Route planning apps and software can streamline the process of getting your product to its destination. These tools are especially useful for companies that ship multiple packages on a daily basis and need to keep track of their progress.
Route planning software can help you save time, money, and resources by allowing you to more efficiently plan routes. It’s also an effective way to reduce miles driven and fuel costs, which is important for many businesses.
These apps use data from satellites and GPS to provide accurate information about weather conditions, traffic, road closures, and other factors that can affect whether you complete a delivery on time or not. If you want to know what the best route planning apps are for your business, read on!
Best Apps For Route Planning
Want to skip the read and get right to my top picks? The best route planner app is Circuit Route Planner.
Success as a delivery driver happens when you find your routes easily and make your deliveries quickly.
So how does a delivery driver find that success?
Find a delivery route planner app that works for you, and you’ll be on the road with little stress, driving to your destination and making your drops on time.
A delivery route planner can help you finish your day early or on time, keeping customers, supervisors and contractors happy.
You’ll also feel satisfied, knowing that you found the most efficient route that should also help you save fuel as well as time.
So if you’re wondering, what’s the best route planner app for delivery drivers? I’m here to help.
Let’s take an in-depth look at the six best delivery route planner apps, so you can get on the road and get driving to success 👇
What Is a delivery route planner app?
Let’s start with a look at what exactly is a delivery route planner.
Having an app on your smartphone that helps plan your route is more than using a map to find your destination. The best delivery route planner also optimizes your route.
Delivery route planner apps: What is route optimization?
Route optimization is a process of finding the most efficient route, and not simply the way between two destinations. It plans your route using a number of different factors, including:
The number of stops.
The location of all the stops on your route.
Any traffic congestion or construction delays.
The best way to approach your destination, perhaps even avoiding tricky situations like crossing intersections or making a left-hand turn.
A delivery route planner app that gives you route optimization will help you plan your best route each day.
It can help you give customers a delivery window.
It can make sure you build in rest stops or bathroom breaks.
It should respond and update based on any changes during the day, modifying planned routes in near real-time as traffic and other situations change.
All this means that it should also help you spend less time driving, avoid backtracking, and reduce your fuel costs as well as lower your stress.
The best delivery route planner app may also help you organize packages in your vehicle, saving you time at every stop. That can add up over the course of the day to be a big time saver.
So let’s look at your options and the 6 best delivery route planner apps.
Best free delivery route planner apps
If you’re looking for a free delivery route planner, you have a couple of options.
Google Maps
The 6 Best Delivery Route Planner Apps: Google Maps
Google Maps is a program that’s used and understood by plenty of people, particularly for personal use.
It’s great for giving you directions from one location to the next. It’s also proving to be a way for researchers to calculate emissions hotspots in real time, since it captures detailed information that helps understand traffic flows on busy roads.
The tricky part is when you need to add more than one stop to your route.
Planning a route with multiple stops can be a time-consuming process, but it is possible to do on Google Maps. You can add multiple stops and make the shortest and fastest route possible.
However, Google Maps has limited use if you need to add a large number of stops. You can only input 10 addresses at a time, including your starting address.
If you have more than nine stops, you can also use Google’s My Maps to make a master list and decide which stops are nearest to each other. The process is messy, and you’re the one who has to plan the route.
Which means that if you simply input the addresses, that’s the route that Google will take you, even if it means backtracking.
There’s no route optimization.
You have to go in and organize your route, first by checking how much time it will take and then making adjustments to reduce that time.
So while Google Maps may seem like the best free route planner app for delivery drivers, it’s not ideal if you regularly make more than nine deliveries in a day.
Pros:
It’s probably already on your phone.
You’re likely familiar with it and have used it for personal trips.
It does re-route around accidents and traffic jams.
It’s free and relatively user friendly, particularly if you only have a few deliveries a day.
Cons:
There are limited stops, as you can only include your starting location and nine other stops.
There’s no route optimization.
It’s time-consuming to add multiple stops and then optimize the route on your own.
SpeedyRoute route planner app
The 6 Best Delivery Route Planner Apps: Speedy Route
This one is not a completely free delivery route planner. There is a free web service when calculating routes with 10 or fewer locations.
The subscription service kicks in for calculation of routes containing more than 10 locations, or for more than three calculations “within a rolling 24 hour period for routes containing any number of locations.”
In other words, if you need to calculate more than three routes from the same IP address within 24 hours, you’ll have to purchase a subscription.
It’s also good for fleet use. If there are multiple delivery vehicles, it gives the optimal route for the number of delivery vehicles.
In this case, the calculated route may use any number of vehicles, up to the maximum you input. The maximum number of locations in a route that Speedy Route will attempt to calculate is 500 locations.
SpeedyRoute will calculate the best route if you have to make multiple stops, then leads you back to your starting location.
Enter all your locations and It will re-order them into the optimal route.
It will guide you to each location once, then take you back to the start in the shortest and quickest way possible. It also gives you driving directions between all the stops on your route.
SpeedyRoute is available worldwide, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, as well as in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the Far East and South America.
Subscriptions are available as daily, weekly, monthly, and special offer periods. Note that we have used USD for all the apps and plans that we have included.
Pricing for SpeedyRoute:
$39/month – Limited to 1 driver, 100 stops per route
$69/month – Up to 5 drivers, 500 stops per route
$99/month – Up to 10 drivers, unlimited stops per route
Pros:
Free for up to 10 delivery locations.
Flexible subscription prices.
Optimizes your route.
Wide availability around the world.
Cons:
The free option is limited to only 10 stops.
Not currently available as an app for iPhones – Android only.
One of the pricier monthly options for single drivers.
Best delivery route planner apps for Android and iPhone
If you really want to take advantage of a quality route planner, spending a bit of money to use a dependable delivery route planner app is worth it.
Delivery drivers agree that finding a quality app is better than wasting time on those that don’t work very well.
Here’s a look at the top picks.
Upper Solo route planner app
The 6 Best Delivery Route Planner Apps: Upper Solo Route Planner App
Upper Route Planner is a route planning and optimization software with two options:
One for small to medium-sized businesses to manage and streamline daily delivery operations, or Upper Solo for individual drivers to plan and optimize routes.
Upper Solo will give automatic route optimization and also lets you save regular routes if you often make deliveries to the same locations.
It uses a route planning and optimization algorithm that it claims will cut planning time by 95%.
Here are some of the key features:
Optimize multiple stops per route.
Add special instructions for each stop.
Generate proof of delivery for tracking and record-keeping.
Input options include using Excel to import addresses, and then you can export your optimized route to other navigation tools including Google Maps.
You can even adjust settings such as driving preferences, vehicle type, and service time, including settings for a car, bike, van, or truck. A three-day free trial lets you explore the app before committing to a plan.
Pricing for Upper Solo:
$4.99/month – 25 stops
$7.99/month – 150 stops
$19.00/month – 500 stops
Upper (for teams) – $39/month/per driver if billed annually, $46.80/month/per driver if billed monthly
Pros:
Route optimization and proof of delivery features.
Ability to adjust settings for the type of vehicle.
Works with more familiar navigation tools like Google Maps.
Cons:
Multiple pricing options make it difficult to choose a plan.
The free trial is limited to 3 days.
Route4Me route planner app
The 6 Best Delivery Route Planner Apps: Route4Me
Route4Me offers services on a website as well as iPhone, iPad, and Android apps.
It lets you enter up to thousands of stops, and then gives an optimized route listing, a map with route lines, and turn-by-turn driving or walking directions.
You can save a route to your Route4Me account for later reference, or share it with friends or business colleagues, either by email or directly into their Route4Me app.
You can even create a route, save it, and then come back and edit it later.
You can also choose from two different options:
Dynamic Routing, for businesses whose driving routes change daily or a few times a week; or Scheduled & Recurring Routing, for businesses whose customers need to be visited using a repeating schedule.
Within these two choices, there are different subscription plans.
For instance, in the Dynamic Routing plan, the options range from route management only, to route optimization for single-person routes, to route optimization for multiple people driving multiple routes.
It’s likely best for businesses rather than individual drivers, as it boasts that its integrated telematics platform “enables dispatchers and field-service personnel to plan, manage, and execute delivery or pickup routes.”
Pricing for Route4Me (all cover 10 drivers):
$239/month – Route management only
$319/month – Route optimization
$479/month – Route optimization for multi-person routes
Pros:
Great for teams of up to 10 drivers.
Routes can be shared among teams.
Cons:
One of the priciest options for route planning software.
The least expensive package includes route management only.
Likely best for teams and not individual drivers.
RoadWarrior route planner app
The 6 Best Delivery Route Planner Apps: RoadWarrior
This is another good option that works for teams or individual drivers.
You can input your stops using the app or by uploading a spreadsheet.
You can add your own preferences to customize the trip, with settings like avoiding highways or planning a one-way trip.
The system also takes into consideration things like drop-off priority, traffic, school zones, and business availability, building an optimized route that you can adjust.
Rather than a proof of delivery, you “Check In” after navigating to and arriving at your stops. The Check-Ins store a record of your arrival times at each stop and also mark that stop as complete in the route.
Road Warrior is available in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, and Switzerland.
The RoadWarrior Flex plan has also added integration with FedEx. It will seamlessly import your FedEx manifests directly to your RoadWarrior app, available on most smart devices.
Pricing for RoadWarrior:
Free – Maximum route size of 8 stops
$10/month – Maximum route size of 120 stops
$10/month plus $10/month for each driver – Maximum route size of 200 stops
Pros:
Can be used by individual drivers or Team RoadWarrior for teams.
One of the least expensive options.
Cons:
The free plan only gives you a maximum of 8 stops per route and 48 daily optimized stops.
Lacks proof of delivery.
Not rated as high by drivers as some of the other options.
The Pro plan is only $10 per month but routes can only be a maximum of 120 stops, and there’s a cap of 500 stops and 500 searches per day.
Circuit Route Planner app
The 6 Best Delivery Route Planner Apps: Circuit Route Planner
Our app, Circuit Route Planner, will plan a route of up to 10 stops for free.
If you need to make more stops, it has an individual plan that’s only $20 a month, as well as three different plans for multiple vehicles or delivery teams, allowing the business to scale.
Circuit Route Planner also offers some bonus features that other GPS navigation apps don’t.
It does route optimization, allowing for faster and shorter routes. It monitors your route, so you can see the entire route in progress.
Circuit can give customers a delivery update with an estimated time of arrival. It also features proof of delivery using a signature or photo.
Here’s another time-saving feature you’ll really love.
Delivery route planner apps: Fast package finder
The 6 Best Delivery Route Planner Apps: The Circuit Route Planner Fast Package Finder
The Fast Package Finder lets you input each package, describing where you’ve placed it in your vehicle.
When you arrive at each stop, it lets you know where each package is located. That will help increase your package delivery speed, helping you find the right package at the right stop.
It could save you up to an hour each day by eliminating time spent searching your vehicle at every destination, which adds up quickly when you’re making many deliveries.
Take the stress out of planning your routes
Get route optimization at the tap of a button with Circuit Route Planner
Try free now 👉
After all, one of the key roles of a driver is to plan the best delivery route, but it’s also to assist with loading and unloading and make sure your packages are correctly stowed and easy to find.
The rise in same-day delivery requests makes a package finder a valuable addition to an already great delivery route planner app.
As an added bonus, Circuit Route Planner also works with Google Maps or any navigation app that you or your company uses, or the one with which you’re most comfortable.
With Circuit, you can easily find your delivery destinations, while following a route that decreases time spent on the road.
It will make sure you avoid time wasters like traffic jams and backtracking, and you can add necessary stops like bathroom breaks right into the route.
The Circuit app builds an optimized plan for up to 500 stops in just a few minutes.
You have options for address inputs, including manual input on your phone or by uploading them from a CSV file on Android devices.
You can voice search addresses, set specific time windows for special deliveries, and re-optimize your route with one click if you need to make a change.
You can also add, delete or re-optimize multiple stops while on your route with ease, including hands-free voice entry to make delivery even faster. It also features the easiest and fastest-to-use user interface (UI).
In fact, drivers themselves appear to love Circuit Route Planner.
It currently has a 4.7-star review in the Google app store with over 20,000 reviews, and has been downloaded over 1 million times, with over 150 Million delivery routes optimized.
Pricing for Circuit Route Planner for individual drivers:
Free – Up to 10 stops
$20/month – Unlimited number of stops
Pricing for Circuit for Teams:
$40/month/per driver – Ideal for services with multiple call-outs and stops
$60/month/per driver – Ideal for retail and medium businesses
$100/month/per driver – Ideal for dispatchers at high-delivery couriers
Pros:
Free to try for up to 10 stops.
Route optimization and Fast Package Finder will save you time and fuel.
Competitive pricing for an individual driver.
Designed for individuals or can be used for fleets.
Circuit for teams lets your business scale up as it grows, with features that increase as you build on to the plan.
Cons:
The free option is limited to 10 stops.
You can’t manually change an optimized route.
Overview comparison table
FEATURE GOOGLE MAPS SPEEDY ROUTE UPPER SOLO ROUTE4ME ROAD WARRIOR CIRCUIT
Route optimization no yes yes Depends on the plan yes yes
Proof of delivery no no yes no Check in feature yes
Package finder no no no no no yes
Top price* free $39/month $19/month $479/month $10/month + $10/month per driver $20/month
Free option yes For 10 stops no no For 8 stops For 10 stops
Free trial It’s free to use For 10 stops 3 days no For 8 stops 14 days
- For the purposes of our comparison, we are highlighting features and pricing for individual drivers, not options for teams.
Delivery route planner apps: How real drivers benefit from Circuit
How Route Planning Apps Save Time and Cut Costs: Saving a route
If you’re still wondering about the benefits of a delivery route planner app like Circuit, don’t just take our word for it!
Reviews from other drivers can help you make your decision.
For instance, a FedEx driver who gave Circuit a try instantly saved 1-2 hours per day by harnessing the power of the app. Joanne Evangelist says her days were long, inefficient and very frustrating. She describes Circuit as a “lifesaver” on her multi-stop delivery routes.
Joanne says her favourite feature of Circuit is that once you put in all your stops, it optimizes the route to be the most efficient, taking into consideration the stops as well as things like traffic.
best route planner app for delivery drivers
Looking for a delivery route planner that will make your life easier and your business more profitable, but not sure where to start?
You’re in luck! Routific has been in the last-mile delivery industry for over a decade, and we’ve spoken to hundreds of businesses who were looking for better ways to plan their routes.
What’s new in this update
This review was first created in 2019, and a lot has changed since then. The market for route planning and route optimization software has exploded, and it seems like there are new tools coming out every month. To help you make the most informed decision, we’ve made several changes in this update. We have:
Expanded our list from eight to 15 reviews.
Removed Google Maps and Mapquest. They’re popular because they’re free, but are missing a lot of tools that delivery businesses need. If you have no budget at all, take a look at our review of the best free route planners instead, where these two are covered in detail. (We’ve included some tips on how to make the best use of them).
Focused on route planning software for last-mile delivery businesses, since that’s the market we know best. Local service businesses will probably also find most of these tools useful, but they’re not designed for long-distance trucking or recreational trip planning.
Tested as many of the planning tools as we can, using a standardized list of 20 stops in Chicago. We haven’t tested any software that doesn’t offer a free trial. In these cases, we’ve gathered as much information as possible from what’s available in public.
In our tests we looked at how easy it was to sign up for each app, how easy it was to use, how accurately it interpreted addresses, and the length of the route it suggested. We’ve also included feature information, and how each app rates on software review site Capterra.
See a summary of our results at the end of this post.
We’ve ordered these reviews roughly by level of sophistication and capabilities, starting with the simplest. We’ve included a summary of cost, features and rating at the top of each review, as well as at the end.
If you want to jump straight to the reviews, use the links below to skip straight to the section you’re interested in. If you’d like to know more about us and why we’re doing this, read on!
Basic route planning & optimization software
RouteXL
Speedy Route
ElasticRoute
RouteSavvy
MyRouteOnline
Road Warrior
Upper
Advanced route planning & optimization software
Circuit for Teams
OnFleet
Optimoroute
Route4Me
Routific
Workwave route manager
Full-featured delivery management software
Locus DispatchIQ
Elite Extra
Summary
“So… why are you writing about your competitors if you also sell route planning and optimization software?”
Our mission at Routific is to make route optimization accessible to every delivery business. We know that manual route planning leads to a lot of wasted driving time and fuel, which in turn has a lot of other negative consequences. If we can make delivery routes more efficient, we can help achieve a lot of other things as well:
More profitable delivery businesses
Less traffic congestion and noise in our cities
Fewer health problems due to air pollution
Lower greenhouse gas emissions
Being radically transparent is at the core of who we are at Routific. We honestly just want to help you adopt route planning software, and we know that you would have done the painful research yourself anyway.
We’ve tried to be as unbiased and factual as possible. Every business is different, so the perfect solution for one might be totally wrong for another. We want to arm you with the data, so that you can make up your own mind.
Simple route planning software for delivery businesses
RouteXL
Cost: From €35 per month (about $40)
Features for delivery businesses: None
Mobile app available: No
Capterra rating: 3.5 (2 reviews)
Plan 2
RouteXL is one of the oldest simple route optimization tools around. You can upload a list of stops using a spreadsheet, and share the optimized routes to a navigation app or phone.
A major limitation is that in our test, RouteXL wasn’t able to recognize all the addresses we loaded. In one case, it created a stop in the wrong place. This means that if you want to use this software for your delivery route planning, you will need to check and double check your addresses.
Also, RouteXL can only route for one vehicle at a time. If you need to create routes for more than one driver you will have to create each one separately, which means you will miss out on some of the benefits of route optimization.
The interface feels a bit old-fashioned and slow, and it’s not all that easy to use.
RouteXL is free to use up to 20 stops. You can get up to 100 or 200 stops per day if you sign up for a paid package.The 100-stop package is € 35 EUR/month (around $40). This makes it more expensive than many other apps we’ve reviewed here.
To sum up, if you have only one vehicle or driver and can afford to spend time double checking addresses, RouteXL is probably worth testing to see whether the interface suits you.
Speedy Route
Cost: $39 per driver per month, with up to 100 stops per route
Features for delivery businesses: Plan multiple routes
Mobile app available: No
Capterra rating: 3.8 (6 reviews)
Plan 3 (1)-1
Speedy Route is a simple, bare-bones route planner and route optimization tool. The free version allows routing up to 10 stops, with paid versions supporting up to 10 drivers and 9,999 stops.
The web app is attractive and easy to use. You can add stops using copy and paste or by uploading a spreadsheet, and it’s possible to add notes for each stop. Once your route is optimized, you can export it to a spreadsheet file or print it out. There’s no option to send the route to a navigation app directly, although you might be able to upload the spreadsheet to another app for navigation purposes.
Speedy Route has no additional features like customer notifications, tracking, or proof of delivery though. If your delivery business needs a delivery route planner that includes these features, you will need to look elsewhere.
ElasticRoute
Cost: Starting at $29 per driver per month after free trial
Features for delivery businesses: Plan multiple routes, delivery time windows
Mobile app available: No
Capterra rating: 5.0 (6 reviews)
Plan 4-1
ElasticRoute is one of the newer delivery route planners on the market, and doesn’t yet have the full range of features that delivery businesses might need. It supports delivery time windows, but not customer notifications or proof of delivery.
In our tests we found ElasticRoute not as easy to use as many of its competitors, although there is a training video which is helpful for getting started. We did encounter some problems with correctly locating addresses – one of our stops was moved across the country! So, like RouteXL, this is a tool that requires careful attention to the accuracy of your addresses. This is something that gets more and more difficult as the length of your list grows.
RouteSavvy
Cost: Starting at $39 per vehicle per month
Features for delivery businesses: Plan multiple routes, driver tracking
Mobile app available: Yes
Capterra rating: 4.7 (20 reviews)
Plan 5
RouteSavvy offers similar features to ElasticRoute, with the addition of driver tracking – but it doesn’t include any driver notifications or proof of delivery.
It’s easy to sign up for a 14-day free trial and upload addresses, although like some of other basic route planners RouteSavvy struggled to interpret one of our test addresses and would have sent us to the wrong place. In the end, we had to copy and paste latitude and longitude coordinates from Google Maps to fix the problem. If we hadn’t known to look for this particular problem we might have missed it. So once again, if you choose this tool you will need to check and recheck the accuracy of your addresses before uploading them.
RouteSavvy does offer the option to share routes via a web link or to a driver app, but the 14-day free trial version will only share up to 3 addresses.
MyRoute Online
Cost: Starting at $29 for 100 address credits, or $49 per month for 500 credits
Features for delivery businesses: Plan multiple routes, delivery time windows, driver tracking
Mobile app available: Yes
Capterra rating: 4.5 (97 reviews)
Plan 6-1
It’s very easy to get started with MyRoute Online. There’s no signup needed, and you can upload addresses from a spreadsheet or type them in directly.
Payment is based on credits: one credit = 1 address, and you can re-use the same address as many times as you like within 30 days. Plans start at $29 for 100 credits, or $49 per month for 500 credits.
The app is relatively easy to use, although the interface feels a little old-fashioned at times. Three of the 20 addresses in our test list couldn’t be resolved, and we had to manually check and update them. On the upside, at least MyRoute Online alerted us to the problem so we had the opportunity to fix it! Some of the other software we tested just went ahead with an incorrect address.
Routes can be printed out, or exported to a GPS file that can be shared with drivers. This makes MyRoute Online a good option for organizations that use TomTom or Garmin GPS devices and need a simple, solid route planning tool without added extras like proof of delivery or customer notifications.
RoadWarriorPlan 7
Cost: $10 per driver per month
Features for delivery businesses: Plan multiple routes, delivery time windows, live tracking
Mobile app available: Yes
Capterra rating: 4.5 (46 reviews)
RoadWarrior is at core a mobile phone app designed for single drivers. RoadWarrior Flex is their desktop app for dispatchers, but there is no free trial so we weren’t able to test it.
In our mobile test, RoadWarrior worked well for the seven stops that were allowed in the free version. You can choose whether to optimize by time or distance, and the app is easy to use. It does not, however, include any delivery management features like customer notifications, tracking, or proof of delivery.
Upper
Cost: Starting at $16.99 per user per month
Route optimization: Professional
Features for delivery businesses: Plan multiple routes, delivery time windows, proof of delivery
Mobile app available: Yes
Capterra rating: 5.0 (1 review)
Plan 8-1
Upper is a newer route planning and route optimization tool that’s easy to use. It has a friendly interface, and users can import up to 500 addresses from a spreadsheet. During our tests it was easy to identify and fix ambiguous addresses.
It’s easy to add drivers with Upper, and once routes are planned they can be shared using a link.
On the downside, during our tests Upper wasn’t all that great at creating efficient routes, with routes more than 50% longer than the best performers. It also doesn’t support customer notifications.
Advanced route optimization software for delivery businesses
When you run a larger delivery operation with multiple drivers and many stops each day, you will probably need more sophisticated route planning and optimization software that offers features like customer notifications and proof of delivery. In this section we explore software that offers more features for delivery businesses.
Circuit for Teams
Cost: Starting at $40 per driver per month after free trial
Features for delivery businesses: Plan multiple routes, delivery time windows, live tracking, customer notifications, proof of delivery
Mobile app available: Yes
Capterra rating: 4.8 (19 reviews)
Plan 9-1
Circuit began as a popular phone-based route planner app for single drivers. More recently, they’ve expanded their offering to include Circuit for Teams, which enables route planning and dispatch for multiple vehicles. Depending on the plan you choose, it includes several features for last-mile delivery businesses, including time windows, customer notifications and live tracking.
Both the apps are very easy to use. On the driver app, users have to enter each of their addresses manually, but the process is quick. Once a route is created, it’s easy to send it to their chosen navigation app.
With Circuit for Teams, users can upload their stops from a spreadsheet or copy and paste them in. Address recognition is excellent.
Onfleet
Cost: $149 per month for route planning only, or from $349 for route optimization
Features for delivery businesses: Plan multiple routes, delivery time windows, live tracking, customer notifications, barcode scanning
Mobile app available: Yes
Capterra rating: 4.7 (81 reviews)
Plan 10-1
Onfleet bills itself as “the world’s most advanced logistics software”. Their primary focus since they started in 2012 has been delivery management, but they added route optimization as a paid add-on in 2016.
In our tests Onfleet did moderately well at address recognition and route optimization. It is, however, quite complex and difficult to use, and will definitely involve more of a learning curve than some of the other software we review here. On the upside, it does include features like barcode scanning and a tracking page for customers, which many others don’t.
The Starter edition of Onfleet is billed at $149 per month, but route optimization is only available from the Basic package, billed at $349 per month. Barcode scanning is available on the Premium package from $799 a month.
OptimoRoute
Cost: $39 per driver per month
Features for delivery businesses: Plan multiple routes, delivery time windows, live tracking, customer notifications, proof of delivery
Mobile app available: Yes
Capterra rating: 4.5 (119 reviews)
Plan 11-1
OptimoRoute offers sophisticated features, with a lot of flexibility and control for you to set up your routes exactly as you wish. It does, however, require some time to learn and understand.
You can set up individual driver profiles with their own shift schedules (including breaks and overtime), start/end locations, skills (if you’re in the service industry), vehicle types, service areas you want them to stay in, and even cost and speed settings. You can also set up multiple capacity constraints (e.g. weight & volume).
Route4Me
Cost: $239 per month for simple route planning, or from $319 per month for route optimization
Features for delivery businesses: Plan multiple routes, delivery time windows, live tracking
Mobile app available: Yes
Capterra rating: 4.4 (305 reviews)
Plan 12-1
Route4Me is one of the oldest route optimization tools on the market. It’s a complex tool with a well-developed marketplace of add-on features so that you customize it to your needs. For example, you can add on support for curbside pickup, avoiding left or right turns, or for allocating stops to time windows.
On the downside, out of all the route optimization tools we tested, Route4Me gave the least efficient route. The total length of the route covering our 20 test stops was 36km (22 miles), against an average of 28km (16 miles). (We’ve listed all the test results in a table at the bottom of this post.)
Pricing for Route4Me starts at $319 per month if you want to include route optimization. Features like customer notifications and delivery time windows are add-ons that will increase the cost. Adding time windows, for example, will cost an extra $79 per month. There are no proof of delivery features.
Routific
Cost: Starting at $39 per driver per month
Features for delivery businesses: Plan multiple routes, delivery time windows, live tracking, customer notifications, proof of delivery
Mobile app available: Yes
Capterra rating: 4.9 (99 reviews)
Plan-13
We went back and forth about whether to include our own software in this list. On the one hand we don’t want this post to be self-promoting — but on the other hand, we want to give as much relevant information as possible so readers can make informed choices. So: Routific is route optimization software that’s specifically built to be easy to use. Our main focus is small to medium-sized local delivery businesses, although service organizations like landscapers or maintenance companies also use us.
Routific supports delivery time windows, proof of delivery, live driver tracking, and customer notification, with a tracking link to see the driver’s movements in real time. Because route optimization is our major focus, the routes suggested by our algorithm are highly efficient. On average our users cut their distance and drive time by 20-40%.
We also pay attention to creating realistic routes for your drivers: our routes have minimum overlap, and we use local traffic data to provide ETA accuracy.
WorkWave Route Manager
Cost: From $49 per vehicle per month
Features for delivery businesses: Plan multiple routes, delivery time windows, proof of delivery, customer notifications
Mobile app available: Yes
Capterra rating: 4.3 (60 reviews)
Plan-14
WorkWave Route Manager doesn’t offer a free trial, or publish any pricing information apart from “as low as $49 per vehicle per month”. This makes it difficult to evaluate without booking a demo – and to do so, you’ll need to call a US number or fill in a form.
WorkWave focusses their products for the pest control and field services industries primarily, but can also be used for delivery routes. It has all the basic route planning functionality such as drag ‘n drop, multiple time-windows, multiple capacities, etc. But they also offer support for more advanced routing needs such as paired pickup and dropoffs and driver territories.
Despite all this, a surprising limitation is that you don’t see the route lines drawn on the map, only coloured dots on a map with numbers on them. This makes it hard to see which roads your drivers are actually taking.
Full-featured delivery management software
Locus DispatchIQ
Cost: $10,000 per year ($833 per month)
Features for delivery businesses: Plan multiple routes, delivery time windows, proof of delivery, customer notifications
Mobile app available: Yes
Capterra rating: 4.6 (41 reviews)
Plan-15
Locus DispatchHQ is part of a larger suite of solutions that also includes LocusTrackHQ and consulting services. As the high price suggests, Locus is primarily aimed at medium to large enterprises that need comprehensive supply chain solutions, including last mile delivery planning and fleet management.
Locus doesn’t offer a free trial version – if you’re interested, you will need to book a free demo. The $10,000 per year price tag is probably more power and expense than you need for a delivery business that’s still in the relatively early stages. If you would like to find out more, we recommend trying some other delivery route planners on a free trial basis first, so you have a better idea of what you’re looking for and what questions to ask during a demo.
Elite Extra
Cost: Not disclosed
Features for delivery businesses: Plan multiple routes, delivery time windows, proof of delivery, customer notifications
Mobile app available: Yes
Capterra rating: 4.8 (11 reviews)
Plan-16
Elite Extra offers comprehensive delivery and courier management software for larger companies with more complex needs. It integrates with many point of sale, ERP, and e-commerce platforms so it’s easy to track orders all the way from checkout to delivery.
One noteworthy feature of Elite Extra is its third-party delivery network. Users can choose from a number of different delivery companies right inside the app – so if you don’t have your own fleet, or want to keep it streamlined, this is an excellent option.
All this does mean that Elite Extra’s software suite is more complex to implement, and likely to be more expensive (they don’t disclose their pricing upfront). This is not an app you can just sign up for and start using. That said, if your company has grown to the point where you need powerful end–to-end delivery management software that’s customizable to your needs, this is an option worth investigating.
Route planning & route optimization software: feature comparison
8 best route planning apps
Route planning & route optimization software: ratings
This table summarizes how each app we’ve reviewed is rated by its users on Capterra. Capterra was founded in 1999 to help businesses choose software, and was bought by Gartner in 2015. It’s widely regarded as the world’s leading business software review platform. We’ve included the rating for each app with a link to its page on Capterra, and also the number of reviews each app has. These numbers were updated at the end of February 2022.
Route Optimization Ratings Chart
Route planning & route optimization software: routing efficiency
For software that offers a free trial version, we ran some basic tests of our own to assess how easy each app was to use, and how good it was at identifying addresses (“geocoding”) and creating efficient routes. We used the same set of 20 stops in Chicago in each case. Our test results are summarized in the table below. (Our “ease of use” rating is obviously subjective — your experience may be different!)
Routing Efficiency Chart
We hope the information we’ve given here will help you identify a shortlist of apps so you can run your own tests and see what suits you — good luck! And if you’re interested in Routific, we offer a free 7 day trial — no credit card required.
Conclusion
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