Garmin Trails vs AllTrails: Which Trail Discovery Option Is Worth Paying For?

Introduction

Garmin recently added a trail discovery layer called Garmin Trails to its ecosystem, and it arrives as part of a paid subscription rather than as something included with the device you already own. The feature sits inside Garmin Connect under Training and Planning, and it also appears within Garmin Maps Plus on Explore.

AllTrails occupies the opposite corner. It is the established trail database that many hikers and riders already carry on their phones, and its free account still lets you record an activity and leave a review.

This comparison looks at what each option actually delivers, where Garmin Trails currently feels thin, and how to decide whether either one deserves a place in your routine.

What Garmin Trails Offers Inside Garmin Connect

Access to Garmin Trails is tied to a subscription. It is part of the paid Garmin Connect Plus feature set, and it is also included with Garmin Maps Plus. If you already hold either one, the feature is available to you without a further purchase.

Inside the Garmin Connect dashboard, Garmin Trails appears under Training and Planning, where it lists trails within your area. Coverage across the United States is reasonably broad, although some users open the section and find nothing nearby. Each trail can be filtered by total ascent and by star rating, and search works well enough to pull up well-known routes such as Half Dome in Yosemite.

Individual trail pages stay minimal. You get a short description, total ascent, an elevation profile, and the months when the trail is most popular. From there, sending the trail to a device works as expected: the route is queued as a course on a compatible watch, and it can also be handled through Garmin Maps Plus on a phone. In Explore, Garmin Trails appears as a map layer you can toggle on and off alongside your usual layers, with the same filters available. Navigating a trail from Explore pushes it to the watch and saves it into your Courses list.

Trail customization is present but limited. You can build a custom course from the base trail, yet the routing tools are basic, essentially allowing you to drop a point or two rather than reshape the route. Most people will find it easier to adjust a course afterwards in Garmin Connect or Explore.

Activation is not always smooth. Signing up through Garmin Connect Plus can fail for some accounts with an error unrelated to the feature itself, even though the same account can reach Garmin Trails through Maps Plus. It is worth checking which subscription you already hold before troubleshooting anything.

Where Garmin Trails Falls Short

The most noticeable gap is community data. Star ratings exist as a filter, but there is almost nothing behind them: trail pages show no reviews or ratings yet, and the underlying trail information appears to be drawn from an existing trail database without the trip reports and user contributions that normally give it context.

That leaves an awkward exchange. You are asked to pay for access, and then asked to supply the reviews and ratings that would make the trail pages useful in the first place.

Coverage is incomplete as well. Some well-known trails are simply missing from the list, and the descriptions on the trails that are included stay brief.

How AllTrails Handles Trail Discovery

AllTrails approaches the same job from the other direction. A free account already allows you to record an activity and leave a review, which is why the database carries the kind of detail that Garmin Trails currently lacks.

There is also a paid tier, priced around $25, that adds a genuinely practical convenience: sending a trail from AllTrails straight to a Garmin Connect account, where it arrives as a course on your device. For anyone who plans routes on a phone and wants them on a watch without a manual file transfer, that is the cleaner workflow.

The trade-off is that you are managing two ecosystems instead of one, and the automatic sending depends on the paid tier rather than on the free account.

Free Route Files Remain the Most Flexible Option

It is worth remembering that route files are widely available from third-party sources, and most of them cost nothing. Downloading a GPX file and importing it into your Courses in Garmin Connect or Explore, then syncing it to your watch, is straightforward and remains part of the Garmin experience you already paid for when you bought the device.

That route works for any trail you can find a file for, regardless of whether it appears in a subscription database.

Garmin Trails vs AllTrails: Which Fits Your Routine

The two options differ less in the trails they cover than in what surrounds them. Garmin Trails keeps everything inside the app you already use for device sync, while AllTrails brings a mature database with reviews, activity recording, and a familiar planning flow.

If you already pay for Garmin Connect Plus or Maps Plus and want trail suggestions in the same place you manage courses and devices, Garmin Trails adds convenience without a second app. If reviews, community detail, and a free way to record and rate a hike matter more, AllTrails covers that ground today.

Cost and Commitment: What You Are Actually Paying For

Garmin Trails is not sold on its own. It comes bundled into a broader subscription, which means the real question is whether the rest of that subscription already earns its place in your routine. If it does, the trail layer is a small bonus. If it does not, the trail layer is unlikely to justify the cost by itself, particularly while the review data is still empty and coverage remains patchy.

Buying Advice

For most people, the decision comes down to what you already have and what you actually do with it. If a Garmin Connect Plus or Maps Plus subscription is already part of your setup, Garmin Trails is worth a look: trails send to your watch cleanly, the map layer in Explore is convenient, and there is no extra step to manage.

If you would be subscribing only to reach trail discovery, hold off. The same route information is available through free GPX files and through AllTrails, and the community data that makes a trail page genuinely useful is already there rather than pending. A practical middle path is to keep importing free route files for the trails you already know, and pay for a trail service only when the convenience of automatic sending is clearly worth it to you.

Conclusion

Garmin Trails is a tidy convenience inside the Garmin ecosystem, but it currently reads as a familiar database placed behind a paywall rather than a new capability. AllTrails remains the stronger choice for anyone who values reviews, community detail, and a free way to record and rate activity. If you already subscribe to Garmin Connect Plus or Maps Plus, try the trail layer and see whether it saves you time. If you would be subscribing for it alone, importing free route files is still the more sensible route.