Garmin challenges: how Connect challenges work, and where they run out

Garmin is the rare platform that never gutted its social features. While Fitbit switched its challenges off in 2023, Garmin Connect kept its badges, kept its monthly leaderboards, and kept letting you start a step race against a friend. If you own a Garmin, the challenge system is alive and genuinely good.

It has the same ceiling every brand’s built-in challenges have, though, and it is worth knowing exactly where that ceiling sits before you try to rope in the whole group chat. Here is what Garmin does, and what it cannot.

The three things Garmin calls a challenge

They get lumped together, but they are different features doing different jobs.

Badges are the solo layer: hit a milestone and Garmin hands you one, no opponent required. Monthly challenges are Garmin’s own themed leaderboards, a low-stakes way to be ranked against strangers pushing the same goal. The one most people mean by “a challenge with friends” is the third: open the Challenges section, create one over steps, distance or intensity minutes, set the dates, invite your Connect friends.

And to be clear about the paid tier, because it causes confusion: Connect+ is Garmin’s subscription for extra insights and coaching, and the ordinary challenges are not behind it. You do not need to pay to race a friend.

Where it runs out

Every person in a Garmin challenge needs a Garmin. That is the whole ceiling, and it is the same wall Fitbit’s old challenges had and Apple’s ring competitions still have: the race is built out of one brand’s data, so it can only include that brand.

In practice that is the problem, because your group is not single-brand anymore. The keen runner has a Garmin, sure, but one friend switched to an Apple Watch, another is on a Fitbit through Google, someone rides with a WHOOP. A Garmin challenge cannot see a single one of them. The feature is not weak. It is fenced.

Racing across brands, and the steps trap

To include everyone you need two things Garmin’s own challenges do not offer: an app that reads every brand, and a metric that means the same thing on each. The second one traps people. Steps feel universal and are not: a wrist, a phone and a ring count the same walk differently, so a cross-brand step race quietly rewards whoever wears the twitchiest sensor. The fair units are active minutes, which key off effort against a shared guideline, and kilometres.

That is the lane Fit, the cross-brand fitness competition app, is built for, and it is ours, so read this with that in mind. Fit holds a standing crew ranked on active minutes and distance, pulls Garmin Connect data in next to Apple Health, Fitbit and the rest, and turns the friend on the other watch back into an opponent. Where Fit loses: if your whole group is already on Garmin, Connect’s own challenges and badges are right there, free, and tie into the ecosystem you are living in. Fit is for the mixed group Garmin cannot assemble.

What to do with this

1. All-Garmin group: use Connect challenges. Create one over intensity minutes or distance, invite your friends, done, no Connect+ needed.
2. Collect badges for yourself, but do not mistake them for competition; they rank you against you.
3. Mixed group: move to a shared unit. Active minutes or kilometres, and an app like Fit that reads every brand, so the friend who left Garmin is not fenced out. The fitness competition apps guide compares the rest, and a cross-brand step race runs in any of the step challenge apps.
4. Set it up once, properly. Length, size and stakes decide whether it survives; the challenge-design guide is the recipe.