited 2 weeks and tried again with chat support. This time I mentioned that I also had an Apple Watch Series 5. The support agent decided to replace my watch for free. Phew!

I thought I was going to become a Garmin-only person, but now I’m not as confident. I know I don’t like the glass on the Apple Watch, but my experience with the Gorilla Glass 3 on the Forerunner 245 has been even worse. My first 245 never got little scratches, it just randomly split in half one day (there was never a drop or crash of any kind). I’ve been using the replacement Garmin sent for a month or so, so far so good, but it will be a long, long time before I truly trust it.

At any rate, I hope my experiences have helped you in some way. Neither of these watches are perfect, but they’re still worth getting, having, and using. The point is to be active, and to lead a healthy and happy life. You can certainly do this without one of these watches, but I find that they help me stay motivated. That’s worth more than a little bit of scratchy glass.

If this was helpful, you can easily help me at no cost to you. Just click on the following links before you buy something at Amazon, eBay, or B&H. I get a tiny commission when you do, even if you’re buying a fake watch. Thanks! 😃

Purchase Links

Garmin Forerunner 245 – Amazon, B&H, eBay

Apple Watch Series 5 – Amazon, B&H, eBay