The increasing popularity of land nodal seismic acquisition systems has led to numerous systems being introduced. When planning the acquisition of a survey different acquisition systems may be offered and it is therefore important to be able to compare their performance in terms of the quality of the data recorded. In this paper I compared two nodal seismic systems using measurements made both in the laboratory and in the field and found that they were broadly comparable apart from a constant 1.2 ms timing difference resulting from the section of the GPS pulse used to control their timing. Given the consistencies in electronic performance, it is likely that the small differences in their overall performance that were found were related to the impact of their physical shape on their ability to couple with the ground. I anticipate that the methodology developed here could be applied to comparisons of other systems in the future.