Review: Tractive Smart Cat Tracker

There’s the Basic Plan, which has 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, worldwide coverage (2G or LTE cellular coverage from over 500 cell 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 above 7 pounds. It needs to 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 pull off when charging is finished.) The charge lasts about five days if you have an indoor cat, but it needs to be charged nearly daily if your pet roams outside.

Once your pet’s profile is made, you’ll set your home’s location, so that the device will enter power-saving mode when at home, and you’ll also set an activity goal to ensure your pet is staying active. Tractive compared Basil to cats of similar age and weight to make a personalized daily activity goal. Through the app, you can also see other users’ pets and compare their goals with yours.

I ended up hiking up Basil’s activity goal (120 to 230 minutes a day was Basil’s assigned default), and the app reported he was consistently more active than 70 percent of similar cats, which gave me peace of mind knowing I’m playing with him enough and keeping him as active as I can in my small Brooklyn apartment. Through the app, you can view activity daily (by the hour) and historically, and it compares active minutes with the individual cat and others. Basil’s daily activity averaged 375 minutes a day, and he burned an average of 450 calories a day (a measure that is estimated based on factors like pet type, weight, and size).

Tractive via Molly Higgins

Tractive via Molly Higgins

The sleep feature acts similarly, monitoring sleep duration and breaking it down into categories of night sleep, day sleep, and calm (when your pet is just chillin’). It tracks sleep based on the lack of movement and time of day, so it’s a good estimate but not super accurate. Like activity, it compared Basil to similar cats and had helpful information alongside the data of what amount of sleep is normal; he was on the low end of normal for average naps of 43 minutes. I was able to see historically that he sleeps around 14 to 18 hours per day (with about eight of that being during the day), and each day it logs night and day sleep with their calm time, and compares it against the pet’s average.

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