I walked 12,000 steps with the $799 Apple Watch Ultra 3 and the $199 Garmin Cirqa: Here’s which came out on top

I’ve been writing about fitness trackers for the better part of a decade, and one thing I always do when unboxing a new device is look at how well it does the basics. One of these easy-to-measure basics is how many steps I’ve taken; hence, these Tom’s Guide walking tests were born.

A few weeks ago, I unboxed the Garmin Cirqa — Garmin’s first screenless tracker, which is set to take on the likes of the Fitbit Air and the Whoop 5.0. My first walking test compared the Garmin Cirqa to the Fitbit Air, and it was pretty disastrous. Since then, I’ve customized the button on my Cirqa and worn it continuously for the past few weeks.

To see if things had improved, I strapped it on and walked 12,000 steps with the $799 Apple Watch Ultra 3. Of course, I don’t think most people would be trying to choose between these two devices — they are extremely different. But I wanted to see how the $199 Cirqa kept up with Apple’s most expensive and smartest smartwatch. Read on to find out which came out on top.

I walked 12,000 steps with the $799 Apple Watch Ultra 3 and the $199 Garmin Cirqa

If you’ve read one of these articles from the Tom’s Guide fitness desk, you’ll know that manually counting 12,000 steps is out of my remit, so I rely on a trusty $5 clicker tool from Amazon.

I manually click every time I take a step. For this test, I wore the Apple Watch Ultra 3 on my left wrist and the Garmin Cirqa on my right. Both trackers count your steps using an internal accelerometer, which measures the swing of your arms.

Each swing counts for two steps, and it doesn’t matter whether you wear your watch on your dominant or non-dominant hand. It doesn’t matter if you walk with your hands in your pockets or holding a cup of coffee; the accelerometer should still measure your body’s movement. It does, however, make a difference if you’re pushing a stroller — no, Apple, I promise I haven’t done a 45-minute elliptical workout while trying to get my toddler to sleep.

As with all of the best Apple Watches, the Apple Watch Ultra 3 doesn’t tell you the number of steps you’ve taken during a specific workout; instead, you see an overall number of steps throughout the day. Probably because steps aren’t actually that useful a metric beyond a certain point, but annoying for me when writing these articles. For this comparison, I downloaded a third-party Pedometer+ app onto my Apple Watch.

I split this test into three walks, and when I got home, I downloaded all the data and compared the results:

As you can see, this one is incredibly close. The Garmin Cirqa came out on top, but by 100 steps, as it counted 103 steps more than I did manually, whereas the Apple Watch Ultra 3 missed 242 steps.

It goes without saying that when we’re talking about a hundred steps, this isn’t much at all over the course of 12,000. The average person takes 2,000 steps a mile, so missing or overcounting 100 in the grand scheme of things won’t really make a difference to your tracking.

It’s also important to point out, again, that I don’t think many people would be choosing between these two devices, as they are designed for very different consumers. Instead, the test was to see how Garmin’s $199 screenless tracker could keep up with a watch four times its price, and I’m impressed.

One thing I did (which I’m sure made my Garmin Cirqa’s data more accurate) was to customize the activity on the side button. When you unbox the device, it’s automatically set to Timed Activity, and in my experience, these activities don’t give you an accurate step count goal.

Instead, I changed the button to automatically start a walk. To do this, head to your Garmin Connect app and click the Cirqa icon. From there, go to Activity Options and then Edit to change the On Device option.

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