The best cycling watch: Apple vs. Garmin, and more – Key Features considered

Reasons you might want to use a watch

• You don’t want to risk damaging a bike computer or smartphone on your handlebars.
• You don’t want to risk a bike computer or smartphone on your handlebars being stolen.
• You are an occasional cyclist
• You only wish for one activity recording device – your watch
• You want directions
• You want alerts from a cycling radar
• To play music

The unusual problems when using a watch for cycling

• It’s dangerous to keep looking at a watch on your wrist when cycling
• A watch on your wrist when cycling is more challenging to read due to vibrations and arm movement
• Watches can easily be mounted on your handlebars, but they are often further away from your eyes than usual, making visibility more difficult – both distance and vibration play a part
• Damage, if you’re careful, you’ll be fine, but in my opinion, you are more likely to damage a watch on your wrist than a device mounted on your bike handlebars

Following a Route

When following a complex route, it is best to use a screen as large as possible.

Watches an also perform simple, non-technical navigation around cities with directional turn indications and haptics (vibrations), you wont feel the haptics with a watch on the handlebars but some watches also have audible turn alerts.

• Large Screen – Garmin Enduro 3 is a great option. Aim for a 51mm case or 1.4″ display. The Garmin ecosystem is the best for complex routes and, like Strava, has a great routing engine that uses popularity-based heatmaps.
• Simple turn indications and vibrations – Apple Watch has pretty much nailed this.

Sports watches like Coros, Polar and Suunto effectively require you to look at the watch.

Winners: More expensive Garmin Watches win for complex routing, whereas smartwatches like Google and Apple win for simple directions.

Screen Mirroring

Only smartwatches like Apple Watch, Google Pixel Watch 4 and Huawei GT 6 Pro let you fully record a workout on your watch while simultaneously broadcasting and displaying metrics on your smartphone. Effectively turning your smartphone into a bike computer. Google Pixel Watch 4 uses RTS – Real Time Sync to the Fitbit app.

Garmin has a similar but different feature that shows the watch display on a Garmin bike computer (why not just use the bike computer?). Many sports watches can also broadcast heart rate to apps on your smartphone or to bike computers.

Winners: Apple, Google and some other high-end smartwatches

Getting Radar Alerts

Perhaps the best cycling safety device after a helmet is a rear-facing radar tail light like Garmin’s RTL515. It changes the flash pattern given to cars when they’re detected, but also alerts you at the same time – typically this would be on a smartphone app or bike computer. However, several Garmin watches (from Fenix 5 era onwards) will also alert you audibly and on the screen if a car is detected behind you.

Whilst there are several brands of non-Garmin radars from Bryton, Wahoo (Good), Magene (good), it’s Garmin’s watches that work with them on your wrist. There are third party Apple Watch apps like NAVIGR8. In essence you have to entirely rely on that third party app for everything during your ride whereas with Garmin, Varia support is just one of many experiences within the standard product.

Winner: Garmin

Making A Call

An LTE-enabled (or 5G) watch probably can make and receive calls and texts on the go without a smartphone. I use Apple Watch Ultra 3 for this rather than taking a smartphone when I cycle. It’s great to be able to say, “Hey Siri, text SoAndso and tell them I’m running 10 minutes late.” It gives you the options of safety features in accidents (emergency SOS) and allows you to easily play your once-a-year card, “come and get me, I’ve really broken down” with a quick phone call.

Bluetooth calls and 4G/5G services in general do deplete your battery quite quickly. On my Apple Watch 10 (LTE), that was often a problem, and I sometimes ran out of juice, but with the Apple Watch Ultra 3’s doubled battery life, it’s never been a problem for me

Whilst the latest high-end Garmin watches do have LTE-M, they do not have general calling and texting abilities. Their abilities are effectively limited only to people you know who have the Garmin Messenger app installed. With an Apple Watch, you can literally call anyone if you are in cell range.

Winners: Apple, Google

Playing Music

Music playback is generally unsafe and annoying to others when loud. You knew that and presumably don’t care.

Some of the newest 2024/5 series of watches, like the Apple Watch and Garmin Fenix 8 Pro, have an onboard speaker that is just about capable of playing music. Garmin and Apple have pretty good music app support, i.e., Spotify.

The older generation watches as many vendors support music playback via paired Bluetooth headphones. However, you need to check where the music is physically stored. Some watches merely act as music controls for your smartphone (which would be paired to earphones and in your backpack), other watches can internally store MP3s and playback, but few can genuinely link live to streaming services like Spotify – in reality, most with Spotify support download a playlist to the watch when you are in WiFi range. The latter option is not valid when you are in the middle of a forest wanting some music vibes.

Winner: Apple, Google

Controlling Indoor cycling workouts

You can download structured workouts to your watch for it to control an indoor smart trainer.

Most people who want to do this will surely also own a bike computer. Let’s assume you need your watch to do the job in an emergency. The options open to you are limited, and you’ll need to buy one of the more expensive Garmin watches, such as my Forerunner 970.

Winner: Garmin

The Best Alternative

Honestly, folks, bike navigation computers were invented for a reason, and the clue is in the name. Bike. They are the best alternative: you can get a pretty good Magene bike computer for just over $100. There’s no need to buy a Garmin for over $500.

If you can’t afford that, there are many apps you can use on your smartphone when handlebar-mounted. These apps are all free to some degree: Strava (links to a great source of routes), Ride with GPS (links to a great source of routes), and the Wahoo app, which links very well with a range of sensors, including indoor trainers.

Take Out

As always, for advanced needs, a Garmin watch is best-placed to handle them. However, I suspect most of you wanting to use a watch for cycling will be occasional cyclists or occasional cycling navigators and simply not want to go to the hassle of buying something new for your handlebars – be that a bike computer or a mount for your smartphone and cycling app to go with it.

Pretty much every smartwatch can record a cycling workout; most produce relatively accurate GPS tracks, but heart rate accuracy varies depending on terrain and how tightly you grip the handlebars. That said, the Apple Watch is as good as most of the others here.

For those of you who want occasional navigation, you’ll probably want to use Apple Maps or Google Maps for quick A-to-B type directions, in which case the big-branded smart watches are the winners – Apple Watch Ultra 3 (Watch 11) or Pixel Watch 4 will be great.

If you plan to follow more complex cycling-specific routes every month, you might want to consider mounting your smartphone on your handlebars. If not, then let’s say you will be receiving shared routes from friends who use Ride with GPS (RwGPS), Strava or Garmin Connect to create them. Most watch brands link easily to RWGPS and Strava to automatically copy routes, but if someone sends you a link to a Garmin Connect route and you don’t have a Garmin watch, there are a few extra steps of faffing required to get the route onto your watch.

Then you need to consider if your watch supports navigation and maps. Read the specs carefully of any watch you plan to buy, as some may well only support breadcrumb routes – a simple line with no mapping context – these are inadequate when following any kind of complex route. But new models of Coros, Polar and Suunto have such maps on their watches. Be mindful of Garmin and maps – any sub-$500 Garmin watch will rarely have onboard maps (use dwMAP as a workaround).

The whole topic of routing and mapping is quite complex. I’ve given you the overview you need here.

The Apple Watch is excellent for most of this, but I certainly wouldn’t use mine to follow complex cycling routes.

Apple Watch Series 11

Smart Sport Watch

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Last Updated on 9 February 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.