GPS Review: Tractive.

Not recommended.

I am always recommending GPS to the owners of dogs, and sometimes cats. I usually recommend Whistle or Fi, both of which I have used in the past. Some of my clients said they used Tractive, so I got one to try out. I have been using it on Valentino for 3 months. It has many shortcomings. Actually, there’s almost nothing that I like about it. It sort of works, sometimes, but I absolutely wouldn’t rely on it if my dog’s life depended on it. Tino is a low risk of going missing. I mostly got him a GPS as a redundant safety measure, and to test the unit. If I had a dog that was a high risk of escaping, I would have stopped using the Tractive GPS after the first week.

The battery life is about a third of what they claim. They say the battery should last for seven days, but it only lasts about two days for me. The battery is not swappable, so you have to put the whole unit on the charging cord. Then, in the morning, you have to remember to put the device back on your dog’s collar. 7 days of battery life would be very useful. It has never lasted that long.

My unit won’t connect to my WiFi. Part of the way they would make the battery last 7 days is by using local WiFi when the dog is at home. When I asked technical support why I couldn’t connect my unit to my WiFi, they said Tractive is not compatible with all WiFi types. What? How can any electronic device not be compatible with some WiFi routers? That is really ridiculous, and they should say that right up front in their ads and on Amazon. It’s not like my WiFi unit is outdated or unusual. It’s Comcast, a couple of years old.

The Tractive device has a light, sort of. It is tiny and dim. If you turn on the light to help locate your dog, it’s not really helpful at all. The Tractive unit tends to end up at the lowest point, due to gravity, so the unit is under the dog’s chin and the light points at the ground. The light does not protrude from the unit, so you can only see it from a very narrow angle. The chances of you seeing the light on the collar are almost zero.

Supposedly, the GPS unit will play a sound if you select that in the app. My unit never made a peep. The app said the sound was on, but nothing happened.

Accuracy is terrible. When I attached the unit to Mu, for testing, the app said he was 200 feet in one direction when he was actually 30 feet in the opposite direction. The tracking collar was actually leading me away from my dog. I tested the accuracy when Mu was right next to me, and it said he was 80 feet away. If my dog was actually missing, the accuracy being off by 200 feet could really make it much harder to find my dog in certain environments. Maybe if it was a typical suburban neighborhood with small lots, you could just look around everywhere within a 200 foot radius and have a good chance of seeing your dog. If there are woods, or the lots are large, locating your dog to a 200-foot radius circle doesn’t really help you find your dog. The only time the accuracy is very good is if I have it on a dog while he is sitting in the car, not moving. In that case, the accuracy is good. If my dog is not moving, and he’s right where I left him, then I don’t really need a GPS collar. For most real world situations where a dog would be missing, a 200 foot margin of error could make it very hard to find a dog.

I contacted technical support twice. When I asked about connecting to WiFi, they just said I was out of luck because their device doesn’t connect to all WiFi units. Later, when the unit died and wouldn’t charge, I got no reply at all from technical support for five days. When they did reply, none of their suggestions worked. I was resigned to the device being dead. Then, the power went out at our house because of a storm. When the power came back on, the Tractive unit charged and started working again. Now I have learned that, if the device won’t charge, I need to unplug the cable and plug it back in. This makes no sense at all, and I don’t know why that fixes the problem. It was not one of the things they told me to do to revive my dead device. So, when I contacted technical support, they were very slow, and their answers were not helpful.

The connection for charging is awkward and annoying. You need to line up the connector just right and feel it click. If you bump it, it will disconnect. If you’re trying to plug in the charging cable in the dark, it’s difficult to manage.

The Tractive device is definitely not worth the money, for a $50 purchase price and $13 per month. Considering it probably won’t help you find your dog, it’s not recommended at any price. Trusting Tractive could get your dog killed.

I will review other GPS trackers soon.