Cargoson alternative: built for brokers, not shippers

Cargoson deserves credit for publishing a full EUR tier list with explicit user and shipment limits — most European TMS vendors publish nothing at all.

One detail matters more than the totals: Cargoson states that “Standard and above add all transport modes, pricing engine, CO₂ reporting”. If pricing is the reason you are buying software, the entry tier is not the one you are comparing — €399/month is. Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and prices from the first plan, because pricing is the whole product rather than a module.

The two products look similar on a screenshot and diverge completely in their data model.

That second row is the whole business. A commissionnaire de transport does not sell transport; they sell the difference between two numbers. Software that stores one number per shipment cannot represent the job, however good it is at the rest.

Nothing on Cargoson’s pricing page describes a purchase-price / sell-price separation, per-customer margin rules, or a portal in which the end client sees only the marked-up price. We are not claiming those capabilities are absent from the product — only that they are not described, which is the same problem for a buyer trying to qualify it.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers, so the buy/sell split is the architecture rather than a feature flag.

• Rebuild once. The carrier’s negotiated grid arrives as Excel or CSV in one of four road models: weight_zone (zones × weight brackets), pallet (price by pallet count × zone), mpl_bracket (linear-metre / LDM brackets) or hybrid_weight (flat rate below a threshold, rate above).
• Compute the taxable weight. An LDM floor and a configurable volumetric ratio decide which weight the grid is read at; rounding rules are configurable per grid.
• Add the real-world extras. Indexed fuel surcharge, tail lift, ADR, ad valorem insurance, appointment booking.
• Run it twice. Without margins → purchase price. With the margin rule for that customer — percent, computed as p/(1-m) so a 20% margin really returns 20% of the sell price, or absolute per bracket → sell price.
• Show one of them. The customer portal renders the sell price against quote Q-YYYY-NNNN and shipment S-YYYY-NNNN. Purchase price and margin are written by the server into a private sub-record that the customer’s account has no permission to read — not hidden in the interface, unreadable by design.

Because one engine produces both numbers, the sell price cannot drift from the buy price when a tariff changes. That failure mode — two implementations of the same calculation quietly disagreeing — is the single most common source of margin leaks in home-grown broker spreadsheets.

Ask one question: whose goods are they?

• Yours. You are a manufacturer, wholesaler or e-commerce operator. Cargoson is designed for exactly this: 1,000+ plug-and-play carrier integrations, direct APIs to DHL, UPS and FedEx, ERP connectors, automatic CMR, pre-calculated CO₂, label printing. Cargavo has none of that and should not be on your shortlist.
• Your customer’s. You are a commissionnaire de transport, a freight broker or a forwarder reselling road capacity. You need two prices per shipment, margin rules per customer, and a portal your clients log into. Cargavo does that from 49 €/month, in English, French, Spanish and German; billing in EUR, USD, GBP, CHF, CAD, MAD or PLN starts on the Growth plan.
• Both. Some businesses ship their own goods and broker for others. Those are two jobs, and they are usually best served by two tools rather than a compromise.

A reader who realises mid-evaluation that they are an intermediary rather than a shipper has learned the most valuable thing on this page, whichever product they end up buying.