Forerunner 165 vs 170: ¿Vale la pena la diferencia de $100?

Day 69: Forerunner 165 vs 170 — Is the $100 Difference Actually Worth It?

Garmin released the Forerunner 170 and immediately people started asking whether they should upgrade from the 165 — or skip it entirely and grab the 165 for $100 less.

The answer starts with one important fact: these two watches are built on the same hardware.

Same display, same sensors, same GPS

Both the Forerunner 165 and 170 share a 1.2-inch AMOLED touchscreen, Garmin's Elevate Gen 4 optical heart rate sensor, single-frequency GPS, and the same Bluetooth and ANT+ connectivity. You are not getting a sharper screen with the 170. You are not getting more accurate GPS. The physical watch — the part that sits on your wrist and actually measures things — is essentially the same.

That is the foundation of this comparison. Any difference between these two watches is a software difference, not a hardware one.

What the 170 adds

The Forerunner 170 introduces a few features the 165 does not have. The two most notable ones are Training Readiness and Smart Wake.

Training Readiness is a single score that combines your sleep, HRV, recovery time, and training load to tell you how ready your body is for a hard effort today. It is a useful feature for people who train frequently and want a daily readiness check without piecing it together from separate metrics. The 165 gives you HRV status and Body Battery, which cover similar ground — just without combining them into one number.

Smart Wake is an alarm that wakes you during a light sleep phase rather than at a fixed time. Handy, but not a reason to spend an extra $100 on its own.

There are also some additional training load metrics and coaching tools on the 170, but for most runners, these additions sit in the background more than they get actively used.

The 165 is still an excellent watch

None of this is to say the 165 is lacking. It tracks GPS, heart rate, sleep, HRV, stress, and Body Battery. It has an AMOLED screen that looks great. It handles running, cycling, swimming, and strength training. The Garmin Coach integration is there. The Connect app ecosystem works the same on both watches.

For the vast majority of people — casual runners, weekend warriors, first-time Garmin buyers — the 165 covers everything they will ever actually use.

The price makes the decision easy for most

The Forerunner 170 costs $299. The Forerunner 165 can be found for around $199, and since it has been on the market since early 2024, it gets discounted regularly — sometimes even lower.

That $100 gap is real. If you train casually, run a few times a week, and are not the type to open a Training Readiness dashboard before every workout, the 165 gives you ninety percent of the experience for two-thirds of the price. Right now it is probably the best affordable Garmin on the market.

The 170 makes sense if you are a more structured athlete who genuinely wants that daily readiness score, trains across multiple sports with coached workouts, or is specifically coming from an older watch that lacked modern health metrics entirely.

Not sure which one fits your training?

If you want to see every difference between the two side by side — feature by feature, only the things that actually matter — the compare tool makes that easy.

Compare the Forerunner 165 vs 170 →