In this blog, we give you our assessment of OptimoRoute, its pros and cons, and five alternatives: eLogii, Onfleet, Circuit, MaxOptra, and Routific.
Thinking about opting for one of the many OptimoRoute competitors out there but not sure how to choose?
Well, you’ve been routed to the right place! In this blog, we’ll give you our honest assessment of OptimoRoute’s pros and cons, and present five route planning platforms to choose from
Each of them - eLogii, Onfleet, Circuit, MaxOptra, and Routific - has some advantages over OptimoRoute for certain types of users. If you’re looking to switch from OptimoRoute, this in-depth guide should be your first stop!
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As in our previous blogs, there’s not much we can say about the comparative merits of different route optimisation algorithms - you really have to try them out yourself to see.
So, our comparison will focus instead on feature set and price in the main.
And OptimoRoute has a lot going for it in these areas.
Unlike some of the older tools on the market, OptimoRoute lets dispatchers incorporate real-time data about vehicle locations to generate up-to-the-minute ETAs for customers and to recalculate routes.
The driver app lets you collect Proof of Delivery (POD) via photo and signature, and add notes.
OptimoRoute is also highly customisable. It accommodates:
It’s also strong on analytics. The breadcrumbs feature is great for seeing in close-up detail where actual routes followed differ from the planned routes.
OptimoRoute’s mobile app is not quite as good as some of the competition. It lacks:
Nor does OptimoRoute incorporate live traffic data. That can make a big difference to the reliability of its predicted ETAs.
And OptimoRoute’s user interface is not the most attractive. It can be quite crowded and has a very “Windowsy” look to it.
But having said that, in terms of core functionality, OptimoRoute is one of the best options available today.
If you’re running a delivery business rather than a field service operation, you’ll need OptimoRoute Pro rather than Lite. It includes:
So, you’re looking at $44.10 per vehicle per month ($49 for monthly billing).
Per vehicle pricing tends to become expensive fast, so we’ll compare a few different fleet sizes throughout this blog to give you a clearer picture:
eLogii offers an exceptional cloud-based route optimisation and delivery management experience designed for businesses that want to scale fast.
It’s built for businesses of all sizes (except for the smallest), in all verticals and it provides some of the most powerful functionality available today.
eLogii offers everything that OptimoRoute provides, but it fills in those crucial gaps we’ve noted and adds more besides.
Rather than just two POD collection types, for example, eLogii offers signature, photo, alphanumeric code scan, QR code scan, barcode scan, and cash on delivery confirmation.
It also allows you to programme workflows around failed deliveries. Rather than just making a note about it, a driver can be given detailed instructions on what to do next.
With 5.6% of all UK deliveries failing to be delivered at an average cost of £14.33 per fail, that has the potential to save companies a huge amount of money each year.
As well as enabling drivers to use Waze to get traffic data, eLogii allows dispatchers to set traffic conditions parameters. So, if a driver is setting off during rush hour, you can pre-plan for a slower start. And as new information comes in, you can reroute vehicles, adjust and notify new ETAs, and recalculate routes in response to hold-ups and road closures.
While OptimoRoute lets you edit vehicle features, eLogii has present vehicle types to choose from and customise - as well as a vast range of options to optimise around (eg vehicle load by weight, by volume, by pallet number, etc). Not only that, you can allocate particular “skills” to drivers to match tasks to the best staff.
And finally, eLogii supports a wide range of different languages. If the language you need isn’t currently available, eLogii can provide a translation file you can integrate using its API.
eLogii is the only OptimoRoute competitor on this list that doesn’t provide off-the-peg pricing. That’s because it is so much more customisable than the other tools - pricing has to be tailored to each customer’s unique needs.
However, the Starter package offers 2,500 tasks (pickups and deliveries) per month, across an unlimited number of vehicles, for around $359 (£270) per month.
So, businesses with very small fleets may find OptimoRoute more suitable.
But as soon as your fleet exceeds 8 vehicles in size, eLogii’s task-based pricing ($359 for 2,500 tasks) becomes more economic than OptimoRoute’s vehicle-based tariff ($396.90 for 9 vehicles).
Onfleet is a good option for smaller businesses that rely on flexible driver resources - as it’s billed on a per task basis rather than per vehicle.
It has an attractive UI and some of the best analytics views on the market. But ironically, when we put it up against OptimoRoute, Onfleet came out looking better for bigger businesses - despite its SME-focused features.
Like most of the OptimoRoute competitors considered here, Onfleet provides driver/dispatcher live chat functionality.
But the biggest advantage is in the pricing model.
Onfleet’s task-based pricing gives users more flexibility in maximising the efficiency of their fleet than vehicle-based pricing:
Having said that, Onfleet’s cheaper packages miss out key functionalities:
Onfleet’s pricing is based on the number of tasks you use in a month, rather than the number of vehicles:
So, a 5, 10, or 20 vehicle fleet could theoretically cost you the same amount per month, depending on how many tasks each vehicle carries out.
The problem there is that Onfleet’s features are designed primarily for smaller firms. Bigger businesses will have more complex needs, which are catered to best from this list of OptimoRoute competitors by eLogii.
Circuit is a last-mile delivery management and route optimisation solution that occupies a very similar niche to OptimoRoute.
So which is better?
Circuit has a lot of the same core functionality as OptimoRoute: automated route management, route import, customer notifications, GPS vehicle and driver tracking, POD collection.
But it has some interesting differences.
For the smallest of small businesses, Circuit has a free version that lets you plan routes of up to ten stops at a time.
It also gets around OptimoRoute’s inability to factor in live traffic conditions to route and ETA calculations by letting drivers use Waze as their mapping app - just as eLogii does.
Waze crowdsources information about hold-ups, roadworks, and other obstacles from across its user base which can make a huge difference in terms of dynamic planning.
While both offer free trials, OptimoRoute offers a rather more generous 30 days compared to Circuit’s meagre 7.
And neither of them supports barcode scanning, which is quite a serious weakness when it comes to integrating last-mile delivery operations into the wider logistics environment. Both these services only offer photo and customer signature POD collection.
Circuit’s pricing tiers ramp up sharply if you need anything above the basics:
At every touchpoint, Circuit is more expensive than OptimoRoute. Switching for price reasons is a non-starter.
MaxOptra’s focus is on making route and delivery management simple. But it does this without sacrificing the flexibility that’s needed to cater to a wide variety of businesses - big and small, across multiple sectors.
It’s really in its range of add-ons (which are paid for) that MaxOptra stands out from OptimoRoute.
These include:
This makes MaxOptra suitable for a wider range of use cases (eg international long haul) - although eLogii includes the first four of these paid-for extras as integral parts of its service.
One area where MaxOptra stands out is through its drag and drop user interface. When planning routes, you can shuffle stops around manually to play with different routing scenarios (sometimes called “map-based planning).
It’s not a unique feature, but it certainly is a popular, user-friendly one.
MaxOptra’s Optimiser package does automated and manual route optimisation. Trace and Trace offers vehicle tracking, POD collection, customer notifications, and ETA calculations.
Only with the Complete service - priced at £50 ($65) per vehicle per month - do you get both sets of features (plus real-time ETA calculation).
Just like Circuit, MaxOptra is more expensive for every size of business than OptimoRoute. And that’s before you factor in the cost of any add-ons.
Routific is a simple, robust, functional route optimisation tool that works well for smaller businesses that don’t need the advanced functionality offered by more sophisticated tools like OptimoRoute and eLogii.
Routific has the most flexible cancellation policy of all the OptimoRoute competitors on this list.
If you want to end your contract or scale your activities down mid-month, Routific will charge you on a daily pro-rata basis. That flexibility is a big advantage for seasonal businesses (eg Christmas and Easter deliveries) that have short periods of intense activity, which come to an abrupt halt. With OptimoRoute, you’re tied to monthly subscription periods.
But that’s about it.
Routific has no live driver and vehicle tracking. It only knows where vehicles were at the last delivery point - which is a major weakness when it comes to any kind of real-time routing.
And as we’ll see in the next section, Routific has some nasty surprises in store on pricing.
Routific’s Essentials package excludes critical features:
So the only fair comparison with OptimoRoute and the other competitors here is to look at the $59 per vehicle per month Professional package.
When you add on $19 per vehicle per month for (non-customisable) SMS and email notifications to customers, you’re looking at a very high price, at all levels:
OptimoRoute has a lot going for it. It has a good range of features (with a few strange omissions) and it’s competitively priced.
As a result of that pricing, it will only be relatively unusual, niche cases where Circuit (eg tiny businesses using the free version), MaxOptra (eg long-haul freight), or Routific (eg seasonal businesses needing maximum flexibility) are viable alternatives.
That leaves Onfleet and eLogii - the two services with task-based rather than vehicle-based pricing.
We’ve compared these two before. eLogii has a wider feature set and greater customisability, meaning that it doesn’t have the shortcomings Onfleet has when it comes to meeting larger businesses’ needs.
Routific is missing essential route optimisation and delivery management features. We examine eLogii, Tookan, and OptimoRoute as Routific alternatives
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