Tractive GPS collar review: Keeping tabs on your pet's health and location

If you have a pet, everyone knows that you love the animal with all of your heart and would be devastated if anything bad happened to your furry friend. While an animal getting sick or injured in your house is sad, there's nothing more frightening than having your cat or dog run out the door and not be able to find them. While you could try putting a Tile, AirTag, or SmartTag on your animal, they're a bit bulky and only work when there's a nearby phone that can detect the tag, which is one of the reasons Apple discourages this use case.

Enter Tractive.

Tractive is a small rectangular device that is powered by a battery and clips onto your dog's existing collar. Packed inside are some sensors that measure your pet's activity level, respiratory rate, heart rate, and barking level. It also has a built-in GPS that utilizes cell phone towers for communication, so that if your pet gets lost, you'll be able to track them in real-time. How well does all of this work? The cat monitor is similar, but doesn't measure meowing, heart, or respiration rates.

I put the Tractive collar on my four-year-old Golden Doodle, Tino, and used it for a couple of months. Let's dig into what I found.

Specifications

There are three different models for dogs, and only one for cats, and the type you buy depends partially on the size of the dog and partially on what you want the device to do. For the review, I was sent the TG6a, which is the normal model. The other two models are for large dogs or large dogs who are adventurous. While all three models generally do similar things, they each have some limitations, as you can see in the table below.

As you can see, the price of the tracker is relatively affordable. However, unlike some devices like the Harymor Q8 Smart Bird Feeder, the Tractive tracker is effectively useless without a subscription plan. The company offers two separate plans: Basic and Premium. While both plans provide GPS location tracking, heart and respiration rate monitoring, and activity and sleep monitoring, for an extra dollar per month, the premium subscription adds on a bunch of additional features such as family sharing, worldwide GPS coverage, GPS data export, and 365 days of location history.

The price of the basic subscription is $108 a year or $144 for two years, while the cost of the premium subscription is $120 a year, $168 for two years, or $300 for five years.

Finally, you can add on Tractive Care, which provides a replacement tracker for any broken, lost, or stolen devices. This costs $2 a month for the one-year plan, $1.50 a month for the two-year plan, or $1 a month for the five-year plan.

Initial Setup

The setup of the Tractive tracker is very straightforward and done from the Tractive app on your mobile device.

Gallery: Tractive Collar

Instead of requiring an extra collar on your dog, Tractive attaches to the dog's current collar by way of a rubber harness. I was a little skeptical, but it's never once fallen off, even with the many play-fights between Tino and his sister, Angel, a rambunctious German Shepard/Boxer mix.

You start by enabling permissions: Bluetooth, location, GPS, and notifications. The app will look for your device via Bluetooth, and once it's detected, it will ask for your location and for you to select a subscription plan. Once done, your device is ready to start monitoring your pet.

You're then asked to define your home geolocation by drawing either a circle, a square, or lines around your property. You can also define additional "virtual fences", which can be either Safe Zones or No-Go Zones. You would think that with having LTE GPS, the zone you could define would be pretty small, but alas, that's not the case. It appears that the minimum size zone is 350 feet (10 meters) in diameter. In my suburban neighborhood, that means the boundary includes not only my house and yard, but also my neighbors. It's not a big deal, but I'd like to be notified if my dog goes to visit my neighbor, something that did happen once during the testing, but with such a large diameter, that's not possible with Tractive.

After you've completed your setup, you're ready to put the Tractive on your pet. Each of the models is slightly different, but the process is the same: The Tractive is put on the front of the collar, and a rubber holder is put on the back and latches around and over the device to keep it in place, so your pet doesn't need a separate collar.

Tracking

This is the main reason you buy a device like a Tractive. The device utilizes GPS through AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile cell phone towers using either LTE or 2G connections, meaning it can be tracked worldwide. The Tractive actually has a SIM card embedded, which is what the subscription unlocks.

The Tractive is always watching your furry friend, and if it ever leaves the geofence you made that defines your home base, you'll receive a notification on your mobile device. For the most part, this works very well, but I did receive a few false positives during my testing period. The first time I saw the notification, I freaked out and ran outside to see if Tino was ok, and found he was just playing in the backyard, completely within the boundary I had created on the app. After a few more false positives, I stopped running outside and just assumed my dog was ok and sure enough, a couple of minutes later, I received the notification that he was back in the safe zone. This was a little disappointing, but it only happened once every couple of weeks.

Going back to the setup section where I noted the minimum radius for a zone is 350 feet (100 meters), the issue is that my dog once left my yard and visited my neighbor's front door. Since it was within that safe zone, though, my only notification was my neighbor bringing Tino back to my house. So you should think of Tractive not as a way to keep your pet in your yard, but rather to keep them in the general vicinity of your home.

If your dog does get away from you, though, the emergency tracking is very good. You'll get updates in near-real time, and the app will show you how fast your pet is going, what their elevation is, and how far away from you they are. It was even accurate when I was tracking Tino in a car my wife was driving, showing him traveling at 53mph. Since a device like this is mainly aimed at finding your lost pet, the false positives noted earlier can be forgiven when the tracking is this good.

The device also keeps track of the history of your pet's walks via the GPS, allowing you to go back in time to see when and how far your dog walked. This is an interesting feature, but privacy concerns can arise from this.

Health Monitoring

Let's face it: Your dog or cat probably isn't escaping from your house on a daily basis, otherwise you have bigger issues than looking for a tracking device for the furry creature. With that in mind, Tractive looks to add extra value by putting some health monitoring functionality into the device, even though it states quite frequently that it is not a medical device and is no substitute for veterinary care.

As noted earlier, Tractive monitors your dog's activity level, respiratory rate, heart rate, sleep, and, depending on the model, barking level. Cats, unfortunately, only have an activity monitor.

The activity rate is arguably the most interesting to look at. Measured in number of active minutes, the app sets a goal when you first configure the application, and it's based on the age and breed of your pet. In my case, Tino's goal was 140 minutes of activity a day, although that number can be modified. Also of interest is that it compares your pet's activity to other animals of the same breed. In Tino's case, he was frequently well above the average Goldendoodle. This is almost certainly because of his two-year-old "sister," Angel, who is part Boxer, part German Shepard, and all energy, and forces him to play more than he might otherwise want to.

While activity is based on the breed, the rest of the health features are based on your pet's normal average. Tractive spends about a week simply monitoring before determining the "normal" range. Once that's complete, you can open the app and see exactly where your pet sits. In my case, I was able to see that Tino's heart rate was elevated one day due to playing in the extreme heat, but his respiration and barking were still normal. You can dig into each report to see what the actual range is, and at the bottom of each page, you can get some information about things that impact each of the measurements.

Regarding sleep, Tractive breaks the report into three pieces: Night sleep, day sleep, and calm. You also get to see the night sleep quality and how many night sleep interruptions your pet experienced. In addition to the current data, you can also see your pet's averages. One confusing thing, though, is that although Tractive tells you how many times your pet woke up in the middle of the night and that "more interruptions can be a sign something's disturbing your dog's sleep," there's no indication of what an excessive number of interruptions is. Some nights, it reports five interruptions, some nights 14, and some nights it's somewhere in between, so how is a user supposed to know what is ok and what is problematic?

I had a lot of issues with the bark monitoring. The app is supposed to show you whether the dog's vocalization is within a normal range, but most of the time, I was just told, "Not enough data today." I reached out to the company, and they found a potential bug with the way my data was being processed and said it was some sort of edge case that they were looking into. I didn't receive any remediation before publication of this review.

Gallery: Tractive App Features

Finally, since everything is gamified nowadays, the Tractive is no different, giving your dog badges for completing various goals. Some of them, like the "5k minute medal," are simply gained over time, whereas others, like the "daily goal doubled," require work on your pet's part to complete. I find them not very useful, but other people love these types of challenges.

While all of these features are mildly interesting, especially the activity level, I found that I only checked in on them from time to time. The app is supposed to notify you when readings are at a dangerous level, but I'm not sure what that means. In my case, Tino had a slightly elevated heart rate one day when he was nervous about a thunderstorm, and I wasn't notified. Considering there's nothing on the graph above "elevated," I'm not sure when I would expect to be told to look at this rating.

Battery Life

Tractive claims "up to 14 days battery life" with the model of tracker they sent me, although the more active models claim up to a month. In my usage, with my somewhat lazy dog who roams the yard but doesn't usually go on long walks, I was getting roughly ten days of power before having to charge the device. Charging doesn't seem to take long, and during the testing phase, I generally just put it on the charger before bed so that it was ready to go when Tino woke up in the morning, meaning I missed capturing his sleep stats for a night.

The Tractive I am reviewing charges with a standard USB-C cable, and the technical requirements state you need 5V with a maximum of 1A of power. Higher voltages can apparently damage the electronics, and, for that reason, Tractive suggests not using your car's charging port, "because these charging ports often have a very high power output, which can damage the battery of your tracker." The other Tractive devices, including the cat tracker, charge with magnetic connections.

Miscellaneous

As noted previously, the GPS in the Tractive collar works extremely well. However, sometimes you don't need something quite that fancy to locate your pet or to find a misplaced collar. The device has a very small speaker in it that is capable of playing a sound. It also has LED lights on the top and bottom that you can turn on to help find the collar, as well as help motorists see your pet when walking in the dark outside. They're minor, but very welcome, features.

Competing Product

There's a competing product, the FI Collar, that is very similar. The aforementioned Angel has one that I purchased over a year ago, but it's hard to compare the two because she has an older model that has no health features other than activity monitoring. The FI Collar has a higher monthly charge, coming in at around $15/month vs. $10/month with the Tractive. While we haven't had any false positives with the FI Collar, the real-time tracking of the older model doesn't seem quite as good as the Tractive. If I upgrade to the latest model, I'll compare the two in more detail.

Conclusion

I used the Tractive collar with Tino for a few months, and my overall impressions were positive. If you're worried about your dog getting loose in the neighborhood, the peace of mind that Tractive provides for roughly $10/month is overall pretty inexpensive. The tracking feature, when enabled, works in near real time and offers good information, including both direction and speed, which is useful for finding your lost pet.

Unfortunately, the health features seem a little dodgy, and the generic "activity level," while somewhat helpful, is a bit limited. On top of that, the false positives on location alerting, while infrequent, were still somewhat disappointing.

That said, if you're buying the Tractive collar because you want to track your dog and view everything else as a fringe benefit, you can't go wrong with the device.

Tractive provided a free sample without any review or pre-approval. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.

Follow us onGoogle News Add as a preferredsource on Google Follow@NeowinFeed Post Like Share Share Share RSS Report a problemwith this article