NFC and Bluetooth Comparison. NFC and Bluetooth are both short-range communication technologies, the main difference between NFC and Bluetooth is the reading range. NFC operates at slower speeds than Bluetooth and has a much shorter range, however NFC consumes far less power compare with Bluetooth and doesn’t require pairing. The maximum working distance for NFC is less than 20 cm where Bluetooth can reach 10 meters in normal usage.
NFC has a lower transfer rate than Bluetooth, but the set up time is much quicker than standard Bluetooth as NFC only need a single wave to interact with another device. The connection between two NFC devices is automatically established in less than 0.1 second. The maximum data transfer rate of NFC (424 kbit/s) is slower than that of Bluetooth V3.0 (up to 24 Mbit/s).
NFC is compatible with existing passive RFID (13.56 MHz ISO/IEC 18000-3) infrastructures, which similar to the Bluetooth V4.0 low-energy protocol that requires low power to operate.
