Tractive Smart Pet Collar Review: An Inexpensive Way to Keep Tabs on Your Fur Baby

There’s the basic plan, which includes GPS location tracking, unlimited live tracking, and activity and sleep monitoring, for $6 per month at $144 billed every two years or $9 per month at $108 billed annually. The Premium plan adds Family Sharing, global coverage (2G or LTE cellular coverage from over 500 cellular networks), 365-day historical location history, and the ability to export GPS data, for $5 per month at $300 billed every five years, $7 per month at $168 billed every two years, or $10 per month at $120 billed annually.

The tracker weighs only 1 ounce and can be used with any cat weighing over 7 pounds. It must be charged on a dock before it can be used, and it takes about two hours to fully charge. (The charger snaps and locks into place, and it’s not the easiest to remove once it’s finished charging.) Charging lasts about five days if you have an indoor cat, but it needs to be charged almost daily if your pet walks outside.

Once your pet’s profile is created, you’ll set the location of your home, so the device goes into power-saving mode when they’re at home, and you’ll also set an activity goal to make sure your pet stays active. Tractive compared Basil to cats of similar age and weight to establish a personalized daily activity goal. Through the app, you can also see other users’ pets and compare their goals with yours.

I ended up increasing Basil’s activity goal (120 to 230 minutes per day was Basil’s default), and the app reported that he was consistently more active than 70% of similar cats, which gave me peace of mind knowing that I’m playing with him enough and keeping him as active as possible in my small Brooklyn apartment. Through the app you can view daily (hourly) and historical activity, and compare active minutes with those of each cat and others. Basil’s daily activity averaged 375 minutes per day, and he burned an average of 450 calories per day (a measurement estimated based on factors such as the type, weight and size of the animal).

Tractive via Molly Higgins

Tractive via Molly Higgins

The sleep feature works in a similar way, monitoring sleep duration and breaking it down into nighttime sleep, daytime sleep, and quiet (when your pet relaxes) categories. It tracks sleep based on lack of movement and time of day. It is therefore a good estimate but not very precise. Like the activity, it compared Basil to similar cats and contained useful information as well as data on the normal amount of sleep; he was on the low end of normal for average naps of 43 minutes. I have observed historically that he sleeps about 14 to 18 hours a day (about eight of which are during the day), and each day he records his nighttime and daytime sleep along with his quiet time and compares it to the animal’s average.

It also shows the sleep phases, that is, the periods of sleep that the cat has had in the day so far, throughout the day, depending on the weather. It was interesting to see his sleep patterns, as he often sleeps through the night when I do, but gets up around 4:45am when the feeder goes off and around 6:15am when my roommate leaves for work, and is awake during the first few hours of my work day, but usually naps from 12pm to 3pm every day. I love this feature as a tool to know when Basil may be sick due to increased sleep.