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Garmin’s Cirqa smart band ($199.99) is new on the market, and a little bit disappointing—my colleague Meredith Dietz wrote that it only really makes sense for Garmin devotees. But to know how it stacks up against Whoop, I figured we needed a head-to-head comparison.
Whoop has long been the smart band to beat. It has a truly best-in-class app that collects your workout, sleep, and habit data, and makes it easy to see what you need to do next. It’s configurable to your goals, staying out of your way exactly as much as you need. Whoop’s downsides are the cost—you need to pay a pricey subscription fee every year—and the fact that it doesn’t have a display or a built-in GPS. Many people who wear a Whoop will have a second device, like a Garmin watch or an Apple watch, to fill that gap.
The Cirqa is Garmin’s newest smart band, and its only smart band that can track workouts and potentially compete with a Whoop. (Last year Garmin launched a “sleep band” that only tracks sleep, but not workouts.) It also does not have a display or GPS. And right off the bat it has one major weakness: the Garmin app is just not as well-designed as Whoop’s app. But maybe other aspects, including the price, will make up for that. Let’s see.
How I tested the Cirqa and Whoop
To compare the Cirqa and Whoop, I wore one on each wrist for a few weeks. The Whoop I wore is an MG, from the 5.0 generation. (I didn’t use any of the MG-only features, so this comparison is equivalent to testing against a Whoop 5.0.) In the photos you see here, the Whoop has a black band and the Cirqa has the gray band. I sometimes wore the Whoop on my bicep, but for most of my testing I had both bands on my wrists for an apples-to-apples comparison.
I slept with both devices for several testing days, logged lifestyle behaviors for at least a week, and used both for a handful of workouts, mostly walking and cycling. I made sure to do a running interval test to compare the devices’ heart rate accuracy, since I’ve found that often exposes flaws in optical heart rate sensors like the ones on both of these smart bands.
Whoop vs. Cirqa: Pricing
The first big difference between the two smart bands is how they’re priced. I’d like to discuss this first because it sets the standards for how I’ll evaluate who wins this comparison. A significant cost savings will put some extra points in the cheaper band’s corner. So let’s see how they stack up.
Whoop is sold on a subscription basis. Technically you don’t pay for the hardware, you just get it for free when you pay your Whoop membership fee. There are three tiers of Whoop membership, and the middle tier, called Peak, is the only one I recommend. It’s $239 each year. That means you pay $239 for the device with a one-year membership, but you’ll have to pay $239 again next year even though you already have the device.
The other tiers are Whoop One, for $199/year, which removes some of the more useful features and isn’t worth the small savings in my opinion. The other is Whoop Life for $359/year, which comes with an MG device. For paying 150% as much as a Peak membership, you only get two features: ECG readings, and blood pressure estimates. If you have the budget for Life, you’d be better off spending it on an Apple Watch, which offers ECG readings and hypertension notifications—and it fills that display-and-GPS gap that you may end up wanting for your workouts.
Cirqa’s pricing is a little simpler, since Garmin sells it as a device in its own right rather than a subscription perk. You’ll pay $199.99 to take the device home, and that’s where the mandatory charges end. Garmin advertises it as “no subscription required,” and that’s true. You’ll get the basic functionality.
But Garmin still kind of wants you to buy a subscription. The Connect+ subscription gets you a bunch of perks that can apply to any Garmin watch, such as nutrition tracking and on-wrist habit logging. I wrote about Connect+ benefits here in more detail.
So, to sum up the pricing:
Whoop costs $239/year for the tier I recommend (device included)
Cirqa costs $200 for the device, and optionally $6.99/month or $69.99/year for additional features
Over two years, Cirqa could cost as little as $200 or as much as $340, depending on whether you opt for the subscription
Over two years, Whoop would cost $478.
The Cirqa wins on price: whether you opt for the subscription or not, it’s cheaper than Whoop.
Whoop vs. Cirqa: Comfort and appearance
Look, there’s no getting around it: the Cirqa device is large. If you have big wrists and already wear a massive Fenix 8 (51 mm) you may not mind. But I have six-inch wrists and have worn a wide variety of smart bands, all of them smaller than the Cirqa. At 47 millimeters long, it’s bigger than the Whoop 5.0 generation, and the slightly larger Whoop 4.0, and it’s even a smidge bigger than the older, clunkier Whoop 3.0.
The Cirqa has a simple velcro strap that is held in place with 13-millimeter watch pins. You can buy aftermarket replacement bands from a variety of sellers. Similarly, Whoop’s unique clasp mechanism means you need to buy that specific band type, but there are plenty of off-brand ones out there if you don’t want to shell out for an official replacement band ($49.99 for Cirqa, $49 and up for Whoop). I find the strap material for both devices comfortable enough; no complaints.
The Whoop wins this one, due to its smaller device and lower profile. The Cirqa feels unnecessarily large and I don’t like it! Opinions will vary, but that’s mine.
Whoop vs. Cirqa: Battery life and charging
A smart band should have a decent battery life, in my opinion. It doesn’t need to power a GPS chipset or a display, and its whole value proposition is that you can put it on and basically forget about it. So I’d like to see a week minimum, and ideally a lot longer.
Over a five-day side-by-side test, the Whoop dropped 29 percentage points, and the Cirqa dropped 40. Your exact battery usage will vary based on your settings and on how many workouts you do. During this particular week, the battery usage was consistent with a 12-day battery life for the Cirqa, and 17 days for the Whoop.
The Whoop can charge with a wireless battery pack, so you don’t have to take it off to charge it. (That said, I want to take it off to charge it, but I do appreciate that the power pack allows me to charge the Whoop without needing access to a USB cable.) The Cirqa uses a standard Garmin plug-in charging cable. I do appreciate that I can use the same charging cable or dongle for all of my Garmin devices.
The Whoop wins this one due to its longer battery life and more convenient charger, but honestly both are adequate in the battery life department.
Whoop vs. Cirqa: Tracking activities
Both the Cirqa and Whoop can auto-detect activities, and tend to be pretty good about doing so. If you make sure to tag the activity afterwards, the algorithm will learn and will do a better job of guessing the correct activity in the future. I’m happy with both devices’ learning abilities, and they did usually correctly pick up the start and end times of my exercise, to within a few minutes, at least.
The Cirqa has a nice feature when it comes to on-demand activity tracking: it has a button that you can press to start an activity. With Whoop, by contrast, you need to get your phone out, open the Whoop app, and tell it to start an activity.
Otherwise, though, Whoop offers a much better experience of tracking activities. Let me count the ways:
Whoop gives me a live activity on my iPhone’s lock screen with my heart rate, zone, and activity time. Cirqa only gives me a basic notification that an activity is in progress. It’s easy to miss this notification, or for it to get buried under others that may come in while you’re exercising. This means that you can’t track the progress of your activity, and that it’s easy to forget to end the activity when you’re done.
If you get a notification from the Garmin app during your activity, and tap it to get into the app, you lose the screen that shows you your live activity. The only way to get it back is from the plus sign where you would normally start an activity. On the other hand, if you want to leave the activity screen, there’s no way to do it voluntarily. You can only end the workout, or stay on that screen.
Whoop shows more data during the activity, including heart rate zones, and where I stand relative to the amount of exercise (“Strain”) the app recommends I get for the day. Garmin only shows my time, distance, and heart rate. I hear that with a Connect+ subscription you can see more data.
Whoop can pull information from other workouts I do, like if I do a Peloton ride or track a workout with an Apple watch. It will note when I did that workout, and substitute its own heart rate readings for that time frame. Cirqa doesn’t have that ability.
Whoop wins this one, hands down. Cirqa’s manual button is nice, but it doesn’t make up for the disorganized and information-poor displays you get from the app.
Whoop vs. Cirqa: Accuracy
When it comes to sleep and recovery scores, both devices give similar readings. You can’t really judge “accuracy” for these, since there’s no objective way to say who is correct when Whoop scores my sleep as 88% and Garmin scores it as 80.
When it comes to activity heart rate, I can judge more objectively. To be honest, both devices are adequate but disappointing. Whoop’s heart rate readings can be a little unreliable—rarely bad, just not very good. It seems Cirqa is the same. Here’s the graph from when I took both of them for an interval run. The workout included five one-minute runs separated by one-minute walks. The gray line shows the readings from a chest strap heart rate sensor; blue is Whoop and green is Garmin.
As you can see, both of them are roughly correct about when my heart rate is high and when it’s low; but neither is keeping up with the chest strap in terms of actual readings. This is a missed opportunity for Garmin, since the company has a better optical heart rate sensor (the Elevate 5) that it uses in its higher end watches like the Forerunner 570 and 970, and the Venu 4. It even put the Elevate 5 in the Index sleep band, which retails for $169.99, so we know it can fit in a smart band, physically and budget wise! Why not use it here? Garmin only knows.
This one is a tie, but somehow I’m more disappointed in Garmin.
Whoop vs. Cirqa: Everyday use
Finally, I’d like to talk about what it’s like to use one of these devices day-to-day. You’ll spend a lot of time with its companion app to view your data and, hopefully, use that information to do something—whether it’s planning your training or keeping tabs on which habits and lifestyle factors might need to change.
Whoop, as I said, has the smoother app. It’s better at distilling what you need to know down to a few data points or recommendations, but it’s also better at letting you drill into whatever specific items most interest you.
Garmin’s strength, by contrast, is that it uses the same Garmin app you’re used to. If you’re already a die-hard Garmin-head, you know this app and you already have it set up the way you want. You have your favorite metrics pinned to your home screen, your favorite glances on your watch, and you obsessively check your Training Status (or your Body Battery, or whichever of Garmin’s many metrics speaks to you most).
If you use a Whoop, the Whoop app will pick up on workouts you did with a Garmin or with any other device. Garmin’s app will not do the reverse; you need to log everything with a Garmin device to get it to fully show up.
Another advantage of the Whoop app is what it calls the Journal, or what Garmin calls Lifestyle Logging. In both apps, you can mark down habits, behaviors, or other factors that might affect your recovery. For example, did you drink alcohol today? Was it a stressful day at work? Did you eat a late dinner?
The difference is that Whoop analyzes the trends in your habits, including not only the ones you logged but also ones that it detected (like how much time you spent doing intense exercise). For example, Whoop has found that morning workouts are beneficial to my recovery, while late meals don’t seem to make much of a difference.
Garmin, on the other hand, is inscrutable. It allows me to tap on the “Late Meals” card, and tells me that I have an overnight stress average of 20 when I log yes, and an average of 18 when I log no. I can also see that my overnight HRV averages 60 when yes, and 75 when no. What is any of that supposed to mean? I have to stop and think about it: “...higher HRV is better, higher overnight stress is probably bad, I guess late meals make the numbers worse? But is this worth worrying about? I’ll have to go tap through 10 other cards to see how this compares to the other five habits I’m tracking.” I’ve had this feature enabled for months and, to be honest, I simply don’t use it or see the point of using it. I love Whoop’s version, though.
Whoop wins this one. The app turns my data into things that are either useful to know, interesting to read, and sometimes even both. Garmin reports my running-related metrics in a way only a Garmin watch user can love.
And the Winner Is...
Whoop may be more expensive, and it doesn’t have the little start button, but on every other measure it’s a far better smart band than the Cirqa. It fits comfortably on small wrists, it has a better battery life, it gives more useful information during activities, it’s more readable and understandable overall, and its journal/logging feature actually analyzes your habits.
I’d recommend the Whoop for anybody who wants a great smart band experience and has the budget to do so. There’s one type of person who this doesn’t apply to: if you’re already married to the Garmin ecosystem, you will most likely be happier adding on a Garmin-compatible smart band and staying within the same app, rather than paying a new subscription fee and learning a new app. For the rest of us, go with the Whoop.
Cirqa Vs Whoop FAQ
Which smart band is better than Whoop?
That depends on your perspective! If you already have a Garmin and want something that works in the Garmin ecosystem, a Cirqa will actually meet your needs the best. If you want something cheap and accessible, the Fitbit Air (without the premium subscription) is only $99 and checks all the boxes for a basic fitness tracker. But I have to say, in my opinion, Whoop has the best app and will give you the best overall experience.
What is the downside of Whoop?
The subscription fee is Whoop's biggest downside, for sure. You have to pay the same cost every year, even though your first payment includes the device and later payments do not.
Is a Whoop useless without a membership?
Pretty much. You can't even log in to the app without a paid (or trial) membership. There are some independent apps that can work with Whoop hardware, but they don't reliably mimic all of Whoop's features and may not even be available by the time you read this.
