Best Route Optimization Software In 2023: Review

Is delivery route planning stressing you out? Are you wrestling with excel spreadsheets, rising delivery costs and increasing customer expectations? Is using Google Maps as a route planner just not good enough any more? If your answer to any of those questions is yes — it’s time to try out proper route optimization software.

This article covers the best route optimization software that we’ve tested in the past year. We’ve included notes about what kind of delivery service each one will suit best, and brief overviews of some other apps that might help you automate your route planning process. (If you're a solo driver looking for a mobile app, rather check out our review of mobile route planner apps for drivers).

Why should you trust our advice about the best route optimization software? At Routific, we’ve been in the last-mile delivery industry for over a decade, and we've spoken to hundreds of businesses who deal with multi-stop delivery routes every day. Things are changing fast, and we’re always learning. These reviews are based on what we’ve learned from real people, running real businesses, both e-commerce and traditional retail.

If you want to know more about the difference between route planning and route optimization, our approach to optimization, and why we think driver acceptability is important, you can read more detail at the end of this article. For now, let’s cut straight to the reviews!

Routific: Best for medium-sized local delivery businesses

Routific is route optimization software that’s specifically built to be both user-friendly and powerful. It includes dispatcher-friendly features like the ability to edit routes, and a timeline view that makes it easy to track progress through the day. Our main focus is small to medium-sized local delivery businesses, although sales teams and service organizations like landscapers or maintenance providers also use our multi-stop route planner features. 

We optimize routes for both pure efficiency (shortest distance) and driver acceptability. Our customers respect their drivers and want to offer great working conditions, so we make it easy to schedule flexible driver breaks, reassign stops between drivers and send updated route details if anything changes.

Independent reviews often note that we have great customer support. Our support team is 100% in-house (we don’t outsource) and run by actual humans.

Circuit for Teams: Best for small businesses with simple routing needs

Circuit began as a popular standalone route planner app for single drivers, well reviewed in both the iOS and Android app stores. More recently, they’ve expanded their offering to include Circuit for Teams, which enables multi-stop route planning and dispatch for multiple vehicles. 

Their browser-based app is impressively easy to use. This makes it a good match for small businesses where one person might have to handle multiple roles, including route planning, dispatch and delivery management. On the downside, their routing engine is lackluster, yielding messy, tangled routes. It’s also not possible to edit routes or view overall distance and time metrics, which makes it less attractive for route managers who have to track multiple routes and vehicles at the same time.

Onfleet:  Best for mid-market and enterprise

Onfleet bills itself as a “complete toolkit for last mile delivery”. They offer the full set of features you’d hope to find in delivery management software, as well as an automatic driver assignment feature that makes it a good option for on-demand courier businesses. There’s also a live chat option inside the driver app, which dispatchers and drivers love. 

Route optimization was included as a paid add-on in 2016, and it’s now standard on all price tiers. Unfortunately the route planning functions are very difficult to use. The interface doesn’t show actual routes, just a collection of pins; and there’s no color coding, so users can’t tell one route from another. Combined with the lack of metrics, this made it impossible for us to tell how good Onfleet’s routes actually were. The lack of a timeline view also makes it difficult for dispatchers to monitor progress in real time. 

Onfleet has a fuller feature set than Routific or Circuit, including barcode scanning. But the steep learning curve, combined with its high cost, make Onfleet more suitable for mid-market to enterprise-level companies.

OptimoRoute: Best for field sales and service businesses

OptimoRoute is a powerful routing app 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 field 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). Like Routific, OptimoRoute doesn’t include barcode scanning or order taking functionality. 

We couldn’t test as thoroughly as we would have liked, because Onfleet limits free trials to 250 stops. Given that limitation, the route optimization was fast — but there was lots of overlap between routes, and it was difficult to edit the routes. 

Route4Me: Best if you need maximum flexibility

Route4Me is one of the original route planning and route optimization tools, 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. 

There are some things about it we found strange, though. Route4Me automatically optimizes its routes to use the smallest possible number of vehicles, and this setting can’t be changed. This makes things awkward if you have your own fleet and drivers — Route4Me could leave one driver sitting idle while another works overtime. We also found their ETA estimations unrealistic. For example, on one route section that Routific and Google Maps both estimated would take 18-19 minutes, Route4Me estimated just 10 minutes. Journey times are routinely under-estimated, which can lead to lots of late deliveries and a very poor customer experience.

Other delivery route planning apps

We reviewed several other apps that we don’t feel comfortable including in our list of the best delivery route planning software, but they may work for certain use cases. If you’re a micro business or charity, don’t have many stops to make, and you’re looking for a free route planner app, one of these might be right for you.

Mapquest Route Planner

Mapquest is a simple but effective route planning app that is free up to 26 stops. It’s quick and easy to use for basic route optimization, although there are no extra delivery management features like dispatch to a driver app, customer notifications or tracking. Once your route is optimized you can print out the directions, or send them via SMS or email. But when we tried the share option it rejected our mobile phone number as invalid, and the email never arrived, so we wouldn’t rely on this. 

Mapquest is ad-funded, so if you find intrusive advertising annoying this won’t work for you. 

RoadWarrior

RoadWarrior, like Circuit, is mainly a mobile route planner app that has recently added a “teams” feature aimed at dispatchers. It has moderately good reviews. It’s popular with courier drivers because it gives the ability to upload a Fedex manifest directly. 

We didn’t directly test RoadWarrior because we didn’t feel comfortable giving our credit card details before signing up for the free trial. Judging by other reviews, though, it’s best suited to solo drivers.

RouteXL

RouteXL is one of the oldest simple route optimization apps around, and it shows. The interface feels a little old and clunky, and it can only optimize one route at a time, which means you miss out on the benefits of multi-vehicle optimization. That said, if you’re a one-vehicle business with a limited number of stops to handle, this might be an option worth testing.

 Speedy Route

Speedy Route is a bare-bones route optimizer that’s good for simple use cases. The web app is attractive and easy to use and optimization is relatively fast (it’s free up to 10 stops). You can’t dispatch routes to drivers from the app, though – you have to export to a spreadsheet file or print it out. There are also no extra features like customer notifications, tracking, or proof of delivery. If you need nothing more than simple optimization, this might be a good option to test.

Upper

Upper is a newer route planner app that’s easy to use, with a friendly web-based route optimization tool that can handle up to 500 addresses. It doesn’t really have anything to make it stand out from the competition, though: it’s slower and offers fewer features than Routific for a similar price, it’s less easy to use than Circuit, and it can’t match the feature set of Onfleet or Optimoroute.  That said, there’s no reason not to use Upper if you like the interface and it works for your purposes.

What’s the difference between route planning and route optimization?

Do you need a route planner app, or a route optimization app? What’s the difference, anyway? We’ve written a whole article about the difference between route planning and route optimization, but basically: route planning is the part of delivery operations that starts with collecting orders and addresses and continues through optimizing routes, inspecting and editing those routes, dispatching the routes to drivers, and finally communicating ETAs to customers. Route optimization streamlines that route to find the most efficient, cost-effective sequence of stops for completing the plan.

Route optimization exists because planning efficient multi-stop routes is really, really hard. Experienced drivers know the best routes for getting from one place to another in their cities. But with every stop you add, creating an efficient sequence gets more difficult. With 20 or more stops, there are hundreds or thousands of good-enough routes to choose from — so how do you choose the best? Route optimization algorithms can compare billions of possibilities to come up with the most efficient routes. It takes a lot of computing power, though — which is why it’s only in the past decade or so that route optimization has become accessible to small and medium-sized businesses.

The benefits of route optimization

The main reasons to use route optimization are related to efficiency gains:

• Route optimization: Quickly find the fastest routes for multiple vehicles.
• Dispatch management: One-click dispatch to a driver mobile app (either Android or iPhone), and real-time tracking through the day.
• Customer management: Send customer notifications about ETAs and completed deliveries.
• Real-time tracking, combined with daily, weekly or monthly analytics, makes both driver management and fleet management easier.

How we tested delivery route planners for this review

We tested all these apps ourselves in free trial mode, using 250-700 stops for each test, depending on the limitations of the trial. This is a fair representation of the workload a typical small to medium-sized delivery business would face in a day.

Every app in our list has these key features:

• Route optimization: Quickly find the fastest routes for multiple vehicles.
• Dispatch management: One-click dispatch to a driver mobile app (either Android or iPhone), and real-time tracking through the day.
• Customer management: Send customer notifications about ETAs and completed deliveries.

A route planner is not the same thing as a navigation app, so none of these apps include driving directions. Instead, they all give drivers the option to use Google Maps, Apple Maps or Waze for actual turn-by-turn directions and real-time traffic updates.

All these features are fairly standard across all the delivery route planners we tested. So we looked at the features which distinguish one route planning solution from another:

• Ease of use: How easy is it to get started and figure out how to use the software productively?
• Speed: How long did it take to get routes ready for dispatch?
• Route efficiency: What’s the total length of all the optimized routes? Shorter driving distance means lower fuel costs and wage bills, so route efficiency is a critical metric. 
• Route acceptability: Do the routes make sense to dispatchers and delivery drivers?
• User ratings: We looked at ratings on Capterra, an independent software review site owned by Gartner. 

Why is route acceptability an important part of route optimization?

A good route is much more than just the most mathematically efficient route. Delivery drivers have to navigate these routes in the real world, and they really hate “spaghetti routes” which overlap and criss-cross each other. Even if the algorithm says it’s efficient, to a human eye these routes look wasteful and stupid. If I see another driver from my company entering the area I’m just leaving, I’m going to have a tough time believing it wouldn’t have been more efficient to put all the deliveries for that area on the same vehicle.

This mismatch between mathematical efficiency and common sense can cause drivers to lose faith in routing software. Then you get, at best, lots of grumbling — and at worst, people override the system and plan their own routes. That’s why, as we refine our algorithms at Routific, we aim for cleanly clustered routes with high driver acceptability. Call it adding driver intelligence to artificial intelligence 🙂.

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