The Coros Pace Pro has landed to take on Garmin — and it takes the fight directly to the Forerunner 965.
The Garmin Forerunner 965 was one of the first big multisport watches to feature an AMOLED screen and remains one of the best options to buy right now.
It’s not cheap though. Thankfully, strong options are emerging priced below the Forerunner 965 – and that includes the Coros Pace Pro. The Pace Pro also packs in a color AMOLED display along with many of the features you’ll be paying more for on the 965.
We’ve lived with both watches, getting to know the good and the not-so-good. We explain whether you can save some money on a feature-packed multisports watch by going for the Pace Pro or whether it’s worth spending more on the Forerunner 965.
Price and versions
Both the Forerunner 965 and the Pace Pro are available in just one size and come in the pick of three colors. It’s black, grey, and blue for the Pace Pro and yellow, black, or white for the FR965.
All versions are available for the same price, so that’s $349/£349 for the Pace Pro and £599/$599 for the FR965. There are occasionally deals on the Forerunner 965 as it’s been around slightly longer, which can see that price drop below the £600/$600 mark. It’s usually not by a huge amount and still hovers around that launch price.
So, the Coros Pace Pro is the cheapest of the two watches by quite a considerable amount.
Winner: Coros Pace Pro
Specs comparison table
| Product name | Coros Pace Pro | Garmin Forerunner 965 |
| Price | £349/$349 | £599/$599 |
| Display | AMOLED | AMOLED |
| Case size | 46mm | 47mm |
| Waterproof rating | Up to 50 metres | Up to 50 metres |
| Screen size | 1.3-inch, 416 x 416 | 1.4-inch, 454 x 454 |
| Multiband/Sat IQ mode | Yes | Yes |
| Heart rate sensor | Optical and ECG | Optical only |
| Topographic maps | Yes (downloadable) | Yes (preloaded) |
Design, display, and build
The overall looks of these watches are undeniably sporty. You’re getting polymer cases, removable silicone straps, and of course AMOLED displays.
Size-wise, the Forerunner 965 is the larger of the two, with its 47.1mm case sitting larger on your wrist compared to the 46mm one on the Pace Pro. Side by side, they’re similar in stature and weight. Both are also waterproof up to 50 metres making them suitable for pool, open water swimming,g and of course keeping them on when you jump in the shower.
Garmin’s watch gives you more physical buttons with five in total, while Coros opts for two. One of those buttons is a rotating dial that lets you twist it to scroll through menu screens and also works with its onboard mapping support.
Then we get into the screens. The Forerunner 965 features a 1.4-inch, 454 x 454 resolution AMOLED, while the Pace Pro includes a 1.3-inch, 416 x 416 AMOLED. The Garmin has a larger and higher resolution display, which does seem to fill the case slightly more than the screen on the Pace Pro. The quality of the two displays is strong. They’re both pleasingly bright, colorful, and easy to view in bright outdoor light. Both can be set to keep the display on at all times, which will see battery life drain quicker when that mode is disabled.
In terms of protecting those displays from scratches, you’re getting Gorilla Glass DX on the 965 and mineral glass on the Pace Pro. You’re not getting the best available scratch protection and we’ve actually managed to scratch the 965 during longer-term testing.
Winner: Draw
Smart features and OS
Garmin and Coros rely on their own in-house operating systems that make them compatible with Android and iOS and offer largely similar experiences when paired to an Android phone or an iPhone. You’re also getting access to web apps if you prefer to look at your stats on a bigger screen.
If you care about linking these watches to third-party apps like Strava, Apple Health, Google Fit or TrainingPeaks, there’s strong integration for those big names, and syncing data via the 965 and Pace pro to apps like Strava is a very slick and seamless.
The on-watch experience on the two watches sees Garmin and Coros take similar approaches. You’re mainly swiping up and down from the main watch face screen to get to your stream of widgets or to view smartphone notifications. Holding down the top left button on the 965 or the bottom right button on the Pace Pro gets you into the watch’s quick settings, while the top right physical buttons get you into the workout tracking mode. Fundamentally, while Coros gives you fewer buttons, getting around feels almost identical.
You’re getting pretty slick performers in general here with no worrying signs of lag when navigating menus, launching modes, and settings menus. One difference we’ve picked up is when viewing maps. The Pace Pro is much quicker when refreshing maps as you move to explore a new section.
In terms of smartwatch features, the Garmin gets you more on the front. Along with staples like notifications and weather forecasts it offers contactless payments, music controls, a music player, access to Garmin’s storefront, and useful daily features like its morning reports. The Pace Pro covers notifications, and a music player, but that’s where things pretty much end. There’s no storefront to tap into. It does offer the same 32GB of storage to play with as the 965, though unlike Garmin’s watch doesn’t let you load music from music streaming services like Spotify.
The overall smartwatch experience is not only more complete on the 965, it’s also more polished. If you want a good blend of a smartwatch and a sports watch, it’s better on the Garmin.
Winner: Garmin Forerunner 965
Battery life
AMOLED screens are power-hungry, which means you’re going to make some trade offs with the battery performance you’ll get from the Pace Pro and the 965. Especially when compared to Garmin and Coros watches that include more efficient transflective displays.
Looking at the promised day-to-day battery life numbers the Pace Pro promises 20 days or 6 days when you enable the always-on display mode. The 965 in comparison offers 23 days or 7 days with the screen on 24/7. You’re looking at similar numbers here we’d say based on our testing, with features like GPS in use, these watches last on average 5 days and closer to a week without GPS in play. Opt to use them with the raise-to-wake display modes and you can more comfortably push through a week and closer to those 20+ day battery life.
In terms of GPS battery, there are some clearer differences. In the best GPS accuracy modes, the Pace Pro promises 31 hours compared to 19 hours on the 965. When using the Pace Pro’s all-systems GPS mode, that number jumps to 38 hours, which is more than the 31 hours offered through 965’s GPS-only tracking mode. Basically, the Pace Pro offers more staying power when tracking outdoors.
Both include useful battery management and usage modes, though we’d say the ones on the Pace Pro are far more useful and insightful. When it comes to charging, there are different setups to deal with. Garmin uses the same proprietary charging cable that’s bundled with most of its watches. The Pace Pro uses a small keychain charger that requires a USB-C cable to power it up. We’d say the 965 is a touch quicker to fully charge up than the Pace Pro, which can take a couple of hours whereas things are a little more rapid on the 965.
Winner: Pace Pro
Tracking performance
At the core, these watches are multisport ones that want to take care of tracking your runs, rides, and swims and can also keep tabs on activities in between those core modes. Both offer triathlon modes for example, and aim to cover indoor workouts including strength training. If you ski, there’s support for that too on the Pace Pro and the 965, while the Garmin will appeal to golfers with the Pace Pro lacking that same dedicated support.
They’ll give you access to training plans for runners, the ability to create workouts including interval ones on the watch, and can dish out insights fuelled by your training and workout history.
If you’re spending most of your time training outside, you’re getting dual-band GPS watches, giving you the best available GPS technology to boost accuracy when tracking near tall buildings or heavily wooded environments. We’ve found the GPS tracking performance on these two watches to be solid on the whole. We’d be inclined to say that the 965 has been a touch more reliable in our tests and looking much closer at the GPS tracks, but these offer solid GPS tracking.
Indoors, we’ve found for activities like pool swims, indoor rowing, and cycling sessions, they performed similarly in terms of accuracy and for metrics like pace, distance covered, and capturing more activity-specific metrics.
For heart rate monitoring, it’s a case of performing well for steady-paced workouts and struggling more at high intensities. A criticism you can level at most optical wrist-based heart rate monitors. If you care about heart rate tracking, pair up an external sensor instead. It’s not a horror show on either watch, but they can have their moments.
The Coros Pace Pro additionally offers an ECG heart rate sensor, which you won’t find on the 965, so if you like the idea of more accurate on-the-spot readings to for a closer look at your general wellness (as opposed to scanning for serious heart health conditions), the Coros Pace Pro gives you that.
A surprising shared feature here is the ability to view full topographical maps on the 965 and the Pace Pro. You’ll need to download them to the Pace Pro first, while they’re already preloaded onto the 965 making it easier to get out and start putting them to good use.
Having AMOLED displays makes viewing maps on both watches a great experience and as already mentioned, moving around those maps feels smoother to do on the Coros. If you want more feature-rich mapping and navigation features, Garmin has more in its locker. Features like ClimbPro ascent planning, Nextfork navigation, and projected waypoints are among the extras you’ll find on the Forerunner 965 whereas the Coros focuses on giving you maps and making sure they’re well optimized for that AMOLED screen. There’s turn-by-turn navigation on both, but you’ll only get that when creating and uploading routes on the Pace Pro.
Both are useful training tools as well, so they’re going to throw metrics and data aplenty at you to tell you how long it takes to recover from a tough workout, when you should train, and if your volume of training is good or bad.
They also offer daily activity and sleep tracking and want to monitor your stress. They’re not impeccable sleep and daily activity trackers, but they have more good days than bad days.
A lot of these insights rely on the accuracy of the optical sensors tracking things like heart rate and stress as well as capturing sleep reliably. We found the watches typically told us roughly similar things, though the presentation of that data felt more glanceable on the Garmin.
It gets busy looking at those insights in the respective companion phone apps, but on the watch, things feel a touch slicker on the Garmin. Especially more glanceable metrics like Training Readiness and Training Status.
Winner: Garmin Forerunner 965
Verdict
Those are our key takeaways from living with the Garmin Forerunner 965 and the Coros Pace Pro. Both are great in different ways and are two of the best multisports watches you can buy. So how do you pick between the two? Here’s our verdict:
Buy Coros Pace Pro if…You want a better value multisport watch that offers good overall performance and features like maps and dual-band GPS for less money.
Buy Garmin Forerunner 965 if…You want a better mix of a smartwatch and sports watch with the best mapping and navigation support and better-presented training analysis.
Also consider: Polar Vantage M3 – If you want an AMOLED multisports watch with strong sports tracking, good training analysis, and the most insightful and reliable sleep tracking on a sports watch, the M3 is worth taking a look at.
