Garmin’s new Strava Route Sync – Komoot too

Love them or loathe them, routes are a mess. More precisely, route sharing and route creation are a mess…sometimes. OK, often. One vendor supports a particular feature, like TBT, and another platform doesn’t. Your friend sends you a route and your preferred platform explodes when it tries to import it. Sharing is caring. But route sharing is just another way to secretly send angst to your cycling buddies the night before a special adventure.

What Garmin and STRAVA have announced today should make my routing life and your routing life just that little bit easier. It’ll steer me to use the Garmin ecosystem a bit more in the future and you will no longer have to use the STRAVA routes CIQ app. If you’d previously moved to Komoot then you will be happy too — this all works with Komoot!

How It Works

Step 1 – link STRAVA or KOMOOT properly to GARMIN

You already have STRAVA linked to Garmin Connect but that’s not enough; you need to also enable the ROUTE sync as well. You do the same kind of thing with Komoot and you’ll also find that RideWithGPS will have their new interface to Garmin working soon as well.

Step 2 – Do something, anything in STRAVA or KOMOOT

If you star and unstar a route in STRAVA, or create a new one, then any such change to a route should trigger a route-sync straight over to your Garmin device. I created a new tour/route in Komoot and it was sent over to all my compatible Garmin devices.

Some notes:

• The Komoot routes were added but not as starred routes, nevertheless, they went directly to the 945
• Deleting a route in Komoot did not delete anything already sync’d to the Garmin environment. With Wahoo, the route is deleted on the Wahoo Elemnt if the source is unstarred in STRAVA — which is how it should be
• There seems to be no way to direct a route to a specific Garmin device or, indeed, to stop it going to all devices

The next day and everything miraculously works with starred routes being sync’d into Garmin Connect in a few 10s of seconds. It’s interesting that the origin of the route is flagged in Garmin Connect. Nice job Garmin.

Thoughts

The wider thoughts here are that it is great that Garmin has opened up to 3rd parties the ability to easily get routes into the Garmin ecosystem with a programmatic API rather than requiring the creation of a CIQ app. As DCR points out this has the knock-on benefit of making new functionality available to supported legacy Garmin devices, which is always a good thing.

However, this announcement seems a little bit rushed to me. What does stick out is the need for routes to be in synchronisation with the source routing platform ie one deletion or unstarring is carried through to Garmin.

I keep my numbers of routes and number of registered Garmin devices under control but if you let either of those get out of hand then it seems to me that you will have a job managing which routes go where. Routing just seems to want to create a mess wherever it goes. Anyway. It’s a great step forward. RwGPS…your turn now please.

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Last Updated on 28 May 2026 by the5krunner

the5krunner

tfk is the founder and author of the5krunner, an independent endurance sports technology publication. With 20 years of hands-on testing of GPS watches and wearables, and competing in triathlons at an international age-group level, tfk provides in-depth expert analysis of fitness technology for serious athletes and endurance sport competitors. ID