SatRadar vs Satellite Tracker 3D
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
SatRadar
Track thousands of satellites in real-time, from the ISS to Starlink constellations. Explore orbital paths, view satellite details, and even travel back in time to witness the history of space exploration. The app offers a detailed view of human activity in low Earth orbit.
- Real-time satellite tracking
- View ISS and Tiangong
- Global navigation satellite systems
- Weather satellite tracking
- Detailed satellite information
- Time travel visualization
- GPU-accelerated performance
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Free. No account, no subscription, no ads. The free version tracks everything, not just the ISS. Ten thousand satellites are flying over your head right now. SatRadar shows you every one of them, where they actually are, doing what they actually do — drawn from the same orbital telemetry that mission controllers and ground stations use every day. Open the app and the sky is already alive. Accurate to the second: real orbital telemetry, the same TLE data NORAD publishes, checked against ground truth. This is the sky we built. The Space Age started as one beep from Sputnik in 1957 and turned into a near-continuous procession of launches that has put more than ten thousand active spacecraft above us — Starlink and OneWeb meshing the planet in broadband, the GPS / GLONASS / Galileo / BeiDou networks holding civilisation's clocks, weather sentinels watching whole oceans, the ISS and Tiangong with humans aboard. SatRadar lets you watch all of it move, in real time, at the scale it actually is. Free to use, with no account required: • The International Space Station and Tiangong, traced across the sky in real time • The complete global navigation networks: GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, and BeiDou • Weather sentinels watching from geostationary perches: GOES, NOAA, METEOSAT • Full orbital trails on the GNSS fleet, so you can see the mathematical poetry of a 12-hour orbit at a glance • Tap any satellite to see what it is, where it is going, and how high above you it sits right now A one-time Starlink unlock opens the full mesh — nearly ten thousand satellites appearing as a living lattice around the planet, every laser cross-link drawn between its real endpoints, every hop between birds animated in actual sequence. The same unlock brings the rest of low Earth orbit with it: OneWeb threads its broadband shell, Iridium NEXT lights up the polar planes, the commercial Earth-observation fleets from Planet, Spire, and IceEye start watching, and the communications constellations of Astranis, O3B, Orbcomm, and Globalstar show up in their actual orbital planes. It is the most complete picture of human activity in low Earth orbit you can hold in your hand. A second one-time unlock — Time Travel — turns the whole thing into a time machine. Go back to October 1957 and the sky empties to a single object: Sputnik 1, circling a planet that had never seen an artificial moon. Move forward and watch it fill in: GPS through the 80s and 90s, the ISS assembling itself from 1998, the low-Earth shell suddenly igniting as Starlink starts launching in 2019 — sixty birds at a time, piling up into the mesh that wraps the planet today. Every satellite appears on its real birthday and moves on its real orbit. Six decades of the Space Age, laid out in front of you. The smoothness is the point. Real-time orbital propagation at constellation scale is genuinely difficult — most viewers buckle under a few hundred objects. SatRadar runs a custom GPU-side SGP4 propagator that holds every satellite at sixty frames a second, on a phone, while you rotate the globe and zoom from city to constellation in one continuous gesture. A few more touches that took a while: • Day and night terminator drawn live across the Earth, with atmospheric scattering at the edge • A stylised, richly textured globe — 8K Earth with live map tiles at close zoom • A star-accurate sky: the Sun, Moon, and the brightest stars in their true positions, every frame • Follow any satellite: lock the camera to it and ride along as it crosses the planet Both unlocks are optional one-time purchases — the app is complete without them. Never a subscription. Family Sharing supported, restored automatically across your iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV. Look up. Then look here. We are absolutely a spacefaring species — finally, suddenly, ridiculously — and you are walking around under the proof of it.
Satellite Tracker 3D
Explore thousands of satellites orbiting Earth in real-time on an interactive 3D globe. Track their precise locations, predict upcoming passes over your area, and receive alerts for visible satellite trains and the ISS. View satellite paths overlaid on the real sky using AR.
- Real-time 3D satellite tracking
- Predict upcoming satellite passes
- AR Sky Mode for live viewing
- Track over 20,000 active satellites
- Alerts for ISS and satellite trains
- View internet mega-constellations
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Basic functions are free, one time in-app purchase to unlock all features. Find and identify the thousands of satellites that orbit Earth in real time on an interactive 3D globe. Monitor Internet constellation growth. The NEW companion app for the satellitemap.space website Satellite Tracker 3D shows you exactly where satellites are right now — and when they'll pass over your location next. Get alerts for potentially visible satellite trains, ISS passes and more. Recent features include offline mode, and an Apple Watch app. Internet Mega-constellations Keep up to date on the growth, re-entries and design of the new internet in space mega constellations. Real-Time 3D Globe Track satellites as they orbit with smooth, accurate positions updated at 60fps. Zoom from a full Earth view down to city level. Near Me What was that I saw last night? see nearby satellite trains, re-entries, the ISS and more replayed from your POV. Find upcoming events and preview them with cloud cover forecast. Sky Mode with AR Point your phone at the sky and see and identify satellites and even aircraft, overlaid on the real sky through your camera. What You Can Track 20,000+ active satellites including communications constellations, the two International Space Stations, weather satellites, debris, satellite "trains", re-entries, Amateur (Ham) Radio tool, Celestial transits, and more. Pinpoint precision. Terms of Use: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/ Privacy Policy: https://satellitemap.space/info/privacy
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is ratings volume: Satellite Tracker 3D at 69 against SatRadar's 5. SatRadar's advantage is update cadence (every 2 days vs every 4 days). On price, rating, ads and in-app purchases there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. SatRadar sells 2 one-off in-app purchases and Satellite Tracker 3D sells 4 in-app purchases, starting at $2.99 per month. Whichever you choose, the download price is not the number that matters.
On the App Store both sit at effectively the same score — 4.8 for SatRadar against 4.7 for Satellite Tracker 3D. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: Satellite Tracker 3D has 69 ratings behind it against 5, so its average is the more settled of the two.
SatRadar ships an update every 2 days, Satellite Tracker 3D every 4 days. The most recent releases landed on October 24, 2026 and October 25, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | SatRadar | Satellite Tracker 3D |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.8 (5 ratings) — better | 4.7 (69 ratings) |
| Positive reviews | — | 86.7% of reviews |
| Number of ratings | 5 | 69 — better |
| Update frequency | Every 2 days — better | Every 4 days |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | Yes |
| Monetization | Free with in-app purchases | Free with in-app purchases |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch — better |
| Requires iOS | 16.4 — better | 17.6 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 67 MB | 24 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | David Hodge | justin beech |
Customer experience
SatRadar
Satellite Tracker 3D
In-app purchases
SatRadar
- Time Travel$4.99
- Unlock Starlink$9.99
Satellite Tracker 3D
- Supporter$2.991 Month
- Supporter$29.991 Year
- Core Unlock$1.99
- Pro Unlock$9.99
Questions
Is SatRadar free?
Is Satellite Tracker 3D free?
Which has better reviews, SatRadar or Satellite Tracker 3D?
Do SatRadar or Satellite Tracker 3D have ads?
Which is updated more often, SatRadar or Satellite Tracker 3D?
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