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ZDNET’s key takeaways

• All the tags — ranging in price from $40 to $2.50 — worked.
• Bluetooth range varied wildly, with the cheaper tag having less than half the range.
• The difference in performance comes down to the quality of the build.

The day that the Apple AirTag arrived was a big day for me. This one product brought to an end one of the biggest frustrations in my life — wasting time looking for things that had been “misplaced” by… ahem… someone. Within hours, I had AirTags on my keys, in my wallet, my rucksack, and even on things like my electric bike — and I never looked back. 

AirTags also opened the floodgates for third-party finder tags, from fobs to wallet cards, from a range of companies, some already in the tech space and some complete unknowns.  

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I’ve standardized on the AirTag because Apple’s solution just works for me (especially because companies like Elevation Lab make some great holders for these tags), but I’ve lost count of how often I’ve been asked if there’s any difference between AirTags and third-party tags, including those cheap tags you can pick up for a few bucks. 

There’s only one way to find out: do some testing.

Bluetooth: Theory vs. reality

One of the main ways that I’ve found that tags differ is the range over which they’ll work. Yes, they all use a form of Bluetooth called Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and under ideal conditions that tech has a range of 100 to 400 feet (30 to 120 meters) in open, unobstructed conditions. 

But… 

Note that AirTags also use a technology called Ultra-WideBand, which we will ignore for the purposes of this study because other tags don’t have access to this.

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How often are we looking for something in an open, unobstructed place? Not often. There’s all sorts of stuff that gets in the way, from bags, pockets, wallets, and luggage to walls and floors to the metal surrounding cars and toolboxes. 

Oh, and don’t forget people; they also block the Bluetooth signal. Both your body and crowds can have a significant effect on Bluetooth range.

There’s also the stuff you can’t see in the form of radio-frequency (RF) interference, especially in the 2.4GHz frequency that Wi-Fi and Bluetooth use. On top of that, locations such as airports can have a lot of other Bluetooth finder tags, making the invisible RF environment very noisy. 

Even the tag’s battery strength makes a difference. As the battery level drops, so does the transmit power. 

Finally, you have to factor in the quality of the phone’s Bluetooth antenna and the tag’s antenna. I’ve tested the same Bluetooth device on multiple phones and had wildly different working ranges.

In short, there are many factors at play here, and these pull that optimistic theoretical range down to a more realistic 30 to 100 feet (10 to 30 meters). 

Getting scientific

OK, so is there a scientific way to do this? Well, sort of. There are quite a few apps I can install on my smartphone.

One I’ve been using the most is nRF Connect (iOS/Android), which shows the signal strength of nearby Bluetooth devices. 

Let’s get a bit technical: This app displays RSSI, or Received Signal Strength Indicator, which is the power of the received signal measured in decibels per milliwatt (dBm). The number is always negative and ranges from 0 dBm, the theoretical maximum, to -100 dBm, which is considered unusable or disconnected. 

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Because dBm is logarithmic, every 10 dBm drop or increase (such as -30 dBm to -40 dBm) means the signal is 10-fold weaker or stronger, and a 20 dBm gap (like -30 dBm to -50 dBm) is 100-fold difference. Keep that in mind. 

In reality, you’ll be looking at signals in the real world ranging from about -30 dBm to -90 dBm. 

The problem is, tags have improved their privacy, and tracking them over Bluetooth is tricky. Tags don’t identify themselves in the app as “AirTags” and such because of security concerns. Instead, most modern tags use manufacturer-specific IDs and also rotate their cryptographic identifiers on a regular basis, so they are hard to spot and track. 

It gets even more complicated: To save battery, finder tags don’t broadcast continuously at high frequency. Instead, they may broadcast every couple of seconds, so a scan might just miss them depending on timing.

Bottom line, you can use apps like this, but I found I had to find a spot with minimal Bluetooth chatter, and even then, it was all pretty hit-or-miss. But I did manage to get some data.

The tag lineup

I’ll be testing three tags.

All their tags are for Apple’s Find My ecosystem, and all are new, fully charged, and paired with an iPhone 17 Pro Max. 

I carried out this experiment using an iPhone for two reasons. The first is that the AirTag only works on iOS, and the other is that there are so many different Android handsets, all with different Bluetooth versions and hardware capabilities, that I didn’t want this to turn into a test of the smartphone’s capabilities. 

All the tags claim a level of dust and water-resistance, and while the AirTag and Tracker Card Pro passed all my tests with flying colors, the cheap “smart” tracker tags, which claimed to have an IP67 (fully dust-tight and supposedly capable of withstanding submergence in up to 1 meter of water for up to 30 minutes without damage) failed after a simple run under a tap. 

On opening one of the tags, I found out why — there was no gasket or seal in the design, so water getting in was inevitable. 

So, how do they stack up?

OK, let’s cut to the chase. 

The Apple AirTag came in first on this list. 

Bluetooth range was consistently 100 to 130 feet (30 to 40 meters) with a clear line of sight, and 50 to 65 feet (15 to 20 meters) indoors. And when using precision finding (a feature that’s exclusive to Apple hardware), this would work out to around 180 to 200 feet (55 to 60 meters) with a clear line of sight, and indoors (with two walls between me and the tag), it was good to about 50 feet (15 meters).

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The Nomad Tracker Card Pro wasn’t too far behind. It doesn’t have precision finding, but Bluetooth was good to 85 to 100 feet (25 to 30 meters) with a clear line of sight, and about 50 feet (15 meters) indoors. Not as good as the AirTag, but pretty darn good, and more than acceptable. 

For both tags, I observed RSSI values as high as -35 dBm, indicating they were transmitting at high power.

OK, what about the cheap tag? 

Here’s where things took a dive. 

Even with a clear line of sight, these tags struggled to be heard over 50 feet (15 meters); indoors, the range was slashed to about 30 feet (10 meters). 

And when it came to Bluetooth signal strength, I found it very variable: I never saw it above -50 dBm, and it would drop as low as -70 dBm even when the tag was next to the iPhone. That’s quite a difference, and accounts for the real-world performance differences.

But these tags did work; it’s just that their range was limited. 

What makes the cheap tags cheap?

So what’s the difference between a tag that costs $30 to $40 to one that costs $2.50? Isn’t it just another case of “the man” ripping us off?

Not really.

As with most things, there’s the right way to do something, the wrong way, and ways that work, but are less than optimal. 

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And this is what we’re seeing here. Yes, the cheap tags work, but they’ve been built in such a way that they’re far from optimal. Bluetooth range is just one of the areas where cost-cutting had an effect. Another is waterproofing. Also, if my experience with these sorts of tags is anything to go by, they’ll burn through batteries a lot quicker than an AirTag because their inefficient design. 

That’s what makes a cheap tag cheap. A design that’s been cut back to the point where it still just about works. 

A quick destructive teardown of an AirTag and the cheap tag shows there’s a lot more going on inside the AirTag.

I tried to take the Tracker Card Pro apart, but after about an hour of prying, cutting, and ripping at it with pliers, I didn’t get very far. That thing is tough and would need a long soak in solvent to defeat it (something I didn’t have the time to do or the inclination in this hot weather). 

This sort of cost-cutting isn’t limited to finder tags; it’s everywhere in consumer electronics, from USB chargers to power banks to even smartphones and computers. 

The bottom line

If I’m going to spend money on a tag to keep track of my keys, wallet, or rucksack, I’m almost certainly going to go for an AirTag or a decent third-party tag because if my wallet, rucksack, or keys go missing, I want the best possible chance of finding them. 

But for $2.50 a tag, the cheaper options still have their place. They work and might be just right for situations where you want to locate something, but it’s hardly the end of the world if you don’t find it. 

But for the important stuff, I’m sticking with decent tags.