Garmin Venu 3 Review

Garmin has long been a leader in GPS and fitness watch industries, and the Venu 3 is a strong component of their lineup, straddling the space between a smartwatch and a dedicated fitness tracker. Packed with advanced tools for running, cycling, and even GPS navigation, it doesn't skimp on smartwatch conveniences like call and text functionality, plus calendar integration when synced with your phone. While its high-end performance comes with a premium price, the Venu 3 stood out as one of the top fitness trackers in our testing.

Activity Tracking

The Venu 3 is one of the top-scoring fitness trackers in our lineup, thanks mainly in part to excellent activity tracking capabilities and accuracy. We evaluated performance in this metric by assessing the Venu's ability to track different cardio workouts, gym workouts, auto-activity detection, and other general activity tracking capabilities.

Cardio Tracking

Cardio workouts can encompass a variety of activities, including walking, running, biking, ellipticals, and more, and we tested the Venu across as many types of cardio workouts as we could. We examined the accuracy of pace, heart rate, distance, and duration. Every time we found the Venu to be impressively accurate and easy to use.

Starting an activity on the Venu requires only a few button types and swipes to make the right activity selection, and then you're off. During activities, the Venu 3's data fields are intuitive and easy to read, plus you can customize them to show any combination of popular metrics like your duration, distance, pace, heart rate, and zone. You can also add more specialized metrics such as cadence metrics and run power metrics to different screens.

We found the heart rate measurements during an activity to be spot on during live view and post-workout when compared to the industry-leading Polar Chest strap. After training extensively with a Chest strap monitor and needing to rely on a phone or other device to view the data, one of our testers noted, “I loved the spot-on accuracy of my heart rate and zone on the Venu, even during max effort sprints. Having the instant visualization and confirmation of my heart rate available from my wrist saved so much time during training.”

Cyclists will be pleased to know that the Venu 3 pairs with many cycling power meters via ANT+ and Bluetooth, and you can view Current Power, Average Power (total), and Power Zones on the watch.

Workout Tracking

Workout tracking on the Venu 3 is pretty intuitive. After testing all kinds of trackers in this area, we know that rep counting still has a ways to go for accuracy in the industry, but found the Venu 3 above average, and easy to manually adjust.

During strength workouts, the Venu will help you track your reps and sets. Though the rep-counting feature accuracy varies greatly depending on the exercise, we loved that the large touch screen let us edit both the reps and weight after each set. When viewing our data afterwards, the Venu 3 tagged the right workouts under half the time, but this is still above average for most fitness trackers that don't even have the capability at all.

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Like other Garmins, the Venu 3 has plenty of workout options and exercises to choose from, such as strength, HITT, Elliptical, and more. You can select from pre-built exercises that target muscle growth or 30-minute full body blasts, as well as create a custom workout in the Garmin Connect App. These workouts will guide you through the reps and exercises, displaying the time or rep scheme before you advance to the next set. For the pre-built exercises, there are animations to show you what the correct exercises are. There's a slight learning curve to navigating between sets, but it's a great feature to have to help take your workouts to the next level.

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Auto Detect for Walks/Runs

Despite stellar performance across most activity tracking, we felt the Venu 3's auto activity detection somewhat less than impressive. It did kick in on several of our runs, but started a little later than the settings said it should. For most people looking to maximize their activity tracking, relying on auto detection isn't going to be their default anyways, but if you're looking for a tracker to pick up activities in the background, the Whoop 5.0 and Oura Ring Gen 4 have better automatic activity detection capabilities.

Other Tracking Features

There are over 50 trackable activities available on the Venu, falling into categories such as running, cycling, eBiking, swimming, snow sports, and some team sports. There's also more recreation activities such as tennis, pickleball, Golf, and stand-up paddleboarding. You can create custom activities, but you'll lose out on many activity-specific metrics to track. For instance, in skiing, the Venu can track total runs, but across other activities, you'll only get total duration and heart rate.

The Venu 3 includes a GPS sensor that works off a variety of satellite navigation systems, providing an impressive degree of accuracy. There's a built-in altimeter for accurate elevation tracking, which enables elevation on your run, as well as tracking flights of stairs in everyday walking. Though you can view run routes using the GPS data afterwards, the Venu 3 doesn't have the ability to navigate you on a previous route, reverse route, or custom route like the Garmin Forerunner 265 does. You can navigate to saved points and locations, though.

Lifestyle Tracking

While most trackers have reasonably accurate step tracking, the Venu 3 is ideally suited for tracking lifestyle metrics, even more so than activity tracking.

We used a Polar heart rate strap monitor as the source of truth for testing heart rate data, but we may as well have used the Venu 3. Its real-time heart rate measurements were spot on with the chest strap, and we noticed no significant lag. Many fitness trackers also struggle to track accurately as your heart rate climbs towards its max, but the Venu climbed right with us from a baseline heart rate mid run, to all out sprints, and right back down.

Tracking your sleep at night is one of the most common reasons to use a tracker, and the Venu 3 does a great job. Like other Garmins in our lineup, we noticed that the sleep scores that Garmin awards us were consistently lower than other trackers, such as the Whoop, but they were at least consistent. Sometimes consistency is more important than accuracy, so that when an outlier score pops up, you can course correct. The Venu 3 accurately tracked the time we fell asleep and woke up. The Venu will also track your sleep stages, though that is hard to verify since even professional-grade equipment doesn't have the means to measure sleep stages with precision. New to the Venu 3 and some other devices in the Garmin universe is Nap detection, and we were overjoyed to take a nap at work, in the name of research. Nap detection on the Venu 3 is acceptably accurate as well.

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There are a plethora of other lifestyle and health tracking indicators that the Venu 3 can help with. Flights of stairs climbed during the day is an easy one thanks to the built-in altimeter, but there are also monitors and reminders for activity and movement, ECG, HRV, pulse oximetry, respiration, and even jet lag. All of these are designed to help you paint a comprehensive picture of your body stats and guide you towards the results you want. Though not all will track automatically in the background, it is easy to navigate to and track any one of these metrics from your watch.

Data & Dashboards

Though the Garmin App can be a bit overwhelming at first, we were really impressed with the Venu 3's ability to display data both on the watch and in the app. Even better, there's no subscription required.

Many data points and metrics are visible right on the Venu 3, particularly after an activity is completed. Every morning, a Sleep Report is visible on the watch. One of our testers noted that “I loved waking up to the sleep report every morning. Not only did it let me evaluate my sleep and provide guidance on my overall readiness & recovery, but it also gave me a few extra precious moments in bed.” You can view current and trend data for things like heart rate, HRV, and sleep data right from the watch.

Though we've read that some people find the Garmin Connect app overwhelming, we love the comprehensive & customizable data fields that are available right on the home screen. We like the breakdown of fields that segment out Today's Activities for a list of events tracked during the day, like workouts, sleep, and even ECG recordings, as well as the In Focus view for a quick synopsis of your data. The At a Glance view that, somewhat counterintuitively, goes into more detail on a variety of metrics. Each one of these fields is able to be clicked into for a detailed graph or chart, and explanations on the metric.

Garmin's ability to provide in-depth analysis and insights is truly impressive. It's not just about access to raw data—you also receive clear, meaningful interpretations that help you understand your current performance and progress. Many charts, such as sleep score analytics, allow for data overlays, enabling users to compare multiple metrics simultaneously. One of our testers particularly appreciated the running and fitness overlays, noting, “I loved seeing the different overlays that compared my heart rate data with elevation, cadence, and pace after a run. That level of detail gave me a deeper understanding of how various performance factors interact and where I should focus to improve.”

Features & Ease of Use

A fitness tracker is meant to be a seamless, around-the-clock companion, making ease of use a crucial factor. The Venu 3 is one of the most intuitive trackers across our lineup, and ranks highly for both the features and ease of use.

The Venu 3 has a lightning-quick setup and learning curve. With a large touch screen and only two buttons, it's easy to get the hang of navigating around the watch's interface. Even without any adjustments, we were very impressed with the access to the most commonly used features like settings, activities, and apps. After testing and being able to customize more screens and data, we felt like we could navigate the Venu 3 just as easily as a phone; something that can't be said for most trackers. We particularly love that Garmin will direct you to a phone for settings you can't edit right on the watch, and a push notification will pop up on your phone, taking you right to that setting's page.

Our lead tester praised Garmin for making workout data easily accessible, allowing users to check their stats without interrupting their exercise. Navigation is intuitive, combining bezel buttons with standard touchscreen gestures. The screen is responsive to taps and swipes, with vibrant colors and clear readability. Like most watches, when wet, you can experience phantom taps and touchscreen issues.

The Venu 3 stands out above some of the other Garmin watches in our lineup, with the ability to answer and talk on phone calls, right from the watch's speaker and microphone. You can also receive and view photos right on the watch, and respond to messages. Unfortunately for iPhone users, Apple iOS blocks any non-Apple messaging features, so you'll need an Android to respond to messages. Garmin also easily connects to third-party apps like Strava, making sharing your workout progress even easier.

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The Venu also boasts some more typical smartphone integrations like weather and calendar apps, a mobile wallet feature, and Find My Phone options. What's better is that the Venu 3 does all of this without requiring a subscription. Users can customize their Garmin experience through the free Garmin Connect IQ app, though some third-party-developed options may come with an additional cost.

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Wearability

The Venu 3 is a very comfortable watch despite its larger screen size, and we didn't notice any snagging on sleeves or straps.

We appreciated that the Venu 3 isn't quite as sporty as other watches like the Fitbit Charge 6 or as bulky as the Garmin Forerunner 265. Its sleek style makes it much more likely to blend in at both the gym and in the office.

Battery

The Venu 3 has some of the most impressive battery longevity of any model we tested, lasting well over 10 days despite daily activity and GPS tracking.

GPS usage and navigation features will degrade battery life quickly, dropping the run time for the Venu down to around 20 hours, but that is still more than enough time for some major workouts and adventures. Going the opposite direction, with battery saver enabled, Garmin states that the battery can last up to 26 days, but you lose most tracking features.

Should You Buy the Garmin Venu 3?

The Venu 3 is a sleek fitness tracker with above-average capabilities across activity tracking, lifestyle tracking, and smartphone integrations. It's a great option for those who don't want to sacrifice performance in any specific area, value detailed analysis, and want the upgrade features that the Venu offers over other watches in the Garmin lineup. If you're looking for a decent blend of smartwatch features without sacrificing the accuracy and depth of activity tracking and analysis, then this may be the watch for you, especially if you have an Android device to pair it with.

What Other Fitness Trackers Should You Consider?

iPhone users may be dismayed by the limits of smartphone integrations with non-Apple devices, and so should look to consider either the Apple Watch 10 or Apple Watch SE Gen 2. Both of these watches lean heavily towards the smartwatch side of activity trackers, and do sacrifice some things like weight and battery life, but can still accurately track your sleep and heart rate while offering fully-enabled phone calls and texting from the watch. If you like almost everything about the Venu 3 but the price tag, the Garmin Vivoactive 5 is a pared-down version that can still track a plethora of activities, and not to mention your heart rate and sleep. The Vivoactive has impressive accuracy, but a little less detail in advanced metrics and elevation data when compared to the Venu 3.