I used a vivoactive 4 for quite a few years and I was overall happy with it. I have been looking at the 5 for months and my wife bought one for me for Christmas. There is a bit of a learning curve, perhaps slightly frustrating at times but now that I've worked through that, actually prefer the interface. I still occasionally forget how to do things like advance set in a work workout. I did just notice a couple scratches on edge of the bezel and crystal. I don't think I am particularly hard on it wearing it exclusively on the back of my wrist, where I often (especially in the beginning) work the 4 on the inside of my wrist, where I believe it was more at risk of being knocked around. I think the crystal was better protected by the bezel, so I may need to be more aware of what I may be doing to cause the scratches. My wife has frequent problems with shut downs on here Watch from a competitor, when we take a boxing class which I never experienced with the 4 or 5 Garmin. I have suggested she talk to others in the class about her experience. Overall, I would purchase again.

This watch is a step up over the Garmin Vivoactive 4. I own both the Vivoactive 4 and the Vivoactive 5. The Vivoactive 5 has a clearer display and the battery stays charged much longer than my vivoactive 4. I only get about two days of charge with the vivoactive 4. The Vivoactive 5 gives me eight days before I need to charge again. I like the Vivoactive 5 very much.

Does exactly what I was hoping for without overwhelming me. I was looking for something to help me understand my fitness and track my exercise as well as sleep. I still wanted it to have smart watch features as well, though. It does all of this well. How I have it set up, the battery lasts me 7-10 days. Battery life was another important feature to me.

I like my watch and would recommend it to others. It tracks a lot of metrics that were confusing at first, but have grown on me and now I appreciate. Overall high marks, very nice products Issues: It is not great at monitoring heart rate. Some time it reads low values and I move my watch a bit and then reading recovers. Maybe it a problem common to all wrist type measurement, so I understand why some people also buy the chest monitor. I plan to, but they currently have a long lead time. It also seems to have some delays in syncing Active Activity with my iOs health app. Might be an iOS issue. Finally, a second charging cable would be helpfuil. I ended up buying a set on-line, and did buy the older stayle USB A since most of my home chargers are this type. But great product overall, Santa might be bringing my wife one.

I'm so picky but after trying the Apple watch Series 9, Garmin Vivoactive 6, Garmin Venu 3S, the Vivoactive 5 is perfect for me. It does what the Vivoactive 6 does but not as much storage capacity, which I really don't need. And the price is excellent!

I bought my vivoactive 5 the end of December as a Christmas gift to me. I had a venue square which I had gotten December of 2021. The venue square was not giving me any issues, I just wanted the vivoactive 5 for some features that the venue didn't have. I'm still learning the features of the vivoactive but I'm very happy with my new watch. I gave my daughter the venue square, she's enjoying it as much as i did.

The watch looks nice and it's not bulky. It's very similar to the Apple watch just that you can't answer text on the watch. The battery goes low if you are getting all ur notifications. If you're getting it for the training feature it only goes up to a half marathon, so if you're doing a marathon it won't give you suggestions.

# Garmin vívoactive 5: Great Fitness Watch, Terrible Sleep Tracker ## Rating: 2/5 for Sleep Tracking I've been using the Garmin vívoactive 5 for sleep tracking over several weeks, and while it's a solid fitness watch, the sleep tracking is fundamentally unreliable. If accurate sleep data matters to you, look elsewhere. ## Major Sleep Tracking Failures ### 1. **Completely Misses Sleep Periods When You Change Locations** The watch frequently fails to track entire sleep sessions if you move to a different bed or room mid-night. Multiple times, I woke up in the middle of the night, moved to a different bedroom, went back to sleep for 2-3 hours, and the Garmin simply stopped tracking—pretending I was awake the entire time. This isn't a minor glitch; it's a fundamental flaw that makes the data useless for anyone dealing with fragmented sleep. ### 2. **Cannot Distinguish Between Sleep and Watching TV** The watch regularly mistakes lying still on the couch watching TV for sleep. On multiple occasions, it logged 1-2 hours of “sleep” that was actually me lying down watching Stranger Things or other shows. If the device can't tell the difference between unconscious sleep and conscious TV watching, what's the point? ### 3. **Fails When You Remove the Watch** If you take the watch off during the night (for a shower, for example), it ends the sleep session entirely. No recovery, no second tracking period—just missing data. This happened multiple times and makes the watch unusable for anyone who might need to remove it briefly during the night. ### 4. **Co-Sleeping Interference** When my toddler slept in bed with me, the watch's tracking became even less reliable. Movement from another person seems to confuse it, leading to either missed sleep periods or wildly inaccurate wake time calculations. ### 5. **Inconsistent Data Accuracy** Comparing the Garmin's data to my actual sleep experience revealed huge discrepancies: - **Dec 14**: Watch showed 3h 45m of sleep ending at 3:26 AM. Reality: I was awake 2:30-6:00 AM (3.5 hours), then slept until 8:30 AM. The watch missed an entire sleep period. - **Dec 15**: Watch claimed I went to bed at 10:51 PM. Reality: I was watching TV until midnight. - **Dec 17**: Watch showed no data at all despite wearing it all night. When your sleep tracker can't even get the basic start/end times right, the detailed sleep stage data (deep/light/REM) is meaningless. ## What Actually Works To be fair, the watch does work reasonably well when: - You sleep in the same bed all night - You don't remove the watch at any point of the night and reapply it - You're sleeping alone - You go straight from awake to bed (no TV time) In these ideal conditions, the sleep stage breakdown seems plausible, and the efficiency calculations are probably in the ballpark. But who has perfect sleep conditions every single night? ## The Bigger Problem The fundamental issue is that the Garmin treats sleep tracking as a simple motion + heart rate algorithm. It has no way to verify whether you're actually asleep or just lying still. It can't handle anything outside its narrow assumptions about how sleep “should” look. For someone trying to address chronic sleep issues—the exact use case where accurate tracking matters most—these failures make the watch actively unhelpful. You can't identify patterns or measure progress when the data itself is fiction. ## Bottom Line **Buy this watch if:** You want a fitness tracker with decent battery life and you only care about general sleep trends (e.g., “I usually sleep 7 hours”). **Don't buy this watch if:** You need accurate sleep data for medical reasons, sleep therapy, or tracking actual sleep patterns. The tracking is too unreliable to be useful for serious sleep ----- **Tested with:** Garmin vívoactive 5 **Testing period:** December 2024 (2+ weeks of nightly use and external journaling) **Use case:** Sleep restriction therapy for chronic middle-of-night insomnia​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Love this watch. Perfect for my fitness tracking.

The item doesnt work. Was so excited to use this and i was so disappointed