Suunto Run review — A great alternative to pricey Garmin watches
Why you can trust Live Science
Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best ones for you. Find out more about how we test.
The Suunto Run is a great, affordable fitness tracker running watch that has a seriously compelling array of features at a relatively low price.
Garmin-baiting highlights include breadcrumb navigation of routes and offline music playback. They make the Suunto Run a serious alternative to a Garmin Forerunner 165 Music, for less money.
Heart rate accuracy is perhaps the key drawback of this otherwise punchy watch. It’s no use for weights-based gym sessions, and while run tracking results are much better, you can’t always trust its readings in the first handful of minutes of a workout.
The Suunto Run was released in June 2025 and costs $249/£199/$449. Suunto keeps things simple, with no extra sizes or models, and no added costs, whether you want a yellow, orange or black finish.
Suunto Run: Design
- Steel bezel
- Mid-size 46mm diameter casing
- Easy-adjust fabric strap
Key specs
Display: 1.32-in, 466 x 466 OLED
Dimensions: 46 x 46 x 11.5 mm
Colors: Yellow/orange/black/grey
Finish: Stainless steel and plastic
Sensors: PPG, dual-band GPS, barometric altimeter, compass
Weight: 36 g
Sizes: 46 mm only
Water resistance: 5ATM
Compatibility: Android 8.0 and above, iOS 16.0 and above
Battery life: Up to 12 days
The Suunto Run may be a conspicuously approachable fitness watch, with a price to match, but Suunto has not reverted to using cut-price materials to achieve that.
It has a stainless steel bezel and Gorilla Glass screen protection. The main part of the casing is tough plastic, but Suunto still offers a few snappy-looking colours to avoid any sense of a generic build or appearance.
We have highlighter yellow, but the Suunto Run also comes in orange and plain black.
If we were to compare the Run with its nearest Garmin competitor, the Forerunner 165 Music, the Run clearly wins on materials. That Garmin has a plastic “polymer” bezel and unspecified “chemically strengthened” glass, not Gorilla Glass from Corning.
The Suunto Run’s strap is also a hit for both look and feel. It’s a free-moving velcro fabric strap, one that can be adjusted to any length. It’s light, comfy and some may find it preferable to a classic silicone watch strap. It does need to be done up fairly tight to get decent heart rate results, though, as it’s naturally less grippy than a rubbery silicone strap.
This watch weighs just 36g, light enough for 24/7 wear. However, it’s not a truly petite design. The 46mm Suunto Run looks about right on our wrist, but some of you may be after something a little dinkier. There’s no smaller option.
The watch is rated at 50m/5ATM water resistant, so you don’t need to take it off when you have a shower or go to the swimming pool. But it’s not ready for scuba diving.
Even the controls go beyond the basics, too. The Suunto Run is a touchscreen watch, with two buttons on the side, next to a clicky rotary dial, which is handy for rapidly flicking through your daily stats or through the many exercise tracking modes.
Suunto has also nailed the Run’s haptics, with a little “click” like vibration as you use the crown to scroll through menus. Haptics are often a little crude in cheaper watches, but they feel great here.
Suunto Run: Features
- Dual-band GPS
- Route guidance but no mapping
- Training load and VO2 Max stats
The Suunto Run has a fairly large 1.32-inch AMOLED screen with a high pixel count of 466 x 466 pixels. Like all of today’s OLED watches, it’s sharp and clear. And while it doesn’t fill out as much of the face as an Apple Watch, that’s the norm for these exercise-focused watches.
This screen is bright enough for comfortable use outdoors, without the incredible brightness we’re seeing in some of the latest models. It’s perfectly fine for an affordable watch like this not to be at the vanguard of tech progress. However, its “raise to wake” gesture is a little sluggish, making it feel as though you’re left waiting a second to see your stats when out for a run. Not ideal.
So what can it do? The Suunto Run has a heart rate reader with the extra red LEDs required for blood oxygenation readings. It has a barometric altimeter for altitude data, and a temperature sensor too.
It, of course, has its own GPS chip for location tracking and even has 4GB of onboard space for music or podcasts.
These can be played through a pair of wireless headphones (or a speaker) only, as there’s no onboard speaker in the Suunto Run. You need to feed it digital files too, as there’s no support for streaming service downloads, which you do get in the Forerunner 165 Music.
What makes this a next-level tracker for runners is its navigation suite of features. While the Run lacks full on-watch maps, you can devise routes on Suunto’s phone app and sync them to the watch so you can see where you’re going.
It uses standard GPX file data, so you’re by no means limited to Suunto’s route creation software either. We used the Trail Router app a bunch of times during testing, for example.
Suunto also provides some decent athlete-friendly stats. There’s VO2 Max, one of the best ways to judge your progress over time, and training load, which Suunto calls Progress. The watch also shows you a recovery percentage, to give you an idea if you might be overdoing things.
A virtual coach is what the base Suunto Run experience lacks. While the stats give you some idea of how tired you may be, the watch doesn’t tell you exactly what sort of workout you should be doing in order to make progress at a decent rate. Suunto’s version of it is called SuuntoPlus, and it’s used with other watches from the brand, but not this one.
However, if you want to use a third-party training app like Runna anyway, the Suunto Run does let you create your own guided interval sessions. You just have to make them yourself, in the Suunto phone app. This is an area where the Garmin Forerunner 165 has a real advantage, though. Its coaching features are loads better at the time of review.
Suunto Run: Performance
- Good GPS performance
- Flawed HR accuracy
- Predictable major battery life loss in always-on mode
Suunto says the Run watch lasts up to 12 days off a charge, or for 20 hours of GPS-tracked activity. We’ve found that around an hour and a half of run tracking takes 10% from the battery, although how much you check your stats will change power use a bit.
To get anywhere near Suunto’s 12-day claim, you’ll need to avoid the “always on” screen mode, which displays the time all day. With that mode, you’re looking closer to 3-5 days, depending on how much exercise tracking you do. It’s fairly swift to charge, reaching 50% in just over 21 minutes, while it hits 100% after 68 minutes.
There’s good news on the tracking front, as the Suunto Run has dual-band GPS. This is where the location chip can use two sets of location frequencies, giving the watch a better chance of locking onto your signal even in challenging areas like dense forests or high-rise-packed cities.
Tracking accuracy was good in testing, with no loss of signal and very similar results recorded to the Garmin Forerunner 970. Initial triangulation could be a touch faster, though.
The heart rate readings are more of a mixed bag. In some runs, the Suunto Run’s results look perfect fine. However, on many runs the watch was very wide of the mark for the first few minutes of tracking, before finally returning to reality.
This typically plays out with the Run either recording a far too high or too low result for up to five minutes, in the worst examples. Dodgy early readings were something very common among these watches a few years ago, but the best have banished the effect. Suunto hasn’t quite yet.
The Suunto Run was also routinely very poor at recording weightlifting-based gym sessions. What you should see here is loads of short, sharp heart rate spikes during these sessions, but the Run watch largely just recorded a spike-free, meandering mush. It does just fine with longer sessions on the bike, elliptical or stepper, but just isn’t up to the task at short intervals.
Suunto Run: User reviews
The Suunto Run currently has a 4.4 rating on Amazon at the time of writing. While most buyers have only positive things to say about this running watch, there were some criticisms.
One reviewer says, as we noted earlier, the “raise to wake” function isn’t responsive enough. Another commented on the fact that there’s no app store, which is true, but not something that should put many off if you are actually shopping for a runner’s watch. Even with a Garmin, we don’t think most people use the Garmin Connect app store all that much.
Should you buy the Suunto Run?
✅ Buy it if: You want a fairly affordable OLED runner’s watch that still has enthusiast features. It has the stats you need to balance a busy workout schedule, plus neat extras like on-watch navigation and music support.
❌ Do not buy it if: You want a super petite watch or are out to predominantly record your gym workouts. The heart rate array doesn’t handle weightlifting-based gym sessions, which will throw off other stats. It’s better for cardio than lifting.
If Suunto Run isn’t for you
There are a few great alternatives to the Suunto Run, but it is one of the better options if you’re not put off by the heart rate wobbles. First up is a watch we mentioned multiple times in the review, the Garmin Forerunner 165 — or Forerunner 165 Music if you need music support.
It’s more expensive, has a smaller screen and uses cheaper materials. Several of the core parts are superior, though. It has better coaching features and a more accurate heart rate reader. And its support for music service downloads (including Spotify) will be a killer extra for some.
Coros’s competitor is the Pace 3, a long-term affordable fave. Its big difference is in screen tech. It has a transflective screen, which looks dull by comparison but leads to longer and more consistent battery life. It’s a top buy, but won’t seem as glossy in person as the Suunto Run.
Suunto Run: How we tested
The Suunto Run was used over two lengthy testing stints, allowing us to use the watch before after it had been given some time to receive an update. But unfortunately this did not appear to fix our issues with its heart rate reliability.
Start to end, the testing period lasted just under three months, and tracking activities were largely runs, gym sessions and a few bike rides, predominantly using virtual cycling platform Zwift. During dedicated testing the Suunto Run was worn as my one and only watch, to make sure I was using it to tell the time and check notifications — you don’t want to go too easy on the battery by using it as a secondary watch. And while it wasn’t worn 24/7 every single day, it was worn like that for extended periods to get a better idea of its sleep tracking abilities.
