Bluetooth tracker vs GPS tracker: the technical comparison

The Bluetooth tracker vs GPS tracker question usually gets answered with a price comparison, which is the least interesting thing about it. They are not two grades of the same product. They use different radios, solve different problems and fail in different ways, and once you understand the power budget the rest of the differences fall out of it almost automatically.

Two completely different radios

A GPS tracker contains a satellite receiver. It listens to signals from a constellation of satellites and calculates its own position from the timing differences. Critically, that receiver only tells the device where it is; to tell you, it needs a second radio — a cellular modem with a SIM in it — to upload that position over a mobile network. Two radios, both of them hungry.

A Bluetooth tracker contains neither. It has one very small radio which does nothing but transmit a short advertising packet a few times a second. It does not know where it is and cannot report anything. Location comes from the other side: any nearby phone that hears the packet knows where it is, and reports that instead, encrypted, to the tag's owner.

That is the whole architectural difference, and everything below follows from it.

Power is what decides all the rest

A satellite receiver typically needs tens of milliamps while it is acquiring a fix, and a cellular modem needs a burst of considerably more each time it transmits. A Bluetooth advertising packet costs a few microamps averaged over time. The gap is roughly three orders of magnitude.

You cannot escape that with a better battery, only with a bigger one, which is why the two products look so different on a shelf. A GPS tracker is the size of a matchbox at best, often the size of a deck of cards, and either takes a rechargeable pack measured in days or weeks per charge, or gets hardwired into a vehicle so it never has to worry. A Bluetooth tag is a coin-sized piece of plastic that runs for up to two years on a single CR2032 and then needs a two-pound cell.

The running cost nobody mentions on the box

Because a GPS tracker must upload over a mobile network, it needs a data connection, and somebody has to pay for it. That is a subscription — usually monthly, occasionally bundled into a headline "lifetime" price that is really a prepaid term. There is no such thing as a subscription-free GPS tracker that reports in real time.

A Bluetooth tag has no SIM, no data plan and nothing recurring. The network it uses is other people's phones, which cost you nothing because their owners already paid for them. Over a five-year ownership period, the difference in total cost is not close; over the same period, the difference in capability is also not close. Both statements are true at once, and which one matters is entirely down to the job.

Bluetooth tracker vs GPS tracker, side by side

The two rows worth staring at are the moor and the underground car park, because they point in opposite directions. Bluetooth tags are excellent in dense human environments and useless in empty ones. Satellite trackers are the reverse: they want an open sky and do not care whether anyone is around, but they struggle under concrete.

Which one do you actually need?

Ask what you are protecting against.

• Losing things — a bag left on a train, keys down the sofa, a case left on a job. Bluetooth. Losing happens where people are, and the ability to make the item shout is worth more than metres of precision.
• A vehicle you would want recovered — a van, a motorbike, a caravan. GPS, hardwired, with a subscription and ideally a monitored service, because a coin cell cannot follow a moving car.
• A person or an animal that moves independently — a dog off the lead, a family member. GPS, or a purpose-built device. A Bluetooth tag is the wrong tool and can be a dangerous one to rely on.
• Kit that lives in bags and cases — cameras, tools, instruments, luggage. Bluetooth, provided those cases end up somewhere with people around them.

Plenty of people end up with both, and there is nothing contradictory about that: a hardwired unit in the van, and coin cells on the cases inside it.

How BlueTag fits the Bluetooth half

BlueTag is squarely the first kind of device, and it does not pretend otherwise. There is no GPS receiver in it, no SIM, no subscription and no monthly anything. Sixty metres — 200 ft — is the reach of the Bluetooth link, and that link is what sets the 80–100 dB buzzer off; outside it, sightings made by other people's devices become an encrypted position in your Apple Account, where only you can decrypt it.

It is 36.3 mm square, 9 mm deep, about 10 g, sealed to IP67, and runs on a user-replaceable CR2032 for up to two years. It works on Apple hardware only — iPhone or iPad, iOS 14.5 minimum — and offers nothing to Android owners. Nor is there any Ultra Wideband, so the closing metres are covered by sound instead of by an arrow on the screen. That is a real trade, and it is what keeps the price where it is.

Sold in pairs, posted at no charge to UK addresses, under £15 per box. Read the full specification and decide for yourself.