Comparison: The Best Trucking Dispatch Apps for Route Management

If there’s one thing that sums up the feeling of tighter competition in the delivery industry right now, it might be this: “[m]ore trucking companies exited the market than entered it in Q3, based on a Trucking Dive analysis of Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration operating authority filings.” In other words, it’s not just your imagination if you’re feeling more pressure than ever in delivery management.

When competition is tough and market conditions are less than forgiving, one of the elements that determines winners and losers is technology. It can act as a leveling agent between larger enterprises and mid-sized businesses trying to compete, and it can be a catalyst for protecting margins when cost pressures increase. The question is: how do you make sure you’re leveraging technology that will actually have an impact and make your business more competitive?

Step 1 is to take a look at your delivery route planning and execution. Does your trucking dispatch app give you the capabilities you need to ensure efficient plans that can be consistently executed by drivers? 

If your answer isn’t an emphatic “yes,” it may be time to look at some alternatives. To that end, we’ve rounded up some of the best trucking dispatch apps on the market to present a direct comparison for logistics operators who are evaluating potential software upgrades. 

We’ll cover the ways that trucking dispatch apps can help improve productivity and help manage costs, as well as a wider view of how they interact with the delivery management process as a whole. We’ll also give our take on why focusing on route optimization and route management is crucial to ensuring efficient dispatch and delivery management.  

Index:

• Why Route Management Is Crucial to Delivery Success
• 5 Ways Trucking Dispatch Apps Impact Logistics Costs
• The Top 4 Trucking Dispatch Apps
  • DispatchTrack 
  • ITS Dispatch
  • Trucklogics
  • Truckbase
• Conclusion: Choosing the Best Trucking Dispatch App  

Why Route Management Is Crucial to Delivery Success

The right dispatch trucking app can be a powerful thing: it gives you the ability to plan loads, stay connected with drivers, and track deliveries in real time. All of these capabilities are crucial, but your ability to translate them into cost savings and increased efficiency will correspond to the efficiency of your routes. 

Ensuring that you have the right loads on the right trucks is critical, but if those trucks then fail to take the most efficient routes between stops, all that improved capacity utilization is squandered.

Unfortunately, ensuring efficient routes is easier said than done in many instances—especially when you have to balance multiple different order or delivery types, split loads up among different types of vehicles, incorporate customer time requests, or deal with any requirement that goes above and beyond what Google Maps could account for. 

Getting this right by hand can take countless hours, which is precisely why it’s so important to integrate robust route optimization into your dispatch management. More specifically, it’s why your trucking dispatch app should have AI-powered route optimization baked into its core capabilities. 

This has the power to be a game changer. Suddenly, you can optimize your loads; meet customer, driver, vehicle, and site requirements; and do it all with the most efficient possible delivery schedules. Here, your on-time delivery rates will improve, meaning you’ll get better performance out of your drivers and make better use of your existing fleet capacity. 

When you dispatch routes to drivers that they can actually execute on, you’ve got a recipe for sustained success. 

5 Ways Trucking Dispatch Apps Impact Logistics Costs

Trucking dispatch apps are a crucial piece of the delivery management technology puzzle—especially when they offer you intelligent routing capabilities. They can go a long way towards helping you control and reduce logistics costs. 

Here’s just a handful of the ways the right technology can do that:

1. Less time spent routing and dispatching—meaning that your dispatching team can save time and focus more on high-value tasks. 
2. Improved first attempt delivery rates—meaning that you can significantly decrease your delivery failure rates and the added costs (redelivery, warehousing, damage) that come with them. 
3. More efficient routes and schedules—resulting in improved route density and thus a reduction in the fuel costs and driver hours associated with each stop on a route. Since these are the top two cost factors for most delivery organizations, improvements in this area can be a game changer. 
4. Better delivery documentation—in other words, incontrovertible proof of delivery that effectively ensures that you get paid for the deliveries you make. 
5. Huge reductions in time spent on the phone—when your solution prioritizes visibility and connectivity, the result is that your teams don’t spend hours every day on the phone with customers and drivers trying to keep everyone in the loop. 

The Top 4 Trucking Dispatch Apps

Those cost savings can have a huge impact for your delivery operations—provided you choose the right trucking dispatch app for your business. Here are four top options to consider:

1. DispatchTrack 

DispatchTrack is the global leader in delivery management software, helping 2,500 businesses around the globe to promise, deliver, and delight their customers. DispatchTrack’s trucking dispatch app acts as your centralized solution for the entire delivery management journey.

DispatchTrack’s solution leverages AI-powered routing to ensure 98% accurate delivery ETAs and maximally efficient delivery routes—no matter what your constraints and parameters are. This is streamlined into a single step with dispatching, so that your drivers are empowered with routes that they can actually execute on. 

This is on top of a robust suite of customer engagement tools (including AI-powered chat agent capabilities), real-time delivery tracking, digital proof of delivery, and reporting—all fully integrated within your larger logistics and supply chain technology stack (including telematics integration and IFTA reporting). The result is efficient delivery management that’s fully connected to your first and middle mile operations as well.  

DispatchTrack was recognized by Gartner in its 2024 Last Mile Delivery guide. It’s a strong fit for businesses that have to grapple with the complexities of big and bulky or scheduled deliveries: building material distributors, food wholesalers, retailers, 3PLs, etc. 

2. ITS Dispatch

In their own words, ITS Dispatch is “a cloud-based Transportation Management Software (TMS) solution from Truckstop.com designed to help owner/operators, small carriers, brokers and even those businesses with dual authority streamline their business with critical tools to manage their loads and reduce paperwork.”

For anyone currently using Truckstop.com as their primary load board, the in-built integration there can be a huge help and can simplify operations significantly. ITS Dispatch offers two-way communication with drivers, IFTA reporting (for a $5 fee per truck), and an easy-to-use load management interface. 

Effectively, it offers a strong TMS option for smaller businesses. For businesses with more complicated route optimization needs (or more complicated tech stacks) there may be some gaps—but it offers an easy-to-use option for more straightforward dispatch and delivery management. 

3. TruckLogics

TruckLogics is “a trucking management software designed for fleet managers, owner-operators, leased operators, brokers, independent dispatchers, and service providers. It allows trucking businesses to monitor the real-time status of dispatches and drivers while also keeping accurate records of miscellaneous expenses while on the go.”

It’s included in this list because it offers a relatively low-cost option, and users note that it offers great functionality for adding new load boards and easily dispatching with them. They also offer functionality for estimating delivery profits at the loading stage, which can be a boon for delivery planning. 

Some users do complain about slowdowns and bugginess, but the mileage tracking is solid and the customer support gets good ratings. 

4. Truckbase

Truckbase, by contrast, is at the opposite end of the spectrum from the last two. It’s a full-featured TMS that bills itself as helping “free up your dispatchers to book more high-paying loads, eliminate check calls, and increase your margins.”

That said, it still gets shoutouts from users (on GetApp, for instance) for its usability, particularly for drivers. In this way, it helps small businesses make sure they’re set up to easily manage orders and dispatches and capture proof of delivery. 

One potential downside is that they don’t seem to offer any built in route optimization capabilities—and while they offer many out-of-the-box third party integrations, they don’t offer API integrations. This means that you may wind up with your route planning and optimization stuck in a silo if you’re not careful about how you implement your technology. 

That said, Truckbase has great reviews and is a go-to solution for many smaller businesses who need TMS capabilities. 

Conclusion: Choosing the Best Trucking Dispatch App

Different delivery organizations look different—both in how their networks are put together and in what technology they need to succeed. That means that, on the one hand, your choice of trucking dispatch app can be fairly idiosyncratic. 

On the other hand, the need to keep logistics costs under control and delight customers with timely deliveries is universal. That’s exactly what the right technology sets you up to do, provided it has the right features and capabilities. 

If you’d like to learn more about what that looks like in practice, reach out to our team today. We’d love to dive deeper into the specifics.