Hey everybody, it's Phil from Routific and today we're going
to be talking about the eight best route planner apps for 2021. Let's get started
Finding the right route planner app for your delivery business can be difficult.
We get it. There are so many options. Options that are paid versus free,
options that have a mobile app versus apps that are just on the desktop. Where do you start? We
know that the process can be painful, diving into all these articles and reading all these reviews.
So we wanted to create this video to take away some of that pain by aggregating all the data that
we know about the best apps and presenting them to you. There are actually a ton of ways for us
to approach doing a review like this but to keep things simple, for the purposes of this video,
we're splitting up our review into two sections: 1. Free route planners and 2. Paid route planners.
Now one of the first things that you'll notice about this list is that Routific isn't on it.
And we did that on purpose. We intentionally took ourselves off of this list because we wanted to
remain as objective as possible while we did this review. With that being said, if you are
interested in trying Routific out for yourself, we offer a 7 day free trial. No credit card required.
If you just launched your delivery service or only deliver to about a dozen stops per day or less,
you're probably fine sticking to free tools. Why don't we kick things off with something that we
all know and love: Google Maps. Google maps is technically the only app on this list that
doesn't have route optimization. What it does do great, is get you from point A to point B
in the quickest time possible. But it doesn't actually optimize those routes for you.
For simple scenarios, limited to one driver and 10 addresses,
you can plot your stops on a map and manually drag and reorder the sequence
when eyeballing the route. The downside is that you have to manually type in each address
and technically you're still manually planning your routes
If you actually want to use Google Maps to plan your delivery routes, that's totally something
that you can do. We actually put together a step-by-step video on how to do just that
and you can watch it right over here, but for now let's switch over to Mapquest.
When you run into the limitations of Google Maps it might be time to try something with a few more
stops for you to play around with. One of those options is Mapquest. Mapquest is more intended
for business use but we'll dive into that a little bit more here. The app supports mass uploads of
your addresses copy paste and spreadsheet upload and offers a free route optimization option to
reorder stops in the optimal sequence one of the options is to set as a round trip which is great
for delivery businesses that have a central depot or a warehouse that the driver needs to return to.
RouteXL is another great option you can track but there are some limitations to it. While RouteXLl
does offer mass upload of addresses using copy and paste, it does not support uploading spreadsheets.
Spreadsheets come in handy when you're looking to sort and organize large number of addresses.
They also are a format that allows you to import and export data into different
software programs a little more easily. The limitation is that route settings apply to
all routes. You can't set up individual drivers with different shift times or starting locations.
Let's check out Flightmap. No it's not just for flights. It's actually another route planning
tool that has a free tier. They support uploading address data via spreadsheets and they give you
a few route optimization controls such as max tasks per vehicle and trip duration limit they
have the same limitation as RouteXL in that you cannot have different settings for each driver.
When you run a larger delivery operation with multiple drivers and more than 25 stops per day,
you might want to look for something more sophisticated in route planning software.
Let's take a look at Onfleet. Onfleet is a great option for route planners.
They offer both route planning, which is the actual planning and optimization of routes,
as well as delivery management, which is more about the customer notifications and
the experience when actually delivering packages. You can create your individual driver profiles
with their own start and end locations and shift schedules as well as their capacity
for each delivery. You can specify a single time window service duration and quantity once
you've optimized your routes you can dispatch them straight to the Onfleet app for drivers and track
the progress from the dashboard the basic package with route optimization starts at $349 per month
Let's take a look at Optimoroute. Optimoroute is another great option for route planners that
offers a little bit more customization to get things exactly the way that you
want them. The only thing here is that there's a little bit of a learning curve.
You can set up individual driver profiles with their own shift schedules including breaks in
overtime start and end locations, skills if that's something that's important in your industry,
vehicle types, service areas where you want them to stay, and even cost and speed settings
you can also set up multiple capacity constraints like weight and volume. They have a mobile app
for drivers that you can dispatch routes to and you can track progress live from your
dashboard. A limitation is that you can't adjust the routes easily with a drag and drop interface.
Workwave Route Manager is another option that will pop up on your list with a ton of features
for you to take advantage of. The only thing to note here is that ,as of this recording,
this is the only app on our list that doesn't offer a free trial, so getting accurate pricing
is a bit difficult to find. Workwave has all the basic route planning functionalities such
as drag and drop, multiple time windows, multiple capacities.. But they also offer
support for more advanced routing needs such as paired pickup and drop-offs,
driver territories, and even different cost structures for your drivers
and optimize based on minimizing total cost. Despite all of this, a surprising limitation
is that you don't see route lines drawn on a map - only colored dots on a map with numbers on them
that makes it hard to see which roads your drivers are actually taking. They also have a mobile app
for drivers which can be used to monitor things like speeding and hard braking incidents.
Route4Me is another big name that'll likely pop up in your list when you do your research.
There's tons of options here for you to take advantage of and if you look through their website
you'll see that they have a lot of use cases so this is a really great place for you to start
poking around. When you explore their capabilities on their marketplace you'll notice that they've
taken a very modular and customizable approach. Each feature is a paid add-on that you can pick
and choose to create your own subscription. One limitation you'll note is that routes are assumed
to all start and end at the same location and with the same shift times. Other than that, since they
support a wide variety of use cases, there are a ton of bells and whistles that you can discover.
They present a ton of information about your routes allows for a ton of customization and setup
and even offers a multitude of ways to view your routes. They also have a mobile app for drivers
with live progress tracking as well as the ability to trace the driver's routes after the fact.
Pricing with route optimization features for a fleet starts at $299 per month.
The cheaper $199 per month option allows only single person routes note that these
prices don't include any of the modular add-on features some of which can be quite pricey.
So which one of these route planning apps should you choose? Honestly, it's hard for us to say.
What we can say definitively though is that if you're just starting out with only a few stops
to make free apps are probably your best bet, but if you're looking for something a bit more complex
with customer notifications, a mobile app, or photo capture, then go the paid route. Let
this be the starting point for your research and hopefully you'll find exactly the right
solution for your business. So with that, I'll say good luck and we'll see you in the next video.