The short answer is that you want both on the same product, and any seller offering only one is leaving customers behind. Here is what each actually does.
NFC: one tap, no camera
The customer holds their phone near the tag and a page opens. No camera, no aiming, no app. It works on iPhone 7 and later with iOS 11 or newer, and on most Android phones made in the last decade.
It fails in two situations worth knowing about. NFC can be switched off in settings, and some older or budget Android handsets never had the hardware. Neither is common, but across a few hundred customers you will meet both.
QR: works on anything with a camera
A scan code works on any phone that can open its camera, including handsets with NFC disabled or absent. It asks slightly more of the customer: open the camera, aim, tap the banner.
That extra step is small but it is not nothing, which is why NFC is the primary and QR is the fallback rather than the other way round.
What this means when you are buying
Check that the product carries both. Every product we sell does, and so do most of the serious alternatives.
- A card with only a QR code is a printed sticker. It works, and it should be cheap.
- A card with only NFC will fail silently for a minority of customers, and you will never hear about it.
- A card with both costs the same to make as one with only NFC.
The thing that matters more than either
Neither technology asks for the review. In buyer discussions the consistent finding is that a card handed over with a sentence gets reviews, and the same card left on a counter as decoration gets very few.
Whatever you buy, the tap only removes the friction of finding your review page. It does not remove the need to ask.
Every product here has both
The tag is a one-time purchase and the tap works forever without a plan. Pro at $9/mo per business adds the stats history, the review funnel, your Action Link profile, multi-site reporting and the ability to change where a tag points.
