SatRadar vs ISS Satellite Tracker
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. NEW: MANEUVER INTEL Satellites move on purpose, and now you can see it. Tap one to see its recent engine burns, how big they were against its usual range, and anything out of pattern. Tap a burn on the strip above the time bar and the clock jumps back to replay it. Unusual activity collects this week's surprises, close approaches between two satellites name the partner, and optional notifications tell you when the ones you follow move. Estimated from public orbit data (U.S. Space Command via Space-Track.org): SatRadar's estimates, not official determinations. This is the sky we built. The Space Age started as one beep from Sputnik in 1957; today more than ten thousand active spacecraft fly above us — Starlink and OneWeb meshing the planet in broadband, GPS / GLONASS / Galileo / BeiDou holding civilisation's clocks, weather sentinels watching whole oceans, the ISS and Tiangong with humans aboard. 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 • Follow the Roman and James Webb space telescopes 1.5 million km out, with Earth beside them 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. The same unlock brings the rest of low Earth orbit with it: OneWeb, Iridium NEXT, the Earth-observation fleets from Planet, Spire, and IceEye, and the communications constellations of Astranis, O3B, Orbcomm, and Globalstar in their actual orbital planes. 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. 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. Every satellite appears on its real birthday and moves on its real orbit. The smoothness is the point. 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.
ISS Satellite Tracker
Discover when and where to see the International Space Station and Starlink trains from your location. Get accurate predictions and reminders for visible passes, working entirely offline. Enhance your viewing experience with detailed orbital data and an educational library.
- Accurate pass predictions
- Offline functionality
- Pass reminders
- Live 2D satellite map
- Starlink train tracking
- 3D orbital globe (Pro)
- Educational library (Pro)
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The International Space Station is one of the few genuinely spectacular things you can see with your own eyes: a brilliant point of light, brighter than any star, sailing silently across the sky. Most people never realise it passes right over their own backyard. ISS Tracker has one job: get you outside at the right moment, looking up. No guesswork. Open the app and it tells you plainly: tonight at 9:47, look west, visible for six minutes, and how bright it will be. Then you step outside and watch it cross. Other apps promise a live video feed and hand you a black screen. This one does not need a feed. Every pass is worked out on your own device from real orbital data, so it works completely offline, anywhere, with nothing to buffer and nothing that can go down. No black screens. No account. Just the right time to look up. Free, forever: - Accurate pass predictions for your exact location - A reminder before each pass, so you never miss one - A live 2D map of the station circling the Earth right now - Every Starlink train currently in the sky, shown as soon as it's up Go further with Pro: - A cinematic 3D globe with the station's real orbit rendered live - Brightness for every pass ("brighter than Jupiter tonight") so you know which passes are actually worth heading outside for - Beyond the ISS: China's Tiangong station and Hubble, tracked the same way - An alert the moment a Starlink train is worth stepping outside for - Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets with a live countdown to the next pass - An education library: what you are really seeing, why it sometimes vanishes mid-pass, how a 400 km orbit and 16 sunrises a day actually work It is not a database and it is not a live stream. Every satellite here earns its place because you can actually see it with your own eyes, not because it's in a catalogue. It is the simplest, most reliable way to answer the only questions that matter: will I see it tonight, and is it worth going out for? Whether you have never spotted it before or you look up every chance you get, ISS Tracker turns "I always miss it" into "there it is." Look up. ISS Tracker's premium features are available as a one-time purchase. There is no subscription and nothing renews automatically. Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/ Privacy Policy: https://digitaldoctorltd.com/privacy.html
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is rating: ISS Satellite Tracker at 5.0 against SatRadar's 4.3. SatRadar's advantage is update cadence (every 2 days vs every 10 days) and ratings volume (6 vs 1). On price, ads, in-app purchases and monetization model 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 ISS Satellite Tracker sells 2 in-app purchases, starting at $9.99 per year. Whichever you choose, the download price is not the number that matters.
ISS Satellite Tracker holds the better App Store score, 5.0 against 4.3. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: SatRadar has 6 ratings behind it against 1, so its average is the more settled of the two.
SatRadar ships an update every 2 days, ISS Satellite Tracker every 10 days. Both last shipped on October 31, 2026.
| Parameter | SatRadar | ISS Satellite Tracker |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.3 (6 ratings) | 5.0 (1 ratings) — better |
| Number of ratings | 6 — better | 1 |
| Update frequency | Every 2 days — better | Every 10 days |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | Yes |
| Monetization | Free with in-app purchases | Free with in-app purchases |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad — better | iPhone |
| Requires iOS | 16.4 — better | 26.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 68 MB | 9 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | David Hodge | Digital Doctor LTD |
In-app purchases
SatRadar
- Time Travel$4.99
- Unlock Starlink$9.99
ISS Satellite Tracker
- Pro Annual$9.991 Year
- Pro Lifetime$16.99
Questions
Is SatRadar free?
Is ISS Satellite Tracker free?
Which has better reviews, SatRadar or ISS Satellite Tracker?
Do SatRadar or ISS Satellite Tracker have ads?
Which is updated more often, SatRadar or ISS Satellite Tracker?
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