Get the Shot Scope X5.
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| Pinned Golf The Caddie | Shot Scope X5 | |
|---|---|---|
| Price (MSRP) | $449.99 | $299.99Lower price |
Get the Shot Scope X5.
Get the Shot Scope X5. At $299.99 (currently $249.99 on sale), it's a fully capable GPS watch with automatic shot tracking, 16 club tags included, 100+ stats, and zero subscription fees — all on your wrist for every round, including walking ones. The Pinned Caddie is a genuinely interesting device with an enormous 8-inch screen and smart course maps, but it's cart-only by design, and you're paying $450 for a product that requires a ride. The X5 goes everywhere you go.
Both run on GPS, cover 36,000–45,000 preloaded courses with free updates, include full-color hole maps, tournament-legal modes, hazard distances, and zero mandatory subscription fees for core GPS functionality. Both have touchscreens and handle scoring. That's where the similarities end — these are fundamentally different tools built for different kinds of rounds.
This is the comparison that matters most. The Shot Scope X5 weighs 50 grams and straps to your wrist. The Pinned Caddie weighs 544 grams — roughly a pound — and needs a cart mount or trolley. Pinned's own notes say it explicitly: "not suited to walking golfers." That's not a flaw so much as a design choice, but it's a hard constraint. If you walk any of your rounds, the Caddie isn't in the running.
The Caddie's 8-inch touchscreen is the obvious counterpoint. It's the largest screen in the GPS golf category, more than three inches bigger than any rival handheld. Yardages are huge and readable at a glance from the seat of a cart. The hole view feels closer to a TV broadcast than a sports watch. If you ride every round and want the biggest possible display, nothing else comes close.
The X5 ships with 16 second-generation club tags that screw into the grip butt of each club. Once they're in, the watch detects and records every shot automatically — club used, distance, location — and syncs to the Shot Scope app where 100+ stats including Strokes Gained and Handicap Benchmarking are waiting, all free. No extra hardware to buy, no tapping the screen after each swing.
The Caddie uses manual shot tracking. You mark shots yourself. That works fine if you're not deep into performance analytics, but it's a different workflow — and the Caddie's strokes gained feature isn't present at all. If improving your game with real data is part of why you're buying a GPS device, the X5 has a meaningful edge here.
Both devices show full-color hole maps. The Caddie's "smart green yardages" let you tap anywhere on the green for a precise distance, which is genuinely useful for club selection on approach. Greens heat maps — which show where shots cluster on the green — are locked behind Pinned Premium (first year currently free; renewal pricing not published). Plays-like distances that account for slope are also Premium-only.
The X5 doesn't have green contours at all, and doesn't offer plays-like distances. What it does have is something called Personalised Hole Maps — the watch overlays your actual club performance data on the hole view, so you can see where your driver or 3-wood is likely to finish based on your real numbers. That's a different kind of smart than the Caddie's green tapping, but it's arguably more useful for course management.
Neither device charges a mandatory subscription. But the Caddie's more interesting features — heat maps, plays-like distances, advanced analytics — live behind Pinned Premium. The renewal price isn't published, so three-year cost of ownership is genuinely unknown. The X5 has no tiers at all: every stat, every feature, zero recurring fees.
Get the Shot Scope X5 if:
Get the Pinned Caddie if:
The Shot Scope X5 is the better GPS for most golfers. The 16 included tags, automatic shot tracking, 100+ free stats, and wrist-worn convenience cover the full range of how people actually play — on the course, walking or riding, without subscription math hanging over them. The Caddie is a legitimate product with a genuinely impressive screen and smart green tools, but cart-only is a real restriction at $450. If every round you play is in a cart and you want the biggest possible display, it earns its place. For everyone else, the X5 wins on versatility, value, and depth of data.
Get the Shot Scope X5.