It’s nearly the end of January, which means you might be thinking of giving up on your well-meaning New Year’s resolution of getting out and running more often. Don’t give up! It’s very normal to pull back from your initial new year bounce, but any exercise is good exercise.

If you’ve been hitting the treadmill or the roads and trails to get your running levels up, you might have considered investing in a decent running watch. You might even be a seasoned runner looking to upgrade your current wristwear to something more modern.

Two of the go-to brands for runners in this day and age are Apple and Garmin. The former’s Apple Watch helped to popularise smartwatches and is the bestselling smartwatch worldwide. If you have an iPhone, I’ve found the latest Apple Watch models, the Series 10 and Ultra 2, track outdoor runs and training sessions excellently with tight integration to the iPhone with accurate GPS routing, plus it’s easy to connect and upload to other apps such as Strava.

For the running-only approach to watches, Garmin is the industry leader. Its Forerunner series provides great GPS and, importantly to marathon runners and those who simply don’t want to charge every day, much better battery life than the average one-day Apple Watch.

But a duopoly on any kind of tech is boring. Surely there are other brands out there worth your attention and, ultimately, money? In search of the best alternatives I checked out the latest running watches from the competition. Maybe they’d even turn out to be better than Apple and Garmin?

I settled on the Coros Pace Pro (£349) and Suunto Race S (£325), dedicated running watches that are priced to compete with the Apple Watch Series 10 (from £399). Garmin doesn’t sell a watch in this exact price range, but I’ve tested the comparable Garmin Forerunner 265 (£429.99).

I’ve been very impressed with both the Coros and the Suunto, testing both across iPhone and Android, with both watches offering OLED displays not always seen on their products, but I lean towards preferring the Suunto. Perhaps it's the garish but unique orange band of my review unit with speckled details and the brand name emblazoned - not a look for everyone, but I love it. It makes the comparatively dull black flat-screen device itself look jazzier. It’s also available with subtler straps.

Suunto uses a bright OLED screen on the Race S with a combination of stainless steel and plastic body to keep the weight down but still look and feel premium. You navigate the operating system with the buttons, scrollable crown or touchscreen and after a day or two everything feels familiar. I like how I can simply hold down one button to silence all notifications indefinitely, rather than this being several taps away.

But the best thing about both watches is they’re not really smartwatches. You can get notifications but not apps. These aren’t extensions of your phone like the Apple Watch is. These are pure running watches, and the data they give you after a few runs is invaluable, and that’s their main function. They both lack the ability to make contactless payments or stream Spotify - things that both Apple and Garmin offer.

The Coros Pace Pro is the chunkier and available with a silicone or nylon strap (I tested the former but would have preferred the latter) and also has buttons, scrollwheel and touchscreen. The screen looks nicer than the similarly sized 1.3-inch display on the Suunto and feels better at displaying more stats and information. But I prefer Suunto’s software simplicity - you can scroll through options to view your recent training stats, sleep and other data, plus customisable watch faces let you keep this information at a glance 24/7. The slimmer Suunto is more comfortable to wear in bed for sleep tracking, too.

Coros has an accessory for charging that is one of the cleverest I’ve seen. Rather than the Suunto’s traditional USB cable in the box, the Pace Pro comes with a rubberised nub on a keyring with a charging connector nestled inside. You attach this to your keys and when you need to charge, remove the plastic connector and plug it into the back of the watch. This then accepts any USB-C cable to charge it up. It’s great, acknowledges your phone or laptop probably has the same charging port, and means you can carry a way to charge at all times.

The Pace Pro trounces the already-excellent battery life of the Race S, though. Coros’s watch keeps on going and going, easily lasting 20 days with light use, and the watch’s crowning feature in my book. Suunto offers more like eight or 10 days.

Comparing both watches’ GPS accuracy involves crimes against fashion, donning one watch on each wrist and hitting the roads in all my runners’ garb. Glancing down at both watches, they kept excellent and comparable distance tracking. Bringing up my aerial run routes on each app shows the lines sticking to roads and pavements where cheaper tech often thinks I’ve run through the corner of a building.

You also get on-wrist live mapping from both watches, complete with ‘non-routable’ maps, which show you where you are with a breadcrumb trail of where you’ve been overlaid on a classic style map, but it doesn’t use GPS to tell you exactly where you are, just if you’ve retrodden your previous path. It’s handy if you’re out without a phone for Google Maps or if you are on a trail run and want to head back the way you came. You can also create routes in apps like Strava and import them into the Suunto app, and then use the map on your wrist during a run to make sure you’re going the right way. It’s excellent.

Coros has the same functionality, but it’s not as easy to figure out, and you have to manually sync routes to the watch even if they’re in the app already.

Both apps dig further into your running data than Apple lets you, and are comparable to the Forerunner 265’s insights but for less money. Neither app requires a subscription, unlike Fitbit or Apple. Coros lays out your distance, pace, effort, best km time, average heart rate, efficiency, training load and more at first glance, with detailed graphs for such nitty gritty as “aerobic power”. Apparently I have some of this but probably need more.

It cleverly records stride length, and of course, the all-important km split times for when I’m trying to run to pace. Use the watch for a couple of months, and the overview of weekly and monthly stats is in-depth and fascinating. It’s better than the Suunto app, which presents similar information but less intuitively. I got used to it, though.

Both watches show your vital stats during runs thanks to always-on screens. It’s so useful to glance down and see your pace, time and distance. It’s all you need. Apple gives you this with the Apple Watch, but it’ll also ping you about Uber Eats offers and everything else you have switched on and will be begging for the charger by bedtime. Coros and Suunto are pure running gadgets, and I only bang on about it because the Pace Pro and Race S offer complete packages for any level of runner at about £100 less than the equivalent Garmin watch, and they undercut the Apple Watch, too.

If you’re looking to upgrade your running watch but are nervous to move away from Apple or Garmin, or indeed buy your first watch from a brand you might not have heard of, I can say with confidence that the Coros Pace Pro and Suunto Race S are more than worth your hard earned cash. If I were buying, my heart says get the Race S with the orange strap but my head says get the Pace Pro because of the phenomenal battery life.

Either way, the running watch competition is thriving in 2025. Apple and Garmin aren’t about to be lapped, but Coros and Suunto are gaining on them.

You can purchase the Coros Pace Pro and Suunto Race S from Amazon.