I started with NFC tags but whipping out my phone everytime I needed to scan a tag got annoying so I switched to bluetooth beacons. I have automations fired by button taps and proximity. MUCH easier and less hassle.
I don't want to make any specific recommendations but any ibeacon signal emitting BLE beacon works perfectly with HA's default bluetooth integration, Bluetooth Low Energy integration and ESPresense.
Can you use BLE for presense detection such that your phone is beaconing and when you enter an area an ESP32 (or something like it) picks it up? Or is this really only useful the other way where there's a beacon and some s/w on the phone picks it up?
Using the phone as a beacon drains battery like stupid in my case. My ble ibeacons are tied to HA, I don't use the phone for any kind of beacon tx or rx.
@bpnine you can definitely use it like that. Look at espresence.com for some examples or esphome.io Bluetooth low energy device. The first site has some good info. Not all phones / watches are compatible