Garmin - Lily 2 Active

Let me start by saying I have spent way too many hours researching the best smart watch for my needs. All the different options and features are overwhelming. So my hope is I can save you some time and stress if your needs are similar. I am starting to count calories and workout again with a mix of strength training, pilates, walks and running. I wanted something that could track my calories burned, step tracker, heart rate monitor and obviously simply tell time without being too big on my wrist. Also receiving reminder notifications from my phone and messages were important too. I've gotten many cheap fitness watches over the years that never lasted long so it was time to spend some more money on one. I have an android, so at first I went with the galaxy classic 6 43mm in silver. The rotating bezel was awesome and the watch had everything I needed and more, but as a female the size was way too big on my wrist and the silver color made me look like a spy kid. The bezel made it look chunky. I returned it and researched Garmin instead. Vivoactive 5 I considered but many reviews said it was not worth it. Has too big a watch face for me anyway. The forerunner 165 is great if you care about detailed running metrics at a lower cost. I ran a half marathon for a college elective and only really learned about many of the metrics from that class. So if you're big into running, I'd definitely recommend this one. Still a bit too big for my wrist though. The venu 3s I also highly considered and is a popular choice amoung smart watch users. Has all the features you need, but still was too big for me at size 41mm. This one is on the pricier side but has more features and a longer battery life. It's great for an all around fitness and lifestyle watch. If you have the money and don't care about the size as much, I recommend this one and almost got it myself. I finally landed on the lily 2 active. The smallest Garmin watch I could find at 38mm. 2 side buttons, and it had all the features I was looking for as mentioned above but could see myself using more features as time went on. I really didn't feel I needed anything too complicated. The screen is in black and white vs color, but as a previous review had said, if I want color I can just look at my smartphone. I decided to buy the lily 2 active and am so happy I did. It's the perfect small size for me and looks sleek. Even has sleep score and body battery functions, which will get more accurate as time goes on. The silver color does NOT make me look like a spy kid. The lines on the screen took a little time to get used to, but are not a big deal to me. I love that I can choose what notifications I want to receive on my watch on ALL my phone apps. If you want to see the feature comparisons in detail side by side you can search "Garmin product comparison" in your browser which I found helpful. If you have any questions I'd love to help if I can!

Garmin Lily 2 active. There’s no smaller watch with GPS. If 9 days smartwatch mode / 9 h GPS is enough for you, have a look at it.

Lily 2 Active because it was the smallest face that had the activities I do most frequently on the watch, meaning I don't have to correct my logging anymore! Also ANT+ to my indoor bike & treadmill is what took me to Lily 2 Active vs just Lily 2 (Vivosmart 4 to Lily 2 Active)

I use the [Garmin Lily 2 Active](https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/1196650/) watch. I’m a very petite person and it has one of the smallest faces out there for a smart watch. It does constant heart rate monitoring, abnormal heart rate alerts, and has excellent sleep monitoring. It’s waterproof so I can wear it in the shower, which is nice since I like the water practically boiling. It’s about $300 but the price has been well worth it for me.

I debated between Vivoactive & Lily 2 Active, and settled on the latter just because it’s slimmer and more comfortable. It has all the basics I need and a good battery life. It’s geared toward women but I don’t see why a guy couldn’t wear it. You can always change the band. The green looks pretty dope.

Garmin Lily 2 Active Had a Fitbit before. It was horribly overestimating calories burned and steps.  My Garmin is a fair bit more accurate (I've compared it with heart rate monitors and other devices, I was a test subject for a friend's sport science study on the topic with multiple devices)

The problem is the clumsy band attachment that sadly make it less suited for a thin wrist than it could have been. The larger Garmin Lily2 **Active**, has a better band arm design though.

That’s not true.- it’s called Activity Tracking, the Venu 3 has it and I’m pretty sure also on VA5/6 and Lily 2 Active.

Sorry, I don’t really fit the audience for your question but I’m gonna share my thoughts anyway. I had a Fitbit Charge 5 (aka basic tracker) for three years, during which time they replaced it once because it died from me wearing it swimming. It started falling apart this year so I decided to replace it with an upgrade. Over a period of several weeks I tried out two Garmin watches (Lily 2 Active and Venu 4) as well as an Apple Watch Series 11 and I ended up going with the Garmin Venu 4. There were some things I liked more about the Apple Watch but I really didn’t enjoy the way any of their health or fitness was set up. Everything is weirdly separated out, the calories were way overestimated, and I felt like the rings were an annoying gimmick. I’m not super athletic but I do exercise consistently and every time I wore the Apple Watch to work out I found myself wishing I’d worn a Garmin instead. The health and fitness feedback from Garmin has been really useful for me, and in particular I’ve found the stress tracking, body battery, and recovery metrics insightful as I try to maintain my exercise alongside a classic winter mental health drop. That being said, I would never pay full price for the Venu 4. I used an Optimity 20% discount and even with that I feel like it was a bit expensive for what it is. The design of the watch feels clunkier than the Apple Watch, and for something that costs over $100 more at full retail it definitely doesn’t have as many features. If I cared about stuff like answering calls or texts or just smart features overall I’d be more bothered by Garmin’s paucity, but I actually had a lot of that turned off on the Apple Watch too.

I was using a Fitbit Charge 5 with a premium subscription from November 2022 up until a few weeks ago, and have been in a big back and forth with a couple of Garmin devices (Lily 2 Active and Venu 4) and an Apple Watch Series 11. I’ll share my (limited) experience. Between the different devices, the Fitbit was best at capturing me lying in bed before falling asleep. Both Garmins and the Apple Watch only seem to start their sleep session recordings when I actually fall asleep and don’t capture how much difficulty I might have with falling asleep. The Fitbit was also best at recording me going back to sleep after waking up in the morning. The Fitbit had the greatest amount of awake time for each night, I think because it counted any restlessness as a full minute of being awake, whereas the Garmin app’s sleep breakdown separates that more. On the other hand, Garmin sleep tracking seems to overestimate how long it takes me to go back to sleep in the middle of the night, compared to both Fitbit and the Apple Watch. I haven’t looked too closely at differences in how the sleep scoring works between devices but I did notice that my scores were lowest on Fitbit because they accounted for both how long it took me to fall asleep and my heart rate while sleeping. But Garmin’s sleep tracking interface has some separation around your heart rate during the night, and there’s more focus on “stress” while sleeping, which is based on HRV readings. The sleep tracking in the Apple Health app is more bare bones than the other two, and the heart-related data is based on sampling throughout the night as opposed to continuous tracking. I don’t really like the sleep interface in the Apple Health app because it makes it hard to look at details for different days or really look at specifics of your data. The Garmin devices have by far had the most questionable SpO2 readings, though I’m not sure if this is an issue with their sensor, the fit of my watch band, or if they just have the most difficulty with my sleeping positions. Also when I did a sleep study with take-home equipment the Fitbit’s sleep stages matched the medical estimates pretty closely, but I wasn’t wearing anything on my head. My Fitbit usually showed my deep sleep on the lower end and REM on the higher end, but both Garmins show more deep sleep and less REM by comparison. The Apple Watch is in the middle. I hope this is helpful! It’s been hard to pick a Fitbit replacement because I got so used to the way the Fitbit tracked everything.

I really agree with your assessment about not having buyer’s remorse but the watch also not feeling like it’s worth the price. I had a period where I was testing out the Venu 4, a Lily 2 Active, and an Apple Watch Series 11. I ended up with the Venu 4 because the features made the most sense to me but I wish I felt more enthusiastic about it. A part of me is still considering selling it and going back to one of the other watches, but I do appreciate the extent of fitness insights it has even though I’m not an athlete.

I think my overarching problem with the Venu 4 is that I don’t feel like it has a strong sense of its own design language in the way the other Garmin watches do. Personally I hate the look of the bulky, tactical watches but those at least have a strong aesthetic throughline to them. I actually don’t really mind the flip phone style OS that it has because it makes me feel like the watch is quieter than a “real” smartwatch. But I do feel like it’s kind of rough around the edges in some ways. Some of the screens feel like PowerPoint slides and others feel like more thoughtful presentations of data. The thing that gets me more is the design of the case, particularly in comparison to the Lily 2 series but also just other circular smartwatches. It just feels so… bland? And the gaps between the metal and plastic parts of the case make the watch look cheaper. I’d love to know if there’s an explanation for that I’ve missed. For me the Apple Watch has better design language but it was too much “phone.” If they made a Lily watch with the Elevate 5 sensor (so ECG and better sleep tracking) I’d switch pretty quickly.

How do you compare the HRV data between the Apple Watches and the Garmin watches? I tried an Apple Watch Series 11 but it seemed to measure HRV differently.

Garmin Lily 2 Active - the active is the only Lily with built in gps. It’s just beautiful, it wins for aesthetics and perfect on a small wrist. It won’t have all the features your Apple Watch does, but it’s worth a look.