Apple Watch vs Garmin vs Strava for Group Challenges

If your friend group, family, or team wants to run a fitness challenge together, which platform actually pulls it off?

Short answer: none of them, if your group uses more than one. Long answer below.

The setup

Three platforms, three philosophies:

• Apple Watch + Apple Fitness. Rings, sharing, and competitions inside the Apple ecosystem.
• Garmin + Garmin Connect. Watch-first, deep health metrics, native group challenges.
• Strava. Activity-first social network, club challenges, cross-device but premium-gated.

Apple Watch for group challenges

Strengths. Beautiful ring system, daily reminders, dead simple to share activity with iPhone contacts. Seven-day competitions are easy to start.

Weaknesses. Apple-only. The moment one friend is on Android or wearing a Garmin, they cannot join. Challenge formats are limited to closing rings and matching exercise minutes. No custom goals, no shared distance targets, no creative formats.

Right for: all-Apple friend groups who like the ring metaphor and short competitions.

Garmin for group challenges

Strengths. Native group challenge feature with step, distance, and active-minute formats. Works across the full Garmin lineup. Genuinely good for runners and cyclists who already live in Connect. We wrote a full breakdown of Garmin Connect group challenges here.

Weaknesses. Garmin-only, fixed formats, leaderboards trapped in the app. Sleep and HRV challenges are not natively supported even though Garmin tracks all of it.

Right for: Garmin-wearing endurance groups who want simple step or distance targets.

Strava for group challenges

Strengths. Cross-device in theory (it accepts uploads from Apple Watch, Garmin, Coros, and more). Strong social feed. Strava clubs with monthly distance and time challenges.

Weaknesses. Everyone in the challenge has to actually be a Strava user, which is a friction point. Challenge formats are mostly distance and time. Some features sit behind Strava's paid subscription. Full breakdown in what Strava club challenges get right (and where they fall short).

Right for: active runner and cyclist friend groups who all signed up for Strava years ago and like the feed.

The mixed-device problem

In real friend groups, families, and teams, people wear different things. One person has an Apple Watch from work. One bought a Garmin for the half marathon. One uses a Fitbit. One is on a Pixel Watch. Two refuse to wear a watch at all.

In that group, every platform on this list excludes someone. The challenge dies because half the participants cannot see the leaderboard.

There are two ways to fix this:

1. Force everyone onto the same platform. Good luck.
2. Use a tool that sits on top and accepts data from all of them.

What "sitting on top" actually means

A challenge layer that:

• Imports activity from Strava automatically
• Imports activity from Garmin automatically (steps, sleep, HRV, the lot)
• Accepts manual entry for anyone who does not want to connect anything
• Puts everyone on one live leaderboard

Meryus is built for exactly this. Connect Strava, connect Garmin, or log manually, and you all appear in the same challenge. No "sorry, we cannot count Sarah's runs because she switched watches" conversation in week two.

For the wider field of options, see the best apps for group fitness challenges.

Recommendation by group type

• All Apple Watch friends, short competition: Apple Fitness sharing is fine.
• All Garmin runners, monthly step or distance: Garmin Connect challenges are fine.
• All Strava users, monthly distance: Strava club challenges are fine.
• Mixed group of any kind: use a cross-platform challenge layer. That is the only thing that survives past week two.

What to do when the group is mixed

You do not have to make everyone switch devices, and you should not try. Three practical options:

1. Track a metric every platform records. Steps, distance and minutes exist everywhere. Elevation and heart rate zones do not translate cleanly.
2. Let people log by hand. One person on no wearable at all is not a problem if manual entry sits on the same leaderboard as the synced data.
3. Sync what you can, type the rest. Runs and rides from Garmin or Strava post themselves; gym sessions and classes get logged in a few seconds.

Once the board is shared, the underlying watch stops mattering. That is the whole trick.

Which metric to pick

For sensible target numbers, see monthly step challenge goals. For a structured format, use the 30 day fitness challenge plan.

Quick start

Start a challenge on Meryus, share the join code, and let your group bring whatever watch they already own. Prebuilt formats live in the challenge templates.