The Garmin Edge 850 and Wahoo Elemnt Roam 3 bike computers are the two major brands' mid-level offerings, albeit there’s nothing mid-level about either’s price tag.
At a penny shy of £400 for the Wahoo, and another £70 on top for the Garmin, you’ll need to shell out big time in order to own either unit. You could also have a flagship Hammerhead Karoo 3 for similar money.
That said, in today’s ever-inflated world, both are a good chunk cheaper than their flagship siblings.
The good news is, both are excellent bike computers with feature sets and performance that will match the expectations of the most discerning riders, whether you’re ensconced in the Garmin or Wahoo camp.
The Garmin Edge 850 offers the slightly more polished experience of the two – a more intuitive interface and slicker overall performance with fewer niggles, plus Garmin’s ecosystem of lifestyle-tracking products is still peerless.
At a glance
Garmin Edge 850
- Pros: Slick performance and easy setup; class-leading screen; high-quality shell; flagship-level Garmin features
- Cons: Expensive; battery life
- Price: £469.99 / $599.99 / €549.99
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Wahoo Elemnt Roam 3
- Pros: Vastly improved screen versus Roam v2; easy to operate and set up; decent battery life; excellent navigation
- Cons: Slow to start up; touchscreen slightly laggy; thick design
- Price: £399.99 / $464.99 / €449.99
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Garmin Edge 850 vs Wahoo Elemnt Roam 3 spec details
The Garmin Edge 850 and Wahoo Elemnt Roam 3 underpin their flagship bike computer siblings – the Edge 1050 and the Elemnt Ace.
Essentially, this means they pack practically all the same features as those top-end computers, with only a few concessions. The size is the main difference – which many will see as a good thing, especially when you compare the Roam 3 to the Goliath Ace – although naturally you lose screen size and battery life.
The Edge 850 combines a touchscreen and button interface. The Roam 3 is the same, with a (new) fully functioning touchscreen to accompany the characteristic big physical button layout.
Compared to each other, the Edge 850 is the smaller, thinner device and has a sleeker finish. The underside gets colder to the touch, offering a more premium-feeling metallic quality, while the lack of buttons on the front face makes it look cleaner when fitted to a bike.
Although the Roam 3’s screen is marginally taller, the buttons impact your perspective a little, so it’s hard to tell the difference if you don’t have both lined up side by side.
The Garmin’s screen is certainly brighter, and with that comes great clarity even in bright light. The Wahoo tackles this in a different way – it has an anti-reflective screen, which helps prevent distracting glare. As a result, it (mostly) gets away with not being as bright, while this contributes to better battery life.
The 850’s screen has a 420x600 pixel count, compared to the Roam’s 320x480 pixels – it’s more detailed, with a richer colour palette, despite the improvements Wahoo has made here versus the Roam v2. Ultimately, the 850 has the sharper, clearer screen, and the reflectiveness isn’t a deal-breaker.
Both come with out-front and stem mounts, tethers, plus USB-C cables. You have what you need to run either computer as you want. The Garmin’s quarter-turn mount plate can be replaced, but the Wahoo’s can’t.
Wahoo’s out-front mount creates a neat shroud, once purported to be in the name of aerodynamics, but it still looks quite bulky on the front of a bike compared to Garmin’s (quite chunky) out-front mount.
The innards are remarkably similar, including 64GB of memory apiece. That’s enough to store 100 courses and 200 hours of detailed ride history on the Garmin, in addition to the software, maps and plethora of downloadable apps in the Garmin IQ store.
Wahoo is less prescriptive and doesn’t have a host of add-on apps available for the Roam 3, but regardless, the memory should be enough for most people's needs.
Garmin Edge 850 vs Wahoo Elemnt Roam 3 performance
Setup and customisation
Where once setting up bike computers could be tricky, it’s now easy. You download the companion app – Garmin Connect or Wahoo (as opposed to the old Wahoo Elemnt app) – turn on the computer and follow the instructions.
In each case, you take a picture of the QR-style code displayed on the computer screen with your phone, then set up the computer from there on the app. With the Garmin, you’re also offered the chance to migrate the screens and sensors you already have on an older device, which is handy if you don’t want the rigmarole of setting it up from scratch.
You can technically do the same with the Roam 3, but you need to be porting from a computer you have saved and backed up through the new Wahoo app – and at the moment, that’s limited to the Ace, Roam 3 or Bolt 3.
You can only customise the screens from the Wahoo app, while with the 850 you can do this on the device itself, as well as through the Garmin Connect app.
The Wahoo app is simpler to use – I found the navigation pathway through the app more obvious (possibly because it doesn’t serve as the catch-all app for an ecosystem the size of Garmin’s). It takes seven menu selections from the Garmin Connect app homepage to arrive at the point where you can change the fields of a selected screen.
Wahoo has stuck with its levelled screen layouts – you select the priority order in the app, then can ‘zoom’ in and out on the data screen to show more or fewer of them, using the physical toggle buttons. Garmin enables you to swap the fields for what you want having decided on the layout beforehand, and hot-swap them during a ride with a few taps of the touchscreen.
Once set up, most riders won’t mess around with their data screens much, and with both computers new pages can be added to display a different mix of fields (this is how I’d use the Wahoo, rather than with the zoom function).
In any case, both feature many ride profiles and can deliver default screens for different disciplines. The Garmin has some extra trail-friendly features and specific MTB disciplines, albeit if you’re only into off-road riding, you might consider its Edge MTB unit instead.
Kudos to Wahoo for including a default setting for recumbent cyclists, too.
Getting going
The Garmin is by far the faster of the two to switch on, so even though satellite and sensor acquisition time is similar between the two, this is the big factor if you just want to switch it on and ride.
The Wahoo loads directly into its ‘ready to ride’ screen, showing metric screens immediately, while the Garmin displays its ‘home’ screen, complete with training recommendation or the latest route you might have synced.
If you want to switch ride profiles on the Wahoo, you need to bring up the menu to do so, while the Garmin enables you to swipe to select the profile immediately.
However, you’re effectively ‘ready to ride’ when you use the Garmin, simply by pressing the start button – it presents you with more options from the get-go.
Both devices can link to a smorgasbord of route providers (such as Strava, Komoot and Ride with GPS), while Garmin offers its own if you want to keep things in-house. Strava is my preferred route builder, only because it’s the place where I publish some of my rides. This functioned flawlessly in testing of both computers.
I like that Garmin gives you the option of selecting the last-synced route – there is decent logic in assuming the last one you worked on or updated would be the one you’d want to use next. That said, it’s not perfect, given it will also show running routes you might have just created. Why?
Bringing up a route from either computer's memory is easy by tapping the relevant screen fields, and both load routes quickly.
Mapping and routing
On the road, maps display clearly. I really like the softer tones of the Wahoo map design, and its chevron-style route line is unmissable.
That said, the Garmin’s purple route line is fairly easy to pick out, too. In short, long gone are the days when fuzzy or low-definition screens used to make following a route tricky.
Turn-by-turn navigation is also easy to follow on both computers, and I never found myself wishing I was using one over the other when testing. I’m also impressed that neither has taken me down any dead-ends or mistaken paths while I’ve been using it, and they both rerouted reasonably quickly when I’d taken a wrong turning.
Neither insists on doubling back on yourself for too long, which was a bugbear of computers of old.
While you can select a location on the downloaded maps with both devices (Garmin uses its own TopoActive maps, while Wahoo uses custom-skinned OpenStreetMap maps), you can also send a point of interest from your phone to the device via the connected app. However, this comes with mixed results.
I have an iPhone, and I can send a location using Apple Maps by sharing it to the Garmin Connect app, but not using Google Maps (frustrating, given this is the mapping app I tend to use). It’s worth noting this won’t work on Android phones, either.
Conversely, on the Wahoo, I can send a location from my iPhone’s Google Maps app, but the Apple Maps connectivity consistently throws up an error message – something I hope Wahoo will fix soon.
The fly in the ointment here for both Garmin and Wahoo is that Hammerhead’s latest Karoo can work with both Apple Maps and Google Maps, so it’s not impossible to achieve – but big-tech politics is beyond the scope of this review.
Deep feature sets: GroupRide, voice prompts, bells and whistles
In testing, I’ve had my phone connected to each computer, with each capable of displaying notifications and call alerts on the device.
You can also program the bonus buttons of higher-end electronic groupsets to control each device, or use the computer as a go-between for more functions, such as music playing.
The 850 has the deeper feature set overall (with lots that many won’t use), with its GroupRide and hazard-warning features particularly noteworthy – but it's up for debate how many use these.
This kind of group-riding technology works best when as many people as possible have access to it, but here it’s limited to users of only more recent Garmins, and not other computer users. Plus, based on my riding experience to date, most hazards aren’t being flagged anyway.
Garmin offers a range of peripheral components such as its Rally power meter pedals that offer unique pedalling insights when viewed through Garmin Connect, and everything syncs with its wider health-tracking products (centralised by the Garmin Connect app).
If you’ve bought into that ecosystem already, given Wahoo doesn’t offer the same range of supporting gadgets, it’s hard to justify moving over.
That said, if you aren’t into driving data from every aspect of your life, and haven’t pre-committed hundreds or thousands of pounds to Garmin’s ecosystem, the Wahoo Elemnt Roam 3 feels more focused on the core cycling experience. It offers a heart rate monitor and Trackr radar as part of its peripheral mix, and will pair to power meters and everything else. For many, that’ll be enough.
And yes, both have virtual bells.
One thing I’ve particularly enjoyed is the new speaker system on the Edge 850, which has been ported over from the Edge 1050. It offers a more refined set of noises versus the jarring beeps you used to get with older Garmin computers, yet it’s still loud and attention-grabbing enough when you come to a turn.
Wahoo’s sounds were already slightly more agreeable, and it has a speaker with similar capabilities, but the loud beeps remain part of the mix. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though – if you generally struggle to hear chimes over ambient noise, this could be a reason to go for the Roam 3.
Both feature voice prompts, but I’ve struggled to get on with these. In towns, and around moving traffic and wind noise, they rarely sound clear enough that I wouldn’t need to glance down at the screen to check the instructions – so they don’t add much to the experience overall.
Battery life
Battery life is important to all of us, but beware being snared by the claims.
The Edge 850 is claimed to deliver up to 12 hours with intensive use, but up to 36 hours if you run it in Garmin’s battery saver mode, which turns off the screen, and reduces the recording rate for things such as GPS (which could impact tracking accuracy) and your heart rate or power sensors.
Wahoo, on the other hand, says the Roam 3 can run for up to 24 hours, depending on the settings and connections you’re running.
Ultimately, to get near the upper ends of these claimed lifespans, you need to compromise on your use of the features. I’ve seen around 18 hours of life from the Roam 3 with my usual sensors attached and the screen brightness set to ‘auto’, but nearer to 11 hours from the Edge 850 with the same general setup, without taking specific measures to eke them out.
Based on that, many might end up troubling the Edge 850’s battery life with an all-day epic summer ride, let alone a big audax. It’s compatible with Garmin’s Charge Power Pack, but that costs £129.99.
The Wahoo is definitely the pick here if you want the onboard battery to last for longer, but you’re going to need an external power source for both if you’re into really long-distance rides but don’t want to shell out for larger Edge 1050, Element Ace or Hammerhead Karoo hardware.
How I tested the Garmin Edge 850 and Wahoo Elemnt Roam 3
I’ve had the Wahoo Elemnt Roam 3 since its launch in May 2025, and the Garmin Edge 850 since September 2025, using them on the vast majority of my rides, sometimes side by side.
I tested them across thousands of kilometres using a mix of components, with fixtures being a heart rate monitor, power meter and electronic groupsets. I also used radars and a FlowBio sweat sensor on occasion. I’ve used the respective companion apps and connections, given neither computer can be used to its full potential without this.
Garmin Edge 850 vs Wahoo Elemnt Roam 3 bottom line
The Garmin Edge 850 and Wahoo Elemnt Roam 3 are excellent premium bike computers, packing in almost exactly the same tech as their bigger flagship siblings without the size. Neither is perfect, however.
The Garmin’s restricted battery life is a factor worth wrestling with if you want genuine all-day ride capability with all features on, and it’s a little more expensive. But you get a sleeker device design, a better screen overall, and probably the most polished user interface I’ve encountered in a Garmin Edge bike computer.
The Wahoo isn’t quite as responsive to use on start-up or when navigating, and you don’t get the depth of Garmin’s product ecosystem (albeit, the essentials for a cyclist are present and correct). Longer battery life is a key positive, and the navigation is easy to follow.
Ignoring brand tribalism, the Garmin Edge 850 is the marginally better computer overall, although if you prefer elements of Wahoo’s product design or features, you shouldn't be disappointed with that either.
