If you’re a logistics leader trying to find the best logistics software, this is a sign from the universe to narrow down your search. That means winnowing down the logistics software options on the table to only the “best” ones, sure—but it also means narrowing down exactly what you mean by “logistics software.”
For instance, Gartner naturally assumes that if you search for logistics software you’re automatically looking for a transportation management system (TMS). But what if you’re a lean team trying to streamline the connections between the first, middle, and last miles of the supply chain, a TMS might be more complexity (and more money) than you really need.
Conversely, the lightest weight logistics solutions (usually in the delivery tracking category or in simple routing applications) often promise more than they can really deliver. When they say that they can handle customer engagement, they might not actually be talking about the number of touchpoints, the scale, and the visibility that you have in mind.
That all brings us to an important question: How do you right-size your technology deployments while ensuring that you’re leveraging logistics software that actually gets the job done—all while seamlessly slotting into your existing technology stack?
It’s not an easy needle to thread, but the best place to start is to make sure you’re adopting the best logistics software for whatever functional area you decide it’s most important to address.
The Best Logistics Software Options for 2026
Logistics software means different things to different people, but whatever you decide to do with your technology stack you should strive to deploy the best logistics software. And what does “best” mean in this case? It means the software that will slot most seamlessly into your operations and technology stack while giving you the best chance of reducing logistics cost, improving customer satisfaction, and ensuring logistics visibility.
Below, we’ll cover both a selection of some of the types of logistics software solutions you might need for your operations, as well as your best bets for each category.
Delivery Management
The most costly and time-consuming part of the typical logistics operation comes down to last mile delivery. It’s certainly the most complicated, it has the most moving parts, and in many ways the stakes are highest—because your ability to execute on your plans directly impacts customer experience at its most crucial moment.
If you’re having trouble getting orders fulfilled on-time, you’re struggling with your NPS, or you feel like you could be getting more out of your fleet, network, or assets, there’s a good chance that delivery management is the area of greatest impact.
With the right solution, you can orchestrate delivery plans, communicate with customers, track deliveries in real time, document deliveries and exchanges, and ultimately execute seamlessly on those plans. When you step back for a thousand-yard view, the right technology will make it easy to track performance and iterate over time to ensure cost efficiency.
In other words, it’s the best means of taking control of everything that happens between the distribution center and customer delivery site. Choosing the right one puts you in a position to significantly lower costs across the most costly part of the supply chain.
Your best bet: DispatchTrack is the leading provider of delivery management software in a crowded logistics marketplace. Other options like Bringg, Omnitracs, and Descartes have points to recommend them, but DispatchTrack has the track record of high-impact innovations and successful deployments that logistics operators need.
DispatchTrack’s platform helps delivery organizations achieve:
- Total visibility across the first, middle, and last miles
- Reduced delivery costs through improved route efficiency and execution
- Improved customer satisfaction and engagement
It does this by slotting neatly into your logistics technology stack to act as a reliable source of truth for logistics and delivery management, helping different roles and functions to promise what they can actually deliver and delight their customers in the process.
This is aided by comprehensive and connected capabilities across logistics operations and sophisticated AI-based workflows that have been proven to boost customer experience, increase route accuracy, and streamline driver workflows.
TMS
For a lot of businesses, the kind of delivery management that we discussed above—replete with connected workflows and total data visibility—can act as a leaner, more streamlined, and less cumbersome alternative to a TMS. But sometimes you really do need an entire TMS.
As Gartner puts it, a TMS “supports multimodal planning and execution of the physical transport of goods across the supply chain. It allows a shipper to manage varying levels of transportation complexity across multiple transport modes and geographic regions.”
More specifically, a solution like this can help you with securing freight, consolidating shipments, and handling payments and settlements—while providing visibility into the process from end to end.
Your best bet: Oracle and SAP have two of the most widely regarded solutions in this area. SAP’s reviews on Peer Reviews note that, in spite of the complexity of the system, it can help simplify transportation workflows and that its Integration with SAP ERP can be extremely valuable.
Oracle is in the same boat. Reviewers describe it as scalable, flexible, and reliable, and it comes with the Oracle name brand—which means that it slots into an ecosystem that some businesses may already be using.
Flexibility is one of the key ways that these solutions can and do add value—when they enable your teams to approach logistics tasks with agility, they can help optimize overall transportation costs.
Supply Chain Management Software
The best logistics software is the one that meets your most pressing need, and if you looked at the TMS options above and wondered if they were up to the challenge, your most pressing needs might be better served by supply chain management software.
This is a large category, and it can include everything from sales and operations planning to managing procurement of raw materials and transportation to your manufacturing facilities—to say nothing of network, warehouse, and even factory floor planning and optimization. This can go all the way down to route optimization (though here we might recommend a standalone route optimization or delivery management solution that integrates with your supply chain software).
Frankly, this is such a big topic that it could more than sustain its own article. But if you’re looking for the best logistics software and your first priority is to gain control of your entire supply chain at this level of abstraction, this is the category to start with. It can help provide visibility up and down the supply chain and ultimately give you greater control of costs.
(Of course, it probably won’t be a one-and-done deployment; instead, you’ll need to augment it with more specialized functionality. For route execution and customer experience, for instance, you’ll need to integrate another solution that specializes in those areas into your SCM solution.)
Your best bet: SAP SCM or Oracle SCM are the heaviest hitters in this area. They can be extremely impactful if you’re already in the SAP or Oracle ecosystem and want to extend your capabilities to include demand forecasting and supply chain planning. These are essentially ERP systems, with all the pros and cons that come with that.
For a slightly more specialized solution, Blue Yonder (formerly JDA)) is a popular option. It has a narrower focus on sales and operations planning, workforce, planning, etc. For businesses that are more specifically trying to improve those specific areas of supply chain management, this is a great option.
Conclusion: The Best Logistics Software for Your Deliveries
The best logistics software may be in the eye of the beholder, but there are definitely better and worse options for any given use case. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer for everyone’s logistics ops, but by identifying your top area of need in logistics you can make a point of getting the best logistics software for your functional area.
In our experience, delivery management and last mile logistics are often overlooked when businesses try to optimize logistics costs. But it can be an important functional area to focus on when adopting new technology, and modern delivery management solutions can actually cover a lot of the functionality that TMS solutions traditionally provide, especially around visibility.
If you want to learn more about what that looks like in practice, reach out to our team today—we’d love to walk you through it.