Garmin Lily 2 Active Review: Small Watch, Serious Sports Features

Introduction

The Garmin Lily 2 Active arrives less than a year after the standard Lily 2, and honestly it earns a bigger name. It packs enough new sports and fitness capability that it could plausibly have been called the Lily 3. At $299 and in a range of color options, it targets one very specific idea: all the core 24x7 health and activity tracking of a high-end Garmin watch, inside a tiny case that does not look like a smartwatch at all.

For sport and fitness enthusiasts who dislike bulky sports watches, this is a genuinely compelling pitch. Here is what the Lily 2 Active actually delivers, and where you should think twice.

A Watch That Does Not Look Like a Smartwatch

The defining trait of the Lily series is discretion. With the screen off, the watch reads as a plain, jewellery-style piece with a patterned etched face. Raise your wrist and the full touchscreen appears with your data, then turns off again as your wrist drops. Visibility in bright sunny conditions was no problem at all.

Despite the small, subtle form factor, the goal is to carry roughly the same 24x7 health and activity tracking you would find on a flagship Garmin watch, and by and large Garmin delivers that here, then layers on a substantial set of new sports features.

Built-In GPS and Battery Life

The headline upgrade over the Lily 2 is onboard GPS. Previously you had to rely on your phone’s connected GPS to record a track. Now you can leave the phone at home, run, and still get pace, distance, and a full GPS map afterwards. During the run, you get two customizable data pages with a wide slate of data fields.

Even with GPS added, battery life holds up well: up to 9 hours in GPS mode and up to 9 days in smartwatch mode, which is nearly double the smartwatch battery life of the Lily 2 released earlier this year.

Expanded Sport Profiles and Workouts

The sports push is real. The Lily 2 Active adds around 15 new sport profiles covering different workout types, some with sport-specific metrics and others focused on categorization. All the data syncs to Garmin Connect, on both the website and the mobile app, where you can review everything after the fact.

It also supports structured workouts, so even if you skip Garmin Coach you can push custom workouts to the watch, including ones coming from third-party platforms like TrainingPeaks. That makes the small watch feel far more like a proper training tool than its predecessor.

Garmin Coach for Running and Cycling

Garmin Coach is now supported, bringing free running and cycling training plans. You pick a goal and set your parameters, such as how many days per week you want to train and which day is your long run, and it builds a complete plan.

The plan automatically adjusts if you miss sessions or life gets in the way, keeping the important workouts intact for your goal. Since Garmin Coach is entirely free, it adds genuine long-term value to the purchase.

Two Physical Buttons and a Cleaner Interface

Hardware got a practical upgrade too: the Lily series finally has two physical side buttons. The top right button acts as confirm or enter, the bottom right as back or escape, which makes taking laps mid-run simple. After a stretch where fitness watches went touchscreen-only, buttons are a welcome return for workout use.

The interface is straightforward. The watch face is customizable with swappable top metrics, swiping right moves through widgets like sleep data, the top button opens the sport profile list, and a long hold brings up the settings menu. The screen blanks when the wrist lowers and lights up again on raise. One quirk: the patterned design piece on the lens is etched hardware, so only the wake-up watch face itself is customizable.

Sensor Pairing, Broadcasting, and Garmin Pay

For athletes, sensor pairing is a big addition. You can connect a heart rate strap, cycling speed and cadence sensors, cycling radar or lights, and temperature sensors. The one exclusion is cycling power meters, which is a fair cut given the likely overlap with this watch.

Heart rate broadcasting is new as well, sending your heart rate over both ANT+ and Bluetooth to third-party devices and apps, so it works with a Peloton bike, the Peloton app, or virtually any bike computer that accepts a heart rate signal. Garmin Pay is also standard on the Lily 2 Active, where it was previously reserved for the more expensive Classic models, and charging has moved to the standard Garmin connector instead of the older clip-on style.

Swimming, Golf, and a Compass

Pool swimming is supported with additional swim metrics such as stroke information, for any pool where you set the length, indoors or out. Open water swimming, however, is not supported: you can do a swim workout in the ocean but the watch will not record a GPS track for it, something Garmin reserves for its higher-tier watches.

Golf support is a surprise addition. The watch downloads courses from your phone, uses GPS to give distance to the hole with different tee positions, and tracks shots. It is not a full Approach-series device, but it covers the basics nicely. There is also a compass, though you cannot follow courses or routes on this watch, so the heading appears only as a data field. A slightly odd combination, but a useful one.

Everyday Health: HRV, Naps, and Health Snapshot

On the wellness side, the Lily 2 Active adds HRV tracking. It records heart rate variability during sleep and, after 19 nights, begins showing trends that indicate whether you are balanced or unbalanced. Many factors influence HRV, from sleep and stress to alcohol and illness, but it serves as a useful early, data-backed indicator of how you are trending.

Nap tracking automatically detects and records naps, and the health snapshot feature lets you capture core metrics like blood oxygenation and resting heart rate at one defined time each day, keeping the variables controlled. Together these round out a genuinely complete 24x7 health package in a small case.

Accuracy: GPS and Heart Rate

Accuracy testing was encouraging on both fronts. On a trail run, the GPS track was nearly spot-on compared with a high-end Garmin fenix 8 and an Apple Watch Ultra 2, holding up even among trees and beside cliffs. Heart rate handled sharp spikes on steep terrain well, lagging only a few seconds on one hard uphill sprint.

An interval workout with tall buildings along the road showed no GPS problems, and heart rate matched closely with only a couple of seconds of lag. It even outperformed a higher-end fenix 7 Pro Solar Sapphire on heart rate in that session. The watch uses Garmin’s Elevate Gen 4 optical heart rate sensor, not the newer Gen 5 with ECG, so there is no ECG here, but overall accuracy was impressive.

Things to Consider Before Buying

Two caveats matter. First, open water swimming lacks GPS tracking, which some swimmers will find limiting at this price. Second, Garmin’s Vivo-based devices like the Lily series rarely receive new features after launch. If you are happy with the feature set today, that is what you will have going forward, unlike fenix or Forerunner models that gain features for a couple of years.

Neither issue undermines what Garmin has done here, but both are worth weighing against how you train and how much you value future updates.

Buying Advice

The Lily 2 Active is easy to recommend if you want serious sports tracking without a sporty-looking watch. Runners, gym-goers, and general fitness users get GPS, coaching plans, structured workouts, sensor support, and strong everyday health tracking in a discreet design. If you need open water swim tracking, ECG, or a watch with a long feature-update runway, look higher in Garmin’s lineup.

At $299 with Garmin Pay standard and nearly doubled battery life over its predecessor, the value proposition is strong for the audience it aims at.

Conclusion

The Garmin Lily 2 Active is one of those rare updates that outgrows its own name. Built-in GPS, 15 new sport profiles, physical buttons, sensor pairing, Garmin Coach, and excellent GPS and heart rate accuracy, all in a case that reads as ordinary jewellery when the screen is off. As long as you accept the limited post-launch feature additions and the open water swimming gap, it is a very easy watch to like.