Turvo alternative for brokerages under 25 people

Turvo’s pricing page states one number: Core TMS — “Plan, Execute and Settle Freight” — “Starts at $5,000 / Month”. The Enterprise tier is “Available Upon Request”. That is more transparency than most enterprise TMS vendors offer, and it deserves credit rather than suspicion.

“Starts at” is doing real work in that sentence: it is a floor, not a quote. What sits above it depends on scope, and the pricing page does not say. For a brokerage sizing its software budget, the floor alone is the decisive number — $60,000 a year before implementation.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers priced for the other end of the market: 490 € a year on Starter, 3,990 € on Scale, billed per organization rather than per seat, and the trial starts without a credit card.

The number is only half the story; the buying motion is the other half. Turvo’s Core plan lists a dedicated onboarding manager, virtual training, data migration, support centre and community access as inclusions. That is an honest description of what it takes to run the platform well, and it tells you the shape of the commitment: scoping, migration, training, go-live.

For a 3-person brokerage, the calendar cost is often heavier than the invoice. The lane you needed to quote on Monday is still unquoted in week six.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers built around one move: rebuild your own carrier rate grid from Excel or CSV, and quote from it immediately. Four grid models cover the European road market — 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). Taxable weight with an LDM floor and a configurable volumetric ratio, configurable rounding, an indexed fuel surcharge and options such as tail lift, ADR, ad valorem insurance and appointment booking sit on top. There is no migration project because there is nothing to migrate: the spreadsheet you already hold is the input.

Being specific here matters more than winning the comparison. Turvo does several things Cargavo does not do at all:

• Multi-party collaboration — a shared communication layer across shippers, carriers and 3PLs, which is Turvo’s founding idea.
• An integration hub for WMS, ERP and load boards. Cargavo ships zero carrier API and zero EDI connections today. Not a paid add-on, not a roadmap tease — it does not exist.
• A driver app, appointment scheduling, and inventory and warehouse visibility.
• Order-to-shipment planning across a supply chain rather than a brokerage.

What Cargavo does instead is narrow and economic. One rebuilt grid produces two prices: the purchase price the carrier charges you, and the sell price your customer sees. The margin rule is set per customer — percent, computed as p/(1-m), or absolute per bracket — and it is applied server-side. Your customer, in a portal where your customers quote themselves, sees the sell price and only the sell price: never the purchase price, never the margin. Quotes are referenced Q-YYYY-NNNN and become shipments S-YYYY-NNNN when accepted.

Match the tool to the bottleneck. If your bottleneck is that a quote request arrives by email and takes twenty minutes of spreadsheet lookups, the fix is a pricing engine over your own grids, not a supply-chain collaboration platform.

Cargavo bills per organization, so headcount inside a plan does not move the price: Starter carries 3 members, Growth 10 and Scale 30. It runs in English, French, Spanish and German, and bills in EUR, USD, GBP, CHF, CAD, MAD and PLN from the Growth plan — relevant if you quote a German shipper on Monday and a Spanish one on Tuesday.

The customer portal is included in every plan: your client simulates a price, requests a quote even for a lane you hold no grid for, books, sees their history, and messages you in context. Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers, and on the Scale plan that portal is white-labelled to your brand, not ours.