Garmin Connect is the companion app for Garmin smartwatches and fitness trackers that stores and displays your health progress and stats after syncing with the Garmin watch. It is readily available for both Android and iOS devices.
Strava is a fitness tracker app that works on your smartphone and its services are also available through the webpage. It can either use the sensors on your phone to track your health and fitness activities or sync with your dedicated fitness tracker to do the same.
Before we conclude which one is more accurate, Garmin Connect or Strava, let us look at what each of them has to offer and what they lack.
Advantages of Using Garmin Connect
Garmin Connect shows you your latest health activities on your personal My Day Page. Further, you can sync your Garmin watch to feed it with the latest data and it will provide you with detailed insights and statistics. The range of information is wide enough to make an inference about your current fitness level.
Garmin Connect can be used to create personalized workout plans and it awards you with badges for task completion. You can also compare your workout with your other friends who use Garmin Connect. More to that, you can seek the help of a Garmin coach to assess your workout plan.
The Garmin community is huge and vibrant. Additionally, when it comes to connectivity, it supports both GPS and Bluetooth and provides you with Life tracking features for your safety. When it comes to sharing, it can be readily synced with other fitness apps like MyFitnessPal and Strava.
Garmin Connect is lucid and intricate at the same time. It easily converts the synced data into intuitive charts and graphs for easy visualization. It can also review the personal records of the user for pace, distance, and step count.
Drawbacks of Garmin Connect
The continuous use of GPS and Bluetooth drains the battery of your device quickly.
Advantages of Using Strava
Strava is a standalone fitness tracking app and is quite popular due to the number of features it comes with. First, it provides free digital health services which can be accessed either via the app or its website.
Strava works great with both iOS and Android and as per stats, there are currently 50 million users using Strava who have shared over 3 billion activities. Strava has more segments to offer than any other fitness app.
Strava is capable of recording run directly from the app, using the GPS and ABC sensors present on your smartphone. In addition to that, it can be paired with other fitness trackers for accurate data syncing and thus offers a wide range of metrics to assess your health progress.
With such a diverse and huge user base, Strava allows users to compare their fitness with other users and offers effective training plans (with Summit Membership). Thus, it can measure your performance very closely and you can also share your live location with the Beacon feature.
Drawbacks of Strava
The major negative about Strava is that it offers a Freemium model that lacks in-depth statistical data and is thus not preferred by professionals. Further, the privacy setting adjustment needs to be more robust.
Verdict: Which is More Accurate?
If you are using Strava with your Phone, then the data that gets fed in is from the GPS and Sensors of the phone. Whereas, if you are using a dedicated fitness tracker to sync its data to Strava, then the data quality changes remarkably. So, the accuracy of Strava is as good as your tracking device.
For Garmin Connect, it needs to be hooked or paired to a Garmin Smartwatch. If the Garmin smartwatch is the premium one, the sensors are highly accurate compared to budget or mid-range models. So, again, an app is as good as the device it uses to get data.
Can Garmin connect and Strava be synced?
Garmin Connect and Strava can be easily synced since 2014 when they announced a one-way data-sharing partnership.
Not only does Garmin Connect allow you to sync data with Strava, but you can also sync its data with other great fitness apps like MapMyFitness, MapMyRun, and Endomondo.
There are some third-party tools available to transfer your data from Garmin Connect to Strava.
● Chrome Extension for selecting Bulk Files
● CopyMySports and www.tapiriik.com can be used for automatically transferring data to Strava.
How to transfer data from Garmin Connect to Strava?
You can link your Garmin Connect Account to your Strava account so that the activities uploaded to Garmin Connect are automatically synced with Strava. Thus, to enable this syncing, you can either use Garmin Connect via the app or website.
Method to link Garmin Connect and Strava using Garmin Connect App
● First, download and install the Strava app on your phone and create an account.
● Next, log in with the Strava account you just create or if you already had one
● Now, open the Garmin Connect app.
● Open the app menu by selecting the striped icon (top left) on Android devices and the “More” option for iOS devices
● Next, tap on “Settings” and then “Connected Apps”
● From the list, select Strava and then select Agree
● Finally, tap on the “Authorize” option.
● It can take some time before the initial sync gets completed. After the initial sync, the past 90 days of data will be synced with Strava from your Garmin Connect.
Method to link Garmin Connect and Strava using Garmin Connect Web
● First, make sure that your Garmin device is segment-compatible.
Here is a list of Garmin devices that are segment-compatible.
● Next, sign in to the Garmin Connect web using your browser
● Now, click on the “add a widget” option at the bottom of the Garmin Connect Dashboard
● Tap on Segments from the Add to Dashboard list and then select the gear icon
● Next, select the “Use Strava Segments” option and then tap on “Connect with Strava”
● Finally, select “Agree” and follow the instructions on the screen.
● It will take several minutes for the initial sync
What if your Garmin data is not syncing to Strava properly?
At times there can be issues when trying to sync Garmin Connect data with Strava. Here is a list of possible solutions to that problem –
● If both the accounts are linked, then wait for the first activity sync
● You can perform this task by using the short test activity and delete it later
● After your first sync is successful, your past 90 days’ activity will also get transferred to Strava
● To assess if Garmin Sync is working or not, you can check the Strava Status option on the status page which displays the uploads from Garmin Connect
● To avoid standby, use the file upload option directly from your device. You can also export the TCX format file from Garmin Connect and upload it to Strava manually
● If accessing takes time, then you can disconnect the link between Garmin Connect and Strava.
● Wait for a while before reconnecting the apps together and they should start syncing in a correct manner.
