The Coros Pace 4 Pro offers comparable GPS performance, longer battery life and a much lower price, while Garmin’s Forerunner 970 wins on training analysis and smartwatch features.
Both the Garmin Forerunner 970 and the Coros Pace 4 Pro sit firmly in the premium end of the sports-watch market, but they aim at slightly different buyers. In testing for Tom’s Guide, the reviewer used the Garmin through a year of marathon training, including the London Marathon in April, then switched to the Coros for Frankfurt Marathon preparation before comparing the two side by side on repeated runs and a recent 20-miler. The result is a comparison that is less about which watch is good and more about which one offers the right mix of capability and value for a runner’s needs.
Price remains the most immediate divide. Tom’s Guide puts the Garmin at $749/£629 and the Coros at $449/£389, a gap that is large enough to shape the decision on its own. The Garmin does sometimes become more attractive in seasonal sales, particularly around Black Friday, while Coros is described as far less likely to discount its watches. That makes the Pace 4 Pro the more accessible option from the outset, even before features are considered.
On hardware, the two watches share much of the same formula: slim bodies, bright AMOLED screens, titanium bezels and a strong focus on comfort for all-day wear. The Coros is slightly lighter and slimmer, with a marginally larger 1.47-inch display, and Tom’s Guide says it is the more appealing watch to wear. Garmin counters with five physical buttons rather than Coros’s three, plus a built-in flashlight that the reviewer found more useful than the Coros screen-based torch. Both include an altimeter, barometer, optical heart-rate sensor and multi-band GPS, but Garmin also supports external sensors over Bluetooth and ANT+, while Coros uses Bluetooth alone.
The wider gap emerges in training features. The Forerunner 970 adds a Training Readiness score, Running Tolerance, Running Economy when paired with Garmin’s HRM 600 chest strap, plus Hill Score and Endurance Score. Coros covers the essentials well, including training load, VO2 max estimates, race predictions and overnight HRV-based readiness guidance, but Tom’s Guide says Garmin goes further in analysis and interpretation. Both watches handled GPS impressively in the reviewer’s testing, including twisting city routes and a long interval session, and both were broadly matched for route tracking accuracy. Heart-rate readings were also close to a chest strap most of the time, although the Coros showed the occasional brief spike, giving Garmin a slight edge.
Battery life is a notable strength for Coros. The Pace 4 Pro is rated for up to 21 days in watch mode and 30 hours in multi-band GPS, compared with 15 days and 21 hours respectively for the Forerunner 970. In the reviewer’s real-world use, with always-on displays active and the most demanding GPS settings enabled, the Coros lasted about seven days between charges, while the Garmin needed topping up after four or five days. That is a strong result for a slim AMOLED watch, and it underlines one of the Coros’s biggest advantages: endurance without bulk.
Garmin still pulls ahead where software breadth matters. According to Tom’s Guide, the Forerunner 970 offers NFC payments, offline music with streaming service support, a more capable Connect IQ app ecosystem and far richer watch-face customisation. The Pace 4 Pro can store MP3 files copied manually to the watch, but it lacks payments and an app store. Navigation is similarly split: both provide offline maps, turn-by-turn directions and climb guidance, but Garmin’s routable maps can generate or reroute paths directly on the wrist, whereas Coros relies on preloaded routes created elsewhere. Taken together, that makes the Forerunner 970 the more complete sports watch, while the Pace 4 Pro is the sharper buy for runners who want excellent core training tools, strong battery life and a lower price.
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