Compare two APIs
Pick any two of the 24 products in the directory and see the four things that decide a schedule: how each bills developers, what every end user has to own or pay for, what approval stands between you and launch, and roughly how much integration work it is. There is no score and no winner — these fields describe how you get access, not which product is better, and arithmetic over “has an approval gate” would be a judgement wearing a number.
| Field | Fitbit Web API (Google) | Garmin Health / Activity API |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Wearable APIs (direct) | Wearable APIs (direct) |
| How it bills developers | Free | Free |
| What each end user needs | Each user must own a Fitbit device and account. | Users sync their own Garmin devices; if you want to offer Garmin wearables, Garmin asks you to contact it through its inquiry form when you request the program. |
| What gates your launch | Developer app registration; access to other users' intraday data is case-by-case (verify). | Garmin Connect Developer Program approval, as Starter or Enterprise Access; Garmin's pages state no review time. |
| Integration effort(our rough judgement, not a vendor fact) | Medium — weeks | High — months |
| Pages here covering it | 60 | 62 |
Both columns come from the same provenance-tracked model, where every value is backed by a sentence already published here — Fitbit and Garmin. “None documented” means we did not find one, which is not the same as there not being one.
For an argued comparison rather than a field table — where each one wins, where it loses, and what we could not verify about either — see the written head-to-heads in comparisons. For what a whole stack costs, the cost planner models the same fields at your user count. For which one to start with at all, try the picker.