I’ve been looking for the best tracker for my dog (Charlie, a 4yo lab rescue) for a while now, and finally decided to pull the trigger recently on 3 of the top options out there and compare them against each other to see which I would stick with.I bought the Whistle, Tractive and the Fi, and put them all on the same collar (lucky Charlie!) to make sure I was testing them under the exact same conditions.We kept them all on the collar for 2 weeks and looked for a couple of things when testing:GPS Location AccuracyTime Taken to Alert an EscapeBattery LifeCollar / App ExperienceGPS Location AccuracyWe live in a pretty rural area, so when we’re out and about walking Charlie - cell service can be spotty. We also rarely see anybody else on our walks, so Charlie is off leash most of the time.He’s also a rescue, and although we got him when he was very young and have trained with him a lot, he does occasionally still follow his nose when he gets excited!Because of this, location accuracy was very important to us. And honestly, we didn’t have very high expectations here because of where we live, but we were pleasantly surprised. They all tracked our walks well both on and off leash (fi and whistle particularly, the tractive seemed to lose signal more frequently) and gave us enough confidence that they could do it when we needed them too.Time Taken to Alert an EscapeAfter doing research into dog trackers, I learned that how quickly they send you an alert after your dog gets out of your house can differ greatly between products - and is a very important metric if you have an escape artist for a pup.We set up a fake ‘escape’ scenario in our house, and had my wife take Charlie out on a walk (without her phone on her or anything) and we would see how long it would take to get a notification that he had ‘got out’. We tested this twice on two different days for increased accuracy and I had my stopwatch ready for accurate measuring.Results are below in order of speed:Fi - 1m52s & 2m07s (!)Tractive - 3m35s & 4m02sWhistle - 5m12s & 5m28sBattery LifeIn short, this is how long each device lasted for us on a full charge:Tractive: 3 daysWhistle: 5 daysFi: 18 daysClear winner here again. We’ve been told to expect worse battery life than most since we live pretty far out, but 18 days is just crazy.Collar & App ExperienceHonestly I wasn’t expecting to have this as a section when I first ordered these products, but there were some really cool features that the Fi and Whistle had that I thought was worth talking about, so here we are. (The tractive didn’t offer these so haven’t talked about them here)The Whistle focuses on health, and claims it can track anything from licks to scratches, and it digests these to give you a daily wellness score for your pup. We found it interesting to see and track these, but also noticed that they weren’t always very accurate, so felt we couldn’t rely on it for an accurate representation. But fun to have nonetheless.Fi’s app experience was the most robust, and offered everything from sleep tracking to local rankings. And the rankings feature was BY FAR our favorite. They basically show you where your dog’s step total (from their activity) ranks compared to other dogs of the same breed using Fi (so you know whether they should be taking more or less for their age!), or compared to other dogs nearby, in your town and your state. We had no idea they had this feature and thought it was so cool that we found ourselves checking Charlie’s rank every day…and don’t know if we could ever go without checking again haha.Overall, after putting the trackers through their paces I would rank them:1. Fi2. Whistle3. TractiveHonestly, I expected them all to be quite similar in their abilities and what they offered, but in the end the escape alerts, battery life and app experience of the Fi was far and away better than the other too. Although we returned our Whistle, it was the next closest, and we found that the Tractive was quite a way behind when it came to performance in the end (also returned it).