A logger tells you what happened once the box is open. A real-time device tells you while the shipment is still moving, when there is still something you can do about it.
Three products. Two you can buy by the unit — Track My Label and Tive, on the Butopia shop — and one quoted per shipment. We will tell you which is right for your lane, including when the answer is a £20 logger.
Three products, in order of how much they have to prove. Most shipments are answered by the first one. Buy up the ladder only when the question forces you to.
"I just need to know it got there — and I want my customer to stop ringing to ask."
A printed adhesive label on the outside of the parcel. It reports arrival at the address rather than a scan at a depot, and the person waiting gets their own page with no account and no app.
"I need to prove the condition it travelled in, to somebody who can stop me shipping."
A cellular smart label the size of a credit card, with a GDP-validated cold chain variant and a NIST-traceable calibration certificate you can pull out of the shipment record when an auditor asks.
"It is dry ice, or cryogenic, or it is going by air and it is worth more than the van."
A reusable device rather than a label, with the full sensor set, external probes for dry ice and cryogenic shipments, and a validated model built for life sciences release decisions.
The differences that actually change a decision. Everything here is from the manufacturers' current published specifications — the links are at the foot of each product page so you can check rather than take our word for it.
| Track My Label | Sensos label | Tive tracker | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Form | Adhesive label, 0.56 mm | Adhesive label, 107 × 72 mm, 24 g | Device, 90–176 g depending on model |
| Reports by | Bluetooth network, or NB-IoT on the cellular label | LTE-M / NB-IoT, plus Wi-Fi and GPS positioning | LTE-M or LTE Cat 1, plus Wi-Fi and GPS |
| Senses | Location and arrival; temperature on the cellular label | Temperature, humidity, shock, light, movement, parcel open/close | Temperature, humidity, light, shock, motion; tilt on Solo Pro |
| Calibration paperwork | Not calibrated — it is an arrival product | NIST-traceable certificate, ISO 17025, on the GDP variant | 3-point NIST-traceable certificate, ISO 17025, every tracker |
| Regulatory position | Operational visibility, not a compliance record | Validated against EU GDP guidelines by Sensos | Solo Pro built for validated life sciences release |
| Extreme cold | No | Down to −30 °C in operation | Probes to −100 °C (dry ice) and −200 °C (cryogenic) |
| After the shipment | Disposable, nothing to get back | Disposable, nothing to get back | Rechargeable — returned and reused, or kept |
| Cost | £7 or £25 a label, published | Per shipment — ask | Listed per tracker on the Butopia shop |
Tive trackers can be bought singly on the shop, where the current price, bulk savings and stock are shown on each product page. Sensos is quoted rather than listed, because it is priced per shipment against volume and lane. Volume pricing, probes and the monitoring service are a conversation for either — we would rather quote you properly than publish a number that turns out not to apply to you.
Real-time monitoring costs several times what a single-use logger costs, and there are shipments where it earns none of it. If all four of these are true, buy a logger and keep the difference:
That describes a lot of routine distribution, and we sell loggers for exactly that reason. Data loggers and where they still make sense →
The honest test. Real-time is worth paying for when somebody would pick up the phone. If an excursion alert at two in the afternoon would cause a driver to be redirected, a receiving site to be warned, or a replacement to be picked, you are buying an outcome. If it would only be read the following morning, you are buying a more expensive logger.
Anyone can sell you hardware. The reason these shipments go wrong is rarely the electronics.
Which device, how many per pallet, and where on the load. A sensor taped to the outside of a box tells you about the box. Placement is the difference between data that represents the product and data that represents the air near it.
Thresholds set to your product's stability data rather than the default in the platform, and sent to the person who can do something. An alert everybody ignores is worse than no alert, because it teaches the team to ignore the next one.
An excursion is not automatically a rejection, and a flat line is not automatically a pass. We will go through the file with you and say what we think it shows — in plain terms, and in writing if you need it for the record.
No, and most people should not. It is common to run Track My Label on routine domestic parcels, a Sensos label on the regulated lanes, and Tive on the handful of shipments a year that go by air on dry ice. They are different answers to different questions, not competing versions of the same one.
No. Track My Label is ours. Sensos and Tive are partner products — we supply them, set them up, and support you through using them, but the hardware, the platforms and the published specifications are theirs. Every technical claim on this site is attributed and linked back to their own documentation.
We say this plainly because it matters to a QA reader who is going to have to name a manufacturer in a document.
Good Distribution Practice is the framework governing how medicinal products are stored and moved. For a monitoring device the parts that bite are calibration traceability, data integrity, and whether you can produce the documentation during an inspection without a scramble.
Sensos states that its cold chain label is validated against EU GDP guidelines, GAMP 5, ISO 17025 calibration and ALCOA+ data integrity principles, and supplies a validation pack to match. That is a claim about their product, not about your process — the qualification of how you use it is still yours to do, and it is a thing we help with.
Usually, and that is one of the main reasons to choose them. The Sensos label uses a non-rechargeable battery that needs no dangerous goods declaration for air freight, and Sensos maintains a live list of tier-one cargo airline approvals. Tive ships non-lithium models tested to RTCA DO-160G for the same reason.
Approval status changes, so we will not print a list here that quietly goes out of date. Ask us before you book the lane and we will check the current position with the manufacturer.
You get told while it is happening, which is the entire point. What happens next is the part worth agreeing in advance: who receives the alert, what they are authorised to do, and what gets written down. We will help you set that up, because a monitoring system with no agreed response is an expensive way to generate anxiety.
Yes. For anything at this end of the range that is the sensible way to buy — a handful of devices on a lane you already know well, so you can see what the data looks like when nothing is wrong. That baseline is worth more than a demo.
Where it goes, what it is worth, and what you would have to prove if it went wrong. We will tell you what we would use.
