NFC vs RFID: What's the difference?

In the contactless industry, we often hear people talk about the difference between near field communication, NFC, and radio frequency identification, RFID. However, there are both differences and similarities between them. We will briefly discuss the differences between them from the perspective of application.

After a few years of development, RFID technology has been widely used in retail, warehousing and logistics, aviation, books, medical and other fields. However, relatively speaking, the public is often more familiar with NFC technology, because the smart phones are basically equipped with this technology, which is easy to use in daily situations such as payment for daily necessities.

The two technologies are closely related, as NFC technology evolved from RFID technology. We can even understand NFC as a subset of RFID technology, and its 13.56MHz frequency band it uses is the specific frequency band of high frequency RFID.

Two distinct functions

We can make a distinction between the two in terms of function. RFID can read and determine data, while NFC technology emphasizes information interaction, which is more flexible and bidirectional.

From the perspective of application scenarios, we can find obvious differences between the two. RFID and NFC are respectively oriented to different specific applications: RFID is based on commodities, while NFC is based on user interactive operation, which requires the participation of users.

The RFID tag is pasted on the specified items so that the items can report their identity and other information to the computer network, which is the cornerstone of RFID technology to achieve more data processing functions.

NFC requires user action

NFC has a very short range of action, as the general working range is within 0.1 meters. It is a user interactive technology, and it needs the user's special participation to ensure the completion of functions such as payment or access.

In practical application, an RFID scanner can read a large number of tags at the same time, which is very common in warehouse inventory.

RFID is more used in production, logistics, retail, tracking and asset management.

NFC is generally one-to-one, and the transmission range of NFC is much shorter than that of RFID. Therefore, NFC technology plays a huge role in access control, public transportation, mobile payment and other fields.

In fact, the application scenarios of RFID technology are far more extensive than NFC, and it can even be said that RFID includes NFC. However, due to the differences in functional characteristics between the two, they basically do not form a competitive relationship, but play a distinct role in their respective application scenarios.