Strava vs Livetrack

This is a very open question, and Strava is not the equivalent of LiveTrack so you are comparing apples and oranges.

Livetrack is a Garmin feature that allow people to follow you realtime when you ride. They get a message with a link to a webpage and it is there they see your ride. The feature depends on cell coverage and it is known to be unreliable, but that is a side story. But that is pretty much all LiveTrack does, that and allowing you to see other friends on your edge if they use it too - I know nobody that use that. So LiveTrack is limited in functionality and usefulness, it is just one feature of Connect.

Strava is a much broader service offering. One feature of Strava is Beacon and yes that one is very similar to LiveTrack. Beyond that Strava is a social media platform, a fitness training tool, offers some analysis features, and have a large base of Segments that are way more useful than the Garmin ones (however on your Edge you can elect to use Strava segments instead of the Garmin ones). Strava is by far the most used fitness service out there. You can have your Garmin account setup such that all your activities tracked with your Edge will automatically upload to Strava.

Short answer - if you're going to subscribe only because of the Strava Beacon feature in combination with Garmin - no, it is not worth it.

Long answer - maybe my misunderstanding, but once you connect Strava Beacon to Garmin Connect, upon starting the activity it sends at the same time two things - the Strava SMS and the Garmin LiveTrack email. Now you'd say - yeah, why not, if LiveTrack fails as usual, at least the Beacon would work... unfortunately not! Once LiveTrack breaks, also the Beacon stops updating. I guess the Beacon just copies the info from LiveTrack. 

One more thing: if he LiveTrack did not start at all (happen more often than we would like), then you're out of luck with Strava Beacon as well - no email, no SMS.

At least in my case this is the behavior. I have Strava Summit for about a year now and that was one of my primary use cases. Will not renew...

Here is some useful info, although does not really get into details : https://support.strava.com/hc/en-us/articles/206470124-Strava-Beacon-for-Garmin-Summit-

You are correct IceLed. If you were using Beacon with the Strava phone app it then does not depend on Garmin because the Straval app updates your Beacon. But since in your scenario the Edge drives the data update, if LiveTrack fails Beacon also fails because in this use case the Edge provide GPS location and Connect updates the Strava Beacon.