Live tracking shows a device's position updating on a map in near real time — useful when you already know something is wrong, and poor at telling you that it is.
Live tracking displays a device’s position on a map, refreshing as new positions arrive. It is the feature every tracking product leads with, because it demos beautifully: a dot moving across a map is immediately understandable.
It is also the wrong tool for most of the questions people actually have.
The dot moves in jumps, not smoothly. A tracker reporting every 60 seconds produces a new position once a minute, and the map interpolates between them or simply waits.
How live it feels comes entirely down to the reporting interval — and shortening that interval costs battery life proportionally. A tracker reporting every 10 seconds looks genuinely live and lasts a day or two. One reporting every 5 minutes lasts a month and looks like a series of teleports.
There is no configuration that gives you both.
Live tracking requires someone to look, and looking is a task that competes with everything else in the day.
The failure mode is predictable. You check obsessively for a week, then less, then not at all — and the day something goes wrong, nobody is watching. The information was available and unread, which is the same outcome as not having it.
Geofencing inverts this. Nothing asks for your attention until a boundary is crossed, and when it is, the notification comes to you. On an ordinary day it produces nothing at all, which is exactly correct.
Most people who ask for tracking want this. “Where is my child right now” is usually a proxy for “tell me if something is wrong”, and the second is a much easier question to answer well.
It has real uses, and they share a shape: you already know you need to look.
In every case the map is being consulted deliberately, not monitored continuously.
Worth separating, because it changes what is reasonable to ask of someone.
Live tracking exposes a continuous record of movement — everywhere someone went, how long they stayed. A geofence exposes only that a specific boundary was crossed during a specific window, and on a day when nothing happens it reveals nothing at all.
For a teenager, an employee, or an elderly relative, that difference is substantial and worth being deliberate about. See lone workers, where it is a legal question as well as an ethical one, and teen drivers.
Both, with the emphasis on alerts.
Positions stream to the map in real time over a persistent connection, so live tracking is there when you need it. But the product is built around zones, schedules, and notifications — the map is where you go after an alert, not somewhere you are expected to sit.
Position history — 24 hours on Pro, 30 days on Business — covers the third case: reconstructing what happened after the fact, which is often more useful than either watching live or getting an alert. See pricing.
Last reviewed 7 August 2026.
Geofencing is the practice of drawing a virtual boundary around a real-world place and having software react when a tracked device crosses it.
The reporting interval is how often a tracker sends its position to a server — the single setting that most directly trades battery life against how quickly you learn about a boundary crossing.
An exit alert is a notification sent when a tracked device leaves a geofenced zone during a period when that zone is being monitored.
GPS accuracy is how close a reported position is to the true location, usually expressed as a radius within which the real position probably falls.
Draw a zone, assign a phone or GPS tracker, and get a blip the moment it crosses the line. Free for 7 days.