Coros Matches Garmin on Almost Everything — Except These Two Things

Coros is great. Just not for me.

Let me be fair before I'm critical: Coros matches Garmin on the things people usually compare. Battery life is excellent, often better. The training metrics are good. GPS accuracy is competitive. If someone tells you Coros is a serious alternative, they're right.

But there are two gaps, and neither is a spec you'd spot on a comparison table. They're both things you'd run into in the first week.

One: you can't link a streaming service

Coros states it plainly — its music-capable watches do not support music-streaming services or music apps. What you get instead is local MP3 files you drag onto the watch, plus media control for whatever is playing on your phone.

MP3 files. In 2026. Where would you even get them?

Users have been asking for Spotify for years. Coros has said it built its side of the integration and approached Spotify, but as of 2026 it still hasn't happened — and that's not really Coros's fault, it needs the other party. Either way, today it doesn't work.

On a Garmin you link the service and sync a playlist. Four of them are supported:

Leave the phone at home, run with headphones, done. That is the entire reason a watch has music storage.

Two: there is no app store

Coros has no third-party app platform. You get the watch faces Coros ships — and there are plenty, they're free, and you can build one from a photo — but you cannot install an app somebody else wrote.

Garmin's Connect IQ Store has thousands of apps, data fields and watch faces. That's the difference between a watch that does what the manufacturer decided, and one you can shape around how you actually live.

A few things I use that simply have no Coros equivalent:

A rain radar telling you whether to start now or in twenty minutes. Prayer times on your wrist. Tide tables for a coastal run. None of those are things a watch manufacturer would build, and all of them exist because the platform is open.

Where that leaves it

Neither of these is a small gap if you run without your phone, or if you've ever thought "I wish my watch showed X". Streaming music you can actually sync, and a store full of apps other people built — those are the two things I'd miss on day one, and they're why I stay with Garmin.

So rather than arguing about brands, the useful question is which Garmin actually fits how you train. Three questions gets you there, and from there you can compare the features side by side:

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