Comparison

SensorDeck vs cool

Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.

Head to head
About

SensorDeck

Features
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SensorDeck - Pro ThingSpeak Dashboard & Alerts Unlock the full potential of your ThingSpeak IoT projects with SensorDeck! Whether you're a hobbyist, a student or an IoT professional, SensorDeck lets you monitor, analyze and act on your sensor data from iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch — anywhere, anytime. Tired of clunky web pages on your phone? SensorDeck is a native app built for Apple devices: clean, fast and full-featured. No account needed — it reads your ThingSpeak channels directly. New in v1.5.0: SensorDeck now keeps an eye on your sensors beyond the app. BEYOND THE APP • Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets: Put any sensor on your Home or Lock Screen with its latest value and recent trend. Widgets refresh on their own, even when the app is closed. • Apple Watch app: Patrol every sensor from your wrist. Sensors in alert or offline are listed first; tap one to see its value, trend and high/low. A haptic at the end tells you "all clear" or "something is wrong". • Watch complications: Put a sensor right on your watch face. • Shortcuts automations and Siri: Check your sensors on a schedule and get notified only when something is wrong, or turn on an air purifier or fan when a value runs high. You can also ask Siri: "Get a sensor reading from SensorDeck". SMART ALERTS • Six conditions: greater than, less than, outside a range, inside a range, rapid change, and sensor offline (stopped reporting). • Advanced options: quiet hours, a minimum repeat interval, back-to-normal notices, and custom messages with the channel, value and time. • Many channels: local push notifications, a Telegram bot, and universal Webhooks (Discord, Slack, IFTTT or your own API). • Monitors every channel at once, not only the one on screen. • Alerts are checked while the app is open with auto-refresh on. When the app is closed, pair it with a Shortcuts automation for scheduled checks. PRO-GRADE CHARTS • Built on Apple Charts, with line, area and bar charts and touch to inspect any data point. • Time ranges from 10 minutes to 1 week. Time labels adapt automatically, and every field in a channel shares the same time axis for easy comparison. • Long ranges load in parts with progress, and the chart fills in as data arrives. • Live statistics: maximum, minimum and average for any time range. • When a range has no data, SensorDeck explains why and shows when the channel last reported. DATA MANAGEMENT • Choose how long data is kept on your device (6 hours to 7 days) and view recent data even offline. • CSV export: export one channel or all of them, using a preset or custom range of up to one year, downloaded from ThingSpeak on demand. • iCloud sync: alert rules and chart styles sync automatically between your iPhone and iPad. • QR codes: scan or share channels to add them quickly. DESIGN AND LANGUAGES • An animated background and a carefully tuned dark interface. • The app, widgets, Apple Watch and Siri fully support English, Traditional Chinese and Japanese. FREE AND PREMIUM The free version includes 1 channel, basic alerts (greater than / less than) and the small Home Screen widget. Premium — a one-time purchase, not a subscription — removes ads and unlocks unlimited channels, advanced alerts, Telegram and Webhook notifications, medium and Lock Screen widgets, the full Apple Watch list and complications, Shortcuts and Siri, and CSV export and data management. Stop guessing, start knowing. Download SensorDeck and take full control of your IoT data!

About

cool

Features
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cool-radar turns the radios already inside your iPhone into a radar for the devices around you — with no extra hardware, and without inventing a single number. WHAT YOU SEE Nearby Bluetooth LE devices appear as contacts with an estimated distance, a bearing once there is enough geometry to support one, and a ranked guess at what each device actually is. The Wi-Fi card shows the link your phone is really on: type, interface, local address and subnet, the default gateway and the gateway's manufacturer. Where both ends have UWB hardware, distance stops being an estimate and becomes a measurement. HONEST BY DESIGN Every value carries a badge. "Measured" is a hardware reading. "Inferred" is a value the math derived. Distances read "ā‰ˆ 4.5 m" because radio ranging is an estimate, not a ruler. When there is not enough geometry for a direction, the app draws a ring of possible positions and a question mark instead of a convincing-looking arrow. And when iOS simply does not expose something — neighbouring Wi-Fi networks, raw spectrum, Wi-Fi CSI — the app says so instead of filling the gap with fiction. THE MATH INSIDE • Log-distance path-loss inversion, with a per-device exponent that recalibrates itself from the geometry you walk • Kalman filtering with motion-gated noise, so a device that is standing still stops drifting on screen • Robust multilateration with Huber weights, so a single reflection off a wall cannot drag a position across the room • A naive-Bayes hypothesis engine that ranks device types from the broadcast name, company ID, advertised GATT services, transmit power, address policy and advertising cadence — and shows you the evidence behind every guess • Behaviour analytics over the signal time series: advertising interval, jitter, trend and periodicity • Radio tomography that maps excess path loss into an attenuation picture of the space FEATURES • Top-down radar with range rings, pinch to zoom, double tap to reset • Device list with search and type filters • Device card with signal history, ranked hypotheses and the evidence for each • Unwanted-tracker heuristics based on public advertising patterns • CSV export of a session • Full Russian and English, switchable inside the app PRIVACY All sensing and all math run on your iPhone. No account, no analytics, no tracking, no advertising identifier. One optional setting — off until you turn it on — may send a 24-bit manufacturer prefix to a public vendor database to name your router. Nothing else ever leaves the device. Use cool-radar only on networks and devices you are entitled to inspect. It does not decrypt Find My identities, does not enumerate neighbouring Wi-Fi networks, and provides no covert tracking of people. REQUIREMENTS iOS 18 or later. Bluetooth works on every iPhone. UWB distance needs U1/U2 hardware on both devices. Room geometry needs a LiDAR model. Anything unavailable on your hardware is shown as unavailable rather than simulated.

Screenshots

SensorDeck4 screens
cool4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is in-app purchases: cool at none against SensorDeck's 1. cool also leads on ads (none vs shown). SensorDeck's advantage is device support (3 vs 1). On price and iOS requirement there is nothing between them.

Scored on Price Ā· Rating Ā· Positive reviews Ā· Number of ratings Ā· Update frequency Ā· Ads Ā· In-app purchases Ā· Monetization Ā· Best chart rank Ā· Devices Ā· Requires iOS

CostPrice Ā· In-app purchases Ā· Ads Ā· Monetization

Both are free to download. SensorDeck sells 1 one-off in-app purchase. cool asks for nothing beyond the download.

Scorecard3 real differences Ā· 3 level
SensorDeck versus cool: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterSensorDeckcool
PriceFreeFree
Update frequencyEvery 5 weeks—
AdsYesNo — better
In-app purchasesYesNo — better
DevicesiPhone, iPad, Apple Watch — betteriPhone
Requires iOS18.518.0 — better
Further details — not scored
Size7 MB4 MB
Age rating17+17+
DeveloperWEI-LUN HUANGZheniy Shacc

In-app purchases

1 purchases

SensorDeck

One-time1
  • Pro Version Upgrade$4.99
None

cool

No in-app purchases

Questions

Is SensorDeck free?
SensorDeck is free to download, with in-app purchases available.
Is cool free?
cool is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Do SensorDeck or cool have ads?
SensorDeck shows ads; cool does not.

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