Garmin Connect Plus Review: Is Garmin's New Subscription Worth $6.99 a Month?

Introduction

Garmin has added a subscription service to Garmin Connect. Given how often the company emphasized that your data was free and fully accessible, this felt inevitable to nobody and everybody at the same time. The good news, confirmed by hands-on use: all of your existing data is still there, and everything currently in Garmin Connect remains free. What Garmin Connect Plus adds is a layer of new insights and features on top.

Pricing is $6.99 per month, or $69 per year after a free 30-day trial. That is only $10 cheaper than Strava’s premium subscription, which is a meaningful comparison point given how much Strava’s paid tier includes. So the real question is whether the new features justify the cost. Here is a full walkthrough of everything that ships in the first release.

Signing Up and Active Intelligence

Subscribing takes a trip to the settings tab in the lower right corner of the app, where the Garmin Connect Plus option sits at the top. You choose a free 30-day trial, enter payment details, and get billed annually after that. Oddly, Garmin asks for a credit card again even if it already has one on file for other services, and the PayPal option behaves strangely. It works, but expect some friction.

Once subscribed, you are asked to enable Garmin’s AI feature, called Active Intelligence. It is optional, so you can use everything else without opting in, and the privacy details are laid out during setup.

Active Intelligence is the headline feature, and it puts a daily tidbit at the top of your dashboard. Our first insight told us we had hit our active minutes for the week, for the fourth week in a row. That is about as useful as it sounds, and it puts this roughly on par with Strava’s similarly underwhelming AI tidbits. You can rate each insight as useful or not, which may improve things over time. The good news is that the rest of the package is stronger than this opening act.

Performance Dashboard

The Performance Dashboard is the most extensive addition, and notably it lives on the website rather than in the app. After picking a sport profile, you get a wall of panels, roughly 10 to 15 to start, with 123 or more panels available for cycling alone. You can mix, match, and drag them around freely.

Credit where due: this is genuinely extensive, and deep-data riders will find panels they never knew they wanted. The main criticism is that it is web-only. In a mobile-first era, this feels like an odd choice, though the website implementation itself is well done. Many metrics here are niche, so most users will configure a handful of panels and ignore the rest.

Live Activity on Your Phone

The Live Activity feature lets you start a workout on your watch and see live sensor data on your phone. Start a strength workout from the training calendar and a panel appears instantly in the Connect app, with heart rate, heart rate zones, and the specific muscle groups being worked. For cycling, it shows power numbers and the structured portions of the workout.

The standout detail is that you can tap individual workout steps to see movement animations and instructions on the phone screen, something the tiny watch display does poorly for complex movements. Comparable features exist on Coros and Apple companion apps, but Garmin’s animation playback for structured workouts is a genuinely useful gym companion. Importantly, the workouts themselves are still free; the subscription only adds the easier phone-based viewing.

Training Guidance Expansions

If you use a Garmin Run Coach or Cycle Coach plan, such as a half marathon or marathon plan with a goal time and a selected race, Connect Plus adds supplementary videos and coaching content to the plan.

In our testing, the extra content did not appear even after completing the setup steps, so how much is genuinely new versus repackaged material remains unclear. The concept is similar to Fitbit Premium’s coached tidbits layered on top of training plans, and as an idea it is one of the more defensible things to charge for here.

Enhanced Live Track

Enhanced Live Track has two components. First, you can create a custom landing page URL that friends and family can visit to automatically see your live activities, which is handy for long treks or big rides. The downside is the absence of privacy zone options, so sharing a permanent public link means potentially revealing where rides start and finish.

The second piece is more practical: starting a Live Track session can now send automatic text messages to your predefined contacts, not just emails. Anyone whose loved ones ignore inbox notifications will appreciate this immediately. It is a small change that solves a very real household problem.

New Social Features

The final category is social. Paying members get a small star on their profile picture and a colored frame around it, plus new badges and challenges. We counted 11 new challenges in the challenges section. It is not clear which badges are exclusive to the subscription, and Garmin could make that more transparent.

These are the lightest-weight features in the package, and most people will not subscribe for a profile badge.

Is It Worth Paying For?

There is a fair argument for Garmin subscriptions when they cover external costs, as with inReach satellite plans, Outdoor Maps+, or LTE kids’ smartwatches. This is different. Garmin Connect has historically been subsidized by premium device purchases, and this is by far the largest Connect update the company has ever shipped, with no close comparison in its history.

Roughly half of these features feel like they should have shipped free as part of buying a premium watch, while others, like the Performance Dashboard and coaching content, are reasonable paywall candidates. The bigger open question is whether Garmin will ever add new free features to Connect again, given how rarely they arrive as it is.

Conclusion

Garmin Connect Plus is not a scam, and your data and existing features remain free. But at $69 per year, only $10 less than Strava Premium, the value depends heavily on which features you will actually use. Live Activity viewing and the Performance Dashboard are the strongest reasons to subscribe; Active Intelligence and the social perks are not. The free 30-day trial makes it easy to judge for yourself before committing.