One is a picture you can print a million times for free. The other is a physical object you buy one at a time.
Use a QR code unless you have a specific reason not to. It costs nothing to make, nothing to reproduce, and it works on every phone sold in the last decade without an app. NFC costs money for every single tag and quietly excludes part of your audience.
NFC is the better tool in a narrow set of cases: when the thing being tapped is reusable rather than printed, when it has to work in the dark, or when you want the interaction to feel like one motion instead of two. Those cases are real, but they are the minority.
The honest test: if you would be printing the thing anyway, print a QR code. If you are buying a physical object for each customer or location, price NFC and compare.
A QR code is a picture. It is a pattern of dark and light squares encoding a short piece of text, usually a web address, and any camera that can focus on it can read it. There is no chip, no battery and no radio. Reproducing it costs whatever the ink costs.
An NFC tag is a physical object: a tiny antenna and chip, normally inside a sticker or card, holding a similar short piece of text. A phone held within about four centimetres draws just enough power from its own radio field to read the chip. Nothing is stored on the tag beyond that text and, like a QR code, it does not run software on the phone.
The consequence that decides most projects is where the cost lives. Duplicating a QR code is free forever. Duplicating an NFC tag means buying another tag.
Tag prices move and vary by quantity, so the useful comparison is not a number but a shape: QR scales to any quantity at no extra cost, and NFC does not.
| What you need | QR code | NFC tag |
|---|---|---|
| Making the first one | Free | Free, but you buy the tag |
| Each additional unit | Ink only | The price of another tag |
| 100 table tents | One print run | One print run plus 100 tags |
| Works on an older phone | Yes, any camera | Only if the phone has NFC |
| Works from across a room | Yes, if printed large enough | No, it needs a touch |
| Works in the dark | No | Yes |
| Survives a photocopy or screenshot | Yes | No |
The pattern is consistent. NFC earns its cost when the object is permanent rather than printed, when it is handled repeatedly, or when the conditions make a camera struggle. In those situations the per-unit price stops being the deciding number.
That last case is a design argument rather than a technical one. Paying for a tap because it feels premium is a legitimate reason to spend the money — just be clear with yourself that you are buying a feeling rather than a capability.
Everything printed at volume. Menus, flyers, posters, receipts, shipping labels, business cards, packaging, table tents, window stickers, badges for a one-day event. In each of those the marginal cost of a code is zero, which is a hard number to compete with.
Reach is the other half. Every iPhone since iOS 11 and effectively every current Android phone scans QR codes from the native camera app with nothing to download. NFC hardware is widespread but not universal, it can be switched off, and the tap point sits in a different place on the back of different handsets — exactly the kind of small friction that makes a customer give up and walk away.
A QR code also survives being screenshotted, forwarded, photocopied and put on a web page. An NFC tag cannot leave the object it is stuck to.
On a single high-value surface — a counter card, a display unit, a hotel room folder — adding an NFC tag beside a printed QR code costs one tag and no extra printing. People use whichever they already understand, and there is no technical conflict between them.
What you should not do is point them at different destinations. Two codes on one surface leading to two different pages is the kind of detail nobody notices until the analytics stop making sense.
QR Code Agent generates codes in your browser with no account and no watermark. The codes are static, so the destination is encoded in the pattern itself and nobody can switch them off later. Download SVG for anything printed and PNG for screens.
If you are considering NFC because you were told a QR code carries a monthly fee, that fee belongs to dynamic codes, which are a different product with a redirect in the middle. It is worth understanding what the fee actually buys before changing technology to escape it.
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