Venu 3 or Forerunner 965 ?

I owned Venu 2 Plus and now Forerunner 965. My wife has Venu 3S. My take is that the Venu is a really nice watch with solid basic functionality, but somewhat dumbed down compared to Forerunners. I'd go with Venu if you care more about style and materials. I'd go with Forerunner if you care about sophisticated training functionality. I think Venu 3 is much less dumbed down than Venu 2 and still has better looks and materials than Forerunner. But also the price went up, so if you care about features you might get more bang for the buck with the Forerunner. On the other hand, I really struggled to find a replacement band and a watch face for my Forerunner, so that the watch does not look silly in an office setting. The stock band and built-in watch faces all look like designed to catch the eye of a 6-year-old ;-)

Thanks for pitching in ! Interesting points, yes s the V2 doesn't have a lot of "metrics" but the 965 has so many it's a bit hard to make sens of them perhaps. I had the 955 for a while and I enjoyed the reports but fairly often the data it gave didn't make a lot of sense, the HRV data mainly.

If you had 955 and V2 and you were not missing any functionality from 955 on V2, I think it's likely that you would not be missing any 965 functionality on V3 either. I am with you that a lot of features/metrics have questionable value (a lot of data is non-actionable) and even quality (for example I don't believe sleep stages are correct and VO2 max estimates seem easily skewed). I am probably on the fence regarding things like stamina or HRV.

In my case probably the only thing that makes me go with 965 rather than V2 or V3 is training load, which I want to be able to check on my watch. V3 improved sports support, sensor support and workout support to the level that is acceptable to me (it wasn't on V2). It's kind of nice to have weather maps (and also regular maps) on 965, but I usually end up grabbing my phone for a larger screen anyway, when I need those, so I think I would not miss those on V2 or V3. But each person will have different needs. I for one could not care less about ECG, which seems to be a big selling point for Venu series. Go figure ;-)

Venu 3 is usually compared with FR 265, comparing it with FR 965 seems a bit too much. FR 265 and Venu 3 have a lot in common, but FR 965 is simply in its own league. But if your comparison is based on screen sizes, yeah V3 vs FR 965.

It comes down to what you want. I have Venu 3 because FR 965 is outside my budget, and I just began running, so I was not sure if I would put FR 265/965 to proper use. If you run and you like running, then get FR 965, you will like the metrics it provides and if you hike, you have maps on your watch. Having said that, I am loving my V3, especially with the recent wrist based running power update, so many insights; having a mic and speaker is important to me (sometimes), and yes you mentioned the difference in OHR sensor. 

Yes, Training Load can be useful if you're training hard and my Edge 530 computes it using the data it records but also the data recorded on the V2.

Since you mention Stamina that was also a metric that convinced me there was a lot of "snake oil" after it showed 50% left after running a full out 15km race!

I think scrollable maps would be my only real incentive to go with the 965, instead of upgrading to the 840.