Transporeon alternative for small freight brokers

These two products answer different questions, and the fastest way to save a week of evaluation is to say so plainly.

Transporeon’s question is: how does a large industrial shipper source, execute and monitor capacity across many carriers? Its own site describes helping to “move, manage and monitor freight”, states 1,500+ connected industrial and commercial companies and 210,000+ connected carriers and logistics service providers, and lists a freight marketplace (“All-in-one freight sourcing. Find partners and make smarter decisions”), execution and visibility, dock and yard management, freight audit (“Automate your freight billing process and be on top of your freight spend”) and eCMR.

Cargavo’s question is: how does an intermediary turn a negotiated carrier rate sheet into a price for its own customer, with a margin? Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers. Four grid models cover European road freight — weight_zone (zones × weight brackets), pallet (price by pallet count × zone), mpl_bracket (linear-metre / LDM brackets) and hybrid_weight (a flat rate below a threshold, a rate above it) — with taxable weight (LDM floor, configurable volumetric ratio), configurable rounding, indexed fuel surcharge and options such as tail lift, ADR, ad valorem insurance and appointment booking.

Nothing in Cargavo replaces a network of 210,000 carriers. Nothing in a shipper-side network platform computes a broker’s sell price with a margin the customer must not see.

This is a statement of fact, not a criticism: enterprise platforms are usually scoped and quoted, because what a customer buys varies enormously. Verified on 23 July 2026, no pricing figure appears anywhere on transporeon.com, the pricing URL returns a 404, and every path leads to a demo request or sales contact.

For a brokerage of 2 to 25 people, that difference is structural rather than financial. A 4-person team cannot put an unquoted line in a budget, and cannot spare the calendar weeks a scoping cycle costs before the first quote comes out of the system.

1. No published price. A small brokerage builds its software budget from numbers it can read. Cargavo publishes 49 €, 149 € and 399 € per month, and 490 €, 1,490 € and 3,990 € per year, billed per organization rather than per seat.

2. No self-serve start. Transporeon’s site offers a demo request; Cargavo offers a 14-day trial that begins without a credit card. On day one you rebuild a carrier rate sheet from Excel or CSV and quote a real lane.

3. Shipper-side product design. A network platform is built for the party that owns the freight. A commissionnaire de transport does not own it: they buy capacity and resell it, and their entire economics live in the gap between the two prices. In Cargavo, one rebuilt grid produces both. The purchase price is what the carrier charges you. The sell price applies your per-customer margin rule — percent, computed as p/(1-m), or absolute per bracket — and is calculated server-side, so the customer portal cannot leak it. Your customer sees the sell price, never the purchase price and never the margin. Quotes carry the reference Q-YYYY-NNNN and become shipments S-YYYY-NNNN on acceptance.

Cargavo bills per organization: Starter carries 3 members, Growth 10 and Scale 30, and headcount inside a plan does not move the price. Billing is available in EUR, USD, GBP, CHF, CAD, MAD and PLN, and the interface runs in English, French, Spanish and German.

The customer portal is included in every plan; white-label branding is a Scale feature. Your client simulates a price against the margin rules you set, requests a quote even for a lane you hold no grid for, books, sees their history and messages you in context — and on the Scale plan the whole portal carries your own brand.

Be clear about the trade: choosing Cargavo means giving up the network. Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers, not a freight exchange: it will not find you a truck, it has no carrier API and no EDI, no dock and yard management, no freight audit module and no eCMR. If any of those is the reason you are evaluating software, Transporeon is the right conversation to have.