Ever since it ushered in the GPS running watch era way back in 2003, Garmin has been turning out some of the best fitness trackers in the business. Many companies have tried to keep pace, but today I’d say the majority of the beeps on race start lines still come from folks firing up a Garmin sports watch.

But Garmin isn’t the only option, and if you’re on a tighter budget, you should look at Coros. Coros’ formula of big battery life, impressive training tools, and budget-friendly pricing puts the brand firmly in the mix among the best running watches that you can buy right now. The Coros Pace 4 ($249) is a prime example.

Reviews editor Adrienne So and I have spent months testing the Coros Pace 4. We think it’s not only a serious rival for Garmin’s own entry-level trackers, but one of the top-value fitness watches going. Here’s why.

Serious Staying Power

Unrivaled battery life has been Coros’ main selling point since joining the GPS arms race in 2018 with the original Pace running watch. I’ve left Coros watches in drawers for weeks. When you come back, they’re still good to go. It's all very Nokia 3310. The Pace 4 keeps that train rolling with a whopping 41-hour GPS battery life. That's more than double the endurance of the Garmin Forerunner 265 ($350) and the Garmin Forerunner 570 ($550).

The Pace 4 packs enough dual-frequency GPS-tracking juice to cover a 24-hour 100-miler, or a good 3- to 4-day hike on a single charge. You have to trade up to a Garmin Instinct 3 ($400) to get anywhere near that on a Garmin with an AMOLED display.

In testing, the Pace 4 was impressively frugal. It burned an average of 3 percent for an hour’s max-accuracy GPS activity and lost no more than 2 percent overnight. If you’re training three or four times a week for an hour, you can strap the Pace 4 on and happily forget about the battery for weeks.

The Coros Pace 4 sticks with a winning design formula: simple styling in an impressively lightweight, 32-gram package. It’s minimal for a sports watch, and I found it really easy to wear 24/7—even tucked up in bed. That's vital if you want to unlock all the training, sleep, and recovery insights.

It also now packs a bright, punchy 1.2-inch AMOLED touchscreen that brings all your tracked stats to life—crucially, without sacrificing battery life. It’s not the biggest display, I found it worked best with three to four stats onscreen mid-workout.

There are trade-offs, though. The Pace 4 is a bit plastic, lacking the premium materials you’ll find on the comparable Forerunner 570. While the excellent AMOLED display is easy to read in all conditions, it’s not quite as bright, or scratch-resistant, as the 570’s display either. The Pace 4 successfully avoids looking cheap. There’s a nice understatement to it. But I personally think the Forerunners are a bit better looking.

Coros keeps the controls simple with the touchscreen, two buttons, and a digital crown, making it easy to scroll and move through your data. We also love that you can opt for a nylon or silicone band when you buy the watch. I’m a big fan of the nylon strap for comfort. Adrienne prefers the convenience of soaping and rinsing a silicone band to handwashing the sweat out of a nylon one.

Training Smarts, Not Life-Taming Tools

With features like offline music, NFC payments, speaker andmic for calls, voice tools, and an improving Garmin Connect IQ app store, Garmin has closed the gap on smartwatches like the Apple Watch. The Coros Pace 4 daily smarts are a little ways off.

With the Coros Pace 4, you’re buying a fitness, performance, and training tool—not a smartwatch. You get notifications, weather, and a built-in mic that makes it easy to take post-run training notes. I mainly use this to catch those “eureka!” thoughts or important to-dos that always seem to surface during my runs, rides, and hikes.

There’s also onboard music storage for MP3 files (who owns those anymore?). But there’s no third-party apps. If contactless payments and streaming tunes are non-negotiables, stick with Garmin.

However, when it comes to sports tracking and training analysis, the Pace 4 packs the same tools you find on all Coros watches, right up to the top-tier Vertix 2S ($699). It measures everything you need to get serious about your training and supports most sporting goals, whether you’re just starting cycling, running Couch to 5K, or preparing to race a marathon.

Coros offers tools like structured workouts, useful information about whether your workouts are productive, peaking, or maintaining, what your fatigue level is, and recommended recovery times. It also has more in-depth features like Virtual Pacer, marathon training plans and fitness benchmarking with VO₂ max and lactate threshold estimates.

Beyond workouts you get all the usual suspects: activity, move alerts, sleep score and stages, plus stress, heart rate variability, and menstrual cycles—a good smattering of the holistic health stuff. The heart rate readouts weren’t 100 percent infallible—but show me an optical that is. For the most part, it performed well up against the leading chest straps. It struggled sometimes during interval runs, when I shifted gears quickly. But that’s common for wrist sensors.

Unfortunately, it does come up a little short on navigation. There’s breadcrumb navigation, but you’ll have to go a little up the Coros food chain to the Pace Pro ($299) if you want offline maps. But otherwise, in my testing, the Pace 4 handled everything from covered forests to tricky urban routes as well as pricier rivals like the Garmin Forerunner 970 and Apple Watch Ultra 3, even if Garmin’s mapping and navigation tools offer more depth.

As I’m writing this, an email from Coros just hit my inbox, announcing an update that adds new tools to all of its watches, including a pacing strategy tool, hill alerts that reveal the lumpy bits up ahead, and a hybrid fitness mode.

Garmin isn't the only brand that continuously rolls out new training features. Coros' software wizards are also working to future-proof your watch with new tools and features across the lineup. These features often apply to past-gen devices, unlike brands like Apple, which often introduce new hardware every year so that new updates can be restricted only to the latest devices. If you want insulation from the compulsion to constantly trade up, Coros is the way to go.

Oh, and while some Garmin watches have the incredibly useful front-facing flashlight, the Pace has a screen-based torch that’s just harder to direct when you’re scrabbling around for run kit in a dark hotel room, trying not to wake your partner, or running on a dark stretch of road.

Big Performance, Small Price

Coros watches tend to be cheaper than their closest Garmin rivals. At $250, the Coros Pace 4 costs the same as Garmin’s entry-level Forerunner 165. It's a lot cheaper than the last-gen Forerunner 265 ($450) and its replacement, the Forerunner 570 ($550).

The gap can close once Garmin watches start to hit the sales and discounts (which happens fairly frequently). Coros watches are rarely discounted, but provided you’re OK with a simpler design and fewer smartwatch tools, the Pace 4 is a cracking option that already represents seriously good value. If you’ve never considered a Coros, the Pace 4 should be your sign to have a closer look.

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