Fit Bit ionic or Garmin Vivoactive 3

[Jay6ixavenue]

I can't decide  whether to get the fit bit ionic, or the Garmin Vivoactive 3. Any advice on how I can choose between the two. I wanna use the sports watch  for running,walking,and Basketball. I have a strava and Runkeeper account that I know syncs well with the Fitbit,but I also have a Nike+run club account that I know works well with the Garmin. Can anybody give me advice on which would be the best option for me, please and thanks.

[WavyDavey]

Get the Fitbit.

[SunsetRunner]

If you want to store music on your watch, this is the one to get. If you are a hardcore fitness person, you might want to look at the Garmin. 

Otherwise they are really very comparable. And while I have the Ionic, I would have been just as happy with the Vivoactive, as I do not use the music feature. But I have years of Fitibit data, and a web app I created to get all my data, so I went with the Ionic.

Reviews are equally good and bad. People here tend to think Garmin is so much better, but reviewers (on the Garmin site, as well as Amazon and Google) speak to similar issues many have with Fitibit (lack of customer service responsiveness, bad HR measurement, bad GPS, not syncing, crappy phone app...), none of which I have ever experienced. 

We'll see how the Ionic app store pans out, if we get new apps soon, and what kind of apps are available.

[jocoyn]

I am on the same search. Different activities but have frustrations with my Charge HR HR zones where the dashboard on the computer is different than the Dashboard on my phone as is the HR history and I just worry about what is going on there because I actually do like to use the info. 

Since I am actually trying to push into peak zones for bits of time I would like better tracking and the fitbit is leaving very unhappy.  I think the Garmin may have better fitness features. 

I wish I had the Fitbit dashboard from a few years ago to be honest. I have an ipod so music, sure it would be nice but. the least important thing.

I plan on making a chart about what is important to me and then evaluating. My plan is to make the plunge when I meet a weight goal of 20 more lbs lost. 

Hard choice.  Looking at reviews on both sites and both seem to have their share of problems. Also look on youtube for reviews.  

[Venkats]

@Jay6ixavenue

How important it is to track your fitness progress?  How important it is to integrate with a chest heart rate monitor? How important it is to have a local music store? 

Vivoactive 3 has bells and whistles on fitness category. IONIC's strong point is the local music store however limited it may be. For an average person, either one should be good notwithstanding the fact that IONIC is new. Vivoactive is relatively cooked in the field.

If you can't take surprises wait for a few more months for IONIC.  

[mlindgren]

I don't think you're necessarily going to get objective answers when you ask this question on the Fitbit forums (or the Garmin forums for that matter). I would recommend reading DC Rainmaker's reviews of each device and seeing which one you think will work best for your needs:

Fitbit Ionic: https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2017/09/fitbit-ionic-smartwatch-in-depth-review.html

Vivoactive 3: https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2017/10/garmin-vivoactive-3-in-depth-review.html

[EvKo]

I think there is a very simple and rather objective answer. Look at the Amazon reviews: the Ionic and the Garmin came out around the same time. The Ionic has over 1,200 reviews, 80% of which are positive. The Garmin has 50 reviews with a much lower grade than Fitbit. If this is not a nobrainer, then I have not seen one yet.

[jocoyn]

Based on my experience with Amazon, 50 reviews is really not enough for the sampling to be meaningful.

[SunsetRunner]

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@jocoyn wrote:

Based on my experience with Amazon, 50 reviews is really not enough for the sampling to be meaningful.

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50? There are 1224 at the moment.

[EvKo]

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@jocoyn wrote:

Based on my experience with Amazon, 50 reviews is really not enough for the sampling to be meaningful.

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Not at all but it speaks volumes about the popularity of the watch and the interest behind it.

[EvKo]

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@SunsetRunner wrote:

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@jocoyn wrote:

Based on my experience with Amazon, 50 reviews is really not enough for the sampling to be meaningful.

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50? There are 1224 at the moment.

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There are 50 reviews for the Garmin. The Ionic has indeed 1224 reviews.

[NickAK]

I had Ionic for about 6 weeks and went back to Vivoactive 3. Here's why:

• Synchronization is extremely unreliable on Ionic, even more so if you have some other Fitbit devices added to your Fitbit app/account
• While Ionic does have support for Pandora streaming and offline music, I wish you luck trying to get that to work. Assuming your were lucky enough, I suggest you try a run outside, with the GPS, and music playing. My personal experience shows the heart rate becomes wildly inaccurate lagging behind and missing all the peaks. 
• Always On Screen: Vivoactive may not have the most beautiful, sharpest, and brightest screen out there, but it has a huge advantage of being always on. Yep, you can see time and other stats when your watch lies on the desk. You don't have to twist your arm to activate display. And you get all your workout stats without a delay. Sure, you can enable always-on during workout on Ionic! See what it will do to its battery life!
• Watch faces: the watch faces available for Vivoactive via ConnectIQ store are miles, miles ahead. My current watch face shows, in addition to time and date and current steps, calories, and distance: Bluetooth connection status, presence of unread notifications, set alarm, battery status, a chart with seven days of steps and calories and when the goals were achieved, and my steps and calories maximums in those 7 days. Just one screen. At a glance... And oh, it also shows my training performance, i.e. maintaining, overtraining, de-training, status...
• Third party apps: while there's plenty of potential for that on Ionic, two months after the release of the watch not a single third party app exists on the platform. Compare it with ConnectIQ store for Vivoactive
• Configurable workout display: Vivoactive sweeps the floor with Ionic when it comes to configuring your workout screens... Number of screens, layout, data fields. Hell, you can even add custom third party data fields like Strava Suffer Score or power
• Shortcuts: Vivoactive has a nifty page with quick shortcuts to various parts of the watch be it alarms, timers, GPS, phone connectivity and the likes. Compare it to Ionic where you can quickly invoke only two apps using hardware buttons.
• Music controls are spiffy but have a knack of disconnecting from the phone and need to be reconnected... Vivoactive somehow handles reconnecting just fine. I can count with my right hand fingers the amount of times Ionic pulled song info ("No music info available", yeah!) -- again Vivoactive handles this just fine.
• Notifications on Ionic don't support Unicode. So, if you receive messages in anything other than English (and possibly Chinese/Korean as they were added to Blaze and inherited in Ionic), you are out of luck. Russian, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew... hell, quite a few Latin-based European languages with special characters needn't apply.
• Did I mention notifications on Ionic are unreliable? Can't tell you how many times I had to re-enable the notifications in Settings, restart Ionic, restart phone, or combination of the three.
• You can't do anything with notifications: can't dismiss them on your phone; no ability to answer/reject phone calls on Android; no canned text replies -- all of this is present on Vivoactive and works well.
• No ability to connect external heart rate sensors, which means no way to get accurate heart rate readings during strength training or HIIT
• No structured/custom workouts -- you either pay for Fitbit prepackaged stuff, or you get nothing. With Garmin, you can create and schedule your own workouts, either in Garmin Connect or directly from the app
• Fairly certain Ionic doesn't supports rep/set counting in strength workouts
• Fitness stats captured by Ionic are a joke compared to Vivoactive, and don't even get started on trying to export your workouts and heart rate details into other services. As far as I know, to this date Fitbit won't give you heart rate unless a workout has GPS data
• No All Day Stress score, a nifty feature Garmin introduced across their 2017 devices to track stress based on heart rate variability
• Not sure what "active minutes" refer to in Fitbit universe, I like Garmin's "intensity minutes" better. They aren't rewarded for you just zombie shuffling along for 10 minutes... You have to show a raised heart rate
• Battery life: Vivoactive edges out Ionic with a longer life. While my Ionic would typically go for 3-4 days, Vivoactive lasts its promised 7. Last time I charged my Vivoactive was on Friday last week, or was it Wednesday? As of Tuesday, it still has 50% battery left. 
• Ionic is slow: there's a good 2-3 sec delay when you open almost any app be it weather, Starbucks card, timer, or what not

That being said, Ionic does have a bright, sharp, and terrifically looking screen, Fitbit Pay works right now and works well (while Garmin Pay still remains just a promise), there's a handy Starbucks QR code app, the weather app is gorgeous and accurate, and I like Fitbit's sleep and weight tracking much better.

So, I think there's a lot of potential for Ionic, assuming they fix the issues outlined above. But unless offline music or contactless pay or gorgeous screen are your requirements, right now you get a better value proposition with Vivoactive. Way better fitness, much more reliable synchronization and better functionality.

[bcalvanese]

I had the vivoactive 3 and it was ok, but I preferred the Ionic.

vivoactive 3 felt cheaper, and a big deal breaker for me was the vibration motor. It was so weak that you only felt it if you where sitting there waiting for it. I had 2 of them and they both had the same extremely weak vibration.

If you put your hand on the face of the device you could feel it fine though. I guess they put it on the wrong side of the device.

Another deal breaker was the battery life. I was getting no where near what they advertised (2 or 3 days at best).

The Ionic feels well built and the vibration motor works good. And the battery life is actually a little better than they advertise (4 to 5 days).

I know the Ionic has its start up issues, but I am confident that they will work that out.

I would say go with the Ionic.

[jocoyn]

Makes sense to wait a bit as they are both new and see how they smooth out.

I have had garmin devices since  the first little yellow etrex came out. in 2000, so after several handhelds, car GPS, and dog trackers I believe they build quality devices and they have been into fitness devices for a number of years. and their devices last for years which is uncommon to say about electronics.. My old first generation foretrex still 'works'. as do our old team 60Cx handhelds. Only device I have had an issue with was an Astro 220 which was set to communicate on frequencies near the Emergency management bands and got fried by VHF radios. They did replace our handheld though, even after it was out of warranty. and later models were designed to avoid that interference.

Garmin has never had brilliantly intuitive interfaces but packs a lot of function in what they do make. A lot of the complaints i see are battery life. fair enough. with GPS on it will eat battery life. 

I have been pleased with my fitbit charge HR though not so much with the Dashboard once they changed it - so I guess for a  month or two I will keep superglueing the strap back together until more info surfaces about the two devices. I do like some of the features of the vivoactive more but want to see how they both play out.

[Crazy-Fritter]

I'm picking up a Vivoactive cheap for black Friday to try it out..... I've had multiple Fitbits and would like to check out the competition 😉

[Tylerama]

Ditto. Just ditched my fourth charge HR after the band peeled away yet again for a Garmin vivosport - wish i'd made the change sooner.

[Jorix]

I have both the Garmin Fenix 3 and the Fitbit Ionic. I use the Fitbit as a 24/7 activity tracker with some limited smartwatch capabilities and for researching the SDK as a developer. Also, casual workouts such as my daily bike commute are tracked on the Ionic. Whenever I head out for more serious workouts, such as running or longer (non-commuting) bike rides, I use the Garmin as it's way more accurate. I use the HRM-RUN chest strap with the Garmin which is the most accurate for HR monitoring. Especially when doing intervals because it's much faster with picking up varying heart rates than optical sensors.

Now, your question was wether you should pick the Ionic or the Vivoactive 3. I'd say, it depends; if you want a fancy watch and aren't too serious about your workouts, go with the Ionic; it's perfectly fine. However, if you want to have the most accurate results and the most stats, then the Garmin might be your pick. Also, you'll have the option to add even more sensors later on; The Ionic doesn't track cadence, ground contact time, L/R balance, etc unlike Garmin.

Good luck deciding!

[Tylerama]

Have a look at the Garmin website, the range of products is huge.. sports, automotive, marine, even aviation navigation and flight computing. They even make dog activity trackers ffs.

Fitbit is for people who want to casually monitor their activity, with basic stats.

Garmin is for people who are more serious about their fitness and want to monitor in more detail, Fitbit aren't even in the same league, to be quite honest, imo.

The Forerunner range are probably what you're after or perhaps the vivoactive 3.

No, I don't work for Garmin or Fitbit, not even the same industries.

[Tylerama]

This x 100 ! 

'Now, your question was wether you should pick the Ionic or the Vivoactive 3. I'd say, it depends; if you want a fancy watch and aren't too serious about your workouts, go with the Ionic; it's perfectly fine. However, if you want to have the most accurate results and the most stats, then the Garmin might be your pick. Also, you'll have the option to add even more sensors later on; The Ionic doesn't track cadence, ground contact time, L/R balance, etc unlike Garmin.'

[Tylerama]

Yeah, cos Amazon reviews are always reliable ! Even some of the poorest quality products get 4 or 5 stars.