Octopus Agile vs Tracker vs Go: which smart tariff wins

Octopus Agile, Tracker and Intelligent Octopus Go are all smart, time-of-use tariffs, but they price your electricity in completely different ways: Agile changes every half hour, Tracker changes once a day, and Go gives you a fixed cheap window overnight. The right one depends less on which looks "cheapest" today and more on whether you can shift your usage, whether you drive an EV, and how much price movement you can live with. You have to be an Octopus customer with a working smart meter to use any of them, so the first step is simply joining — which earns you £50 in bill credit.

Octopus Agile, Tracker and Intelligent Octopus Go are all smart, time-of-use tariffs, but they price your electricity in completely different ways: Agile changes every half hour, Tracker changes once a day, and Go gives you a fixed cheap window overnight. The right one depends less on which looks "cheapest" today and more on whether you can shift your usage, whether you drive an EV, and how much price movement you can live with. You have to be an Octopus customer with a working smart meter to use any of them, so the first step is simply joining — which earns you £50 in bill credit.

The core difference: how often the price moves

These three tariffs are usually compared on price, but the thing that actually separates them is structural — how frequently the unit rate changes and what it is pegged to. Agile is half-hourly: it publishes 48 different prices a day, each set a day ahead from the wholesale day-ahead market, so what you pay at 2pm can be a fraction of what you pay at 6pm. Tracker is daily: one electricity price and one gas price, refreshed once every 24 hours to follow wholesale, so the figure holds steady all day and only moves overnight. Go (and its smarter sibling, Intelligent Octopus Go) is neither — it gives you a low, fixed rate during a set overnight window and a flat, higher rate the rest of the time. Once you see it that way the choice gets simpler: Agile rewards people who can chase the cheapest half-hours, Tracker suits people who want wholesale exposure without micromanaging it, and Go suits people who can dump a big chunk of usage — usually an electric car — into the small hours. We never quote live unit rates here because they change quarterly with the price cap and vary by region; check octopus.energy for the current numbers in your postcode.

Octopus Agile: half-hourly prices that follow the market

Agile is the most hands-on of the three. Every afternoon Octopus publishes the next day's 48 half-hourly rates, derived from the wholesale day-ahead market, so you can see in advance when power will be cheap and plan around it. When the grid is awash with cheap wind, prices fall hard and can occasionally drop below zero — meaning Octopus effectively pays you to run the dishwasher, charge a battery or top up a car. The trade-off sits at the other end of the day: the early-evening peak, roughly 4pm to 7pm, is when rates climb highest, and although Octopus applies a capped ceiling to that peak, it can still be well above a standard rate. Agile genuinely wins for engaged households with shiftable loads — a home battery, an EV, a heat pump, or just the discipline to run big appliances at lunchtime or overnight — because those people can actively steer their usage toward the cheap slots. It is the wrong fit if your evenings are unavoidably busy, you would rather not look at an app, or you want a predictable bill, and note that Agile prices electricity only, not gas.

Octopus Tracker: one wholesale-linked price a day — gas included

Tracker is the middle ground. Instead of 48 prices it gives you a single electricity rate and a single gas rate that update once a day to follow the wholesale market, so you get most of the upside of buying energy close to cost without having to time your washing machine to the half hour. That daily cadence makes it far less demanding than Agile while still moving with the market, and crucially it tracks gas as well as electricity — something Agile does not do — which makes it interesting for homes that still heat and cook with gas and want both fuels priced off wholesale. Octopus also applies a daily cap to the unit rates to stop them spiking without limit. The honest catch is that wholesale cuts both ways: when gas markets are calm Tracker tends to undercut the price-capped standard tariff, but during a supply shock the daily price can climb, and you are accepting that variability in exchange for the long-run saving. It suits people who want wholesale exposure and gas tracking with low effort, and who can glance at the app occasionally rather than daily.

Octopus Go and Intelligent Octopus Go: a fixed cheap window overnight

Go works on a completely different principle from the other two. Rather than tracking the market it gives you a guaranteed low rate during a fixed overnight window and a flat, higher rate for the rest of the day — predictability rather than market exposure. Intelligent Octopus Go goes further: it plugs into your car or charger, schedules charging into the cheapest hours for you, and can extend that cheap window beyond the standard slot, so you wake up to a full battery without setting anything manually. This is the tariff built for EV drivers, and increasingly for homes with batteries or heat pumps that can soak up power overnight. Where it wins is certainty: the overnight rate is fixed and low, so there are no half-hourly games and no daily wholesale wobble to watch. The catch is the maths — the daytime rate is higher than a standard variable rate, so Go only pays off if you genuinely move a large share of your consumption into the cheap window. Charge a car at home most nights and it is hard to beat; have no big overnight load and the higher day rate works against you. Intelligent control also needs a compatible vehicle or charger, though the plain Octopus Go version still offers the fixed window without the smart scheduling.

So which wins — and what 'Flexible Octopus' actually is

There is no single winner, because each tariff is optimised for a different household. If you drive an EV and charge at home, Intelligent Octopus Go is usually the standout. If you want to follow the wholesale market but value your evenings, Tracker is the low-effort choice and the only one that also tracks gas. If you have batteries, a heat pump or simply enjoy steering usage toward the cheapest and occasionally free half-hours, Agile rewards that effort most. Many households even layer them over time, starting on one and moving as their setup changes. It is also worth clearing up a common search-engine mix-up: Flexible Octopus is not a smart tariff at all — it is the standard variable tariff that tracks the energy price cap, the default you land on when you join. So 'Octopus Flexible vs Tracker' is really 'price-cap default vs wholesale-linked daily pricing', not two time-of-use tariffs going head to head. The reassuring part is that none of these locks you in: smart tariffs carry no exit fees, so you can try one, switch to another, or drop back to Flexible if it does not suit, which makes experimenting genuinely low-risk.

How to get on a smart tariff — and £50 while you do it

Here is the part most comparison pages skip: you cannot pick Agile, Tracker or Go until you are already an Octopus customer with a working smart meter. So the practical route is to join Octopus first through the referral link on this page, then move onto whichever smart tariff fits — for free, with no exit fees, and you can switch again if it does not suit. Joining through the link means you receive £50 as energy account credit, not cash and not a code to type in. It is paid automatically once your switch fully completes and your first monthly Direct Debit clears, usually around four weeks, occasionally longer if your old supplier is slow to release you. It costs you nothing extra, the switch is protected by the Energy Switch Guarantee — same meter, no engineer, no break in supply, around five working days — and Octopus is a safe mainstream choice: by its own figures the UK's largest electricity supplier, powering roughly one in four homes on 100% renewable electricity, a long-standing Which? Recommended Provider with an 'Excellent' Trustpilot score near 4.8. One thing to avoid: if you sign up via a price-comparison or switching site, the referral is dropped and Octopus pays that third party instead of crediting you, so go straight through the link here. This is an independent, unofficial guide, not Octopus itself — but the £50 is the real referral reward, and joining is what unlocks every smart tariff above.

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