TMS for Freight Brokers Without a Fleet: Buying Transport Is Not Running It

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and transport commissionaires who own no vehicles. The category confusion this guide exists to clear up comes from one word doing two jobs. "Transport management system" describes both the software a haulier uses to run trucks and the software a broker uses to buy transport. They share a name and almost nothing else.

The difference is structural, not a matter of feature depth. Each product type is organised around a central object, and every screen, permission and price follows from it.

• A fleet TMS is organised around the vehicle. The main screen is a planning board. The questions it answers are: which truck takes this load, which driver is legally allowed to drive it, what is the route, where is the vehicle now, what did the trip cost per kilometre.
• A broker TMS is organised around the rate. The main screen is a quote. The questions it answers are: which of my carriers covers this lane, what does their tariff say for this weight and this zone, what is my chargeable weight, what margin applies to this customer, what price do I send.

A freight broker without a fleet lives entirely in the second list. The working day is a chain: a rate request arrives, a purchase grid is read, a taxable weight is derived, a margin is applied, a quote goes out with a reference such as Q-YYYY-NNNN, and an accepted quote becomes a shipment such as S-YYYY-NNNN. Not one step of that chain involves a vehicle you control, because the vehicle belongs to the carrier you bought from.

This is why the shortlist matters more here than in most software categories: a broker evaluating fleet products is not comparing good and bad tools, but tools built for a neighbouring profession. The rest of the choosing a TMS category assumes you have already made this distinction.

The billing unit of a piece of software is the most honest sentence on its website. It tells you what the vendor believes creates value, and vendors are rarely wrong about their own product. Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers without a fleet, is billed per organisation for exactly that reason: the thing that scales for a broker is quotes and customers, not assets.

Four billing units dominate this market, and each one encodes a different assumption about your business.

• Per vehicle, per truck or per driver, per month. Assumes you own the capacity. A broker with zero trucks either cannot be quoted at all, or gets shoehorned onto a substitute unit invented for the occasion.
• Per user, per month. Assumes headcount tracks value. AscendTMS publishes 69 $, 119 $ and 149 $ per user per month on its own pricing page. Every hire raises the bill.
• Per shipment band. Assumes volume tracks value. Freightview publishes 149 $ per month for 0 to 50 shipments; the higher bands show no figure.
• Tiered flat, per organisation. Assumes capacity limits track value. Cargavo publishes 49 €, 149 € and 399 € per month. Cargoson publishes 199 € per month billed annually for 2 users and 100 shipments.

Two consequences follow when you have no fleet. First, the price you are quoted for a per-vehicle product is a negotiated exception, which means you have no published benchmark and no way to compare offers. Second, and more expensive, the modules the price pays for are the ones you will never open: the roadmap of a per-vehicle product goes to planning, telematics and driver compliance, because that is what its billing unit rewards. The full comparison of billing models, including the setup and connector fees that sit outside the subscription, is in the TMS pricing guide.

The honest way to shortlist is to write the two lists before looking at any vendor. Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and transport commissionaires without a fleet, and the lists below are the ones that decide whether any product in the category fits.

Needed, because a broker cannot quote without them:

• Rate grid build. Your carriers send tariffs as Excel or CSV files. The product must model them as they exist. Four shapes cover road freight: weight_zone (weight brackets crossed with zones), pallet (a price per number of pallets per zone), mpl_bracket (loading-metre brackets per zone) and hybrid_weight (a flat charge below a threshold, a rate above it). See rate grid for the definitions, and the four models are compared in the types of freight rate grid.
• Chargeable weight. Gross weight is rarely what you pay on. The engine needs a loading-metre floor, a configurable volumetric ratio and configurable rounding, applied identically on the buy side and the sell side. The chargeable weight calculator runs the same three rules.
• A margin engine that runs on the server. Percentage margins computed as p/(1−m), or absolute amounts, set per customer, per grid or per bracket — and applied where a salesperson cannot forget them or edit them. The freight margin calculator shows the p/(1−m) arithmetic.
• Multi-carrier comparison on one lane. The buy decision is the job. Reading four tariffs in four workbooks is the thing being replaced.
• A quote record with a reference that survives. Q-YYYY-NNNN becoming S-YYYY-NNNN, with the financials attached but never exposed to the customer.
• A customer portal. Your clients ask for prices. A branded simulator and a quote request form answer them without an email round trip.

Not needed, because you own nothing to manage: a dispatch or planning board, route and tour optimisation, telematics and GPS tracking of your own vehicles, tachograph data and driving-hours compliance, a driver mobile app, fuel card and fuel consumption management, vehicle maintenance scheduling, and cost-per-kilometre fleet analytics. Every one of those is genuinely valuable software — to a haulier. Priced into a subscription you pay, they are seven modules of dead weight.

Define both before comparing them. A fleet TMS is transport management software whose users own or operate the vehicles: hauliers, carriers, own-account fleets. Dashdoc, for example, positions itself on its own site as software for road transport operators — carriers and hauliers. A broker TMS is transport management software whose users buy capacity from third-party carriers and resell it with a margin: freight brokers, transport commissionaires, non-asset 3PLs. Cargavo is in the second group.

Read the last column as a shopping list rather than a verdict. A fleet TMS is not a weak broker TMS; it is a strong product aimed one profession to the left. The overlap between the two columns is real but narrow: both track a shipment, both hold customer records, both produce documents. Everything that makes each product expensive to build sits outside that overlap, which is why buying across the line means paying for the expensive part twice — once in subscription, once in the workarounds you invent to make a planning board behave like a quoting tool.

You can classify almost any transport software in about four minutes without booking a demo. Run these seven checks in order — the last one is decisive on its own, and it is the one a broker evaluating a TMS for a business without a fleet should run first.

1. Read the pricing unit. "Per vehicle", "per truck", "per driver" or "per asset" per month settles the question immediately. If no price is published, read the plan comparison table for the same nouns.
2. Look at the hero screenshot. A Gantt-style planning board with rows of vehicles, or a map covered in truck icons, is a fleet product. A quote form or a rate table is not.
3. Scan the feature navigation. Dispatch, route optimisation, driver app, telematics or GPS, tachograph, driving hours, fuel management, maintenance, eCMR — three or more of these and the answer is settled.
4. Check the nouns used for customers. "Fleets", "hauliers", "carriers", "drivers", "your vehicles". Broker products say "your customers", "your carriers", "your margin".
5. Open a case study. If success is measured in trucks operated, kilometres saved or empty-running reduced, the product optimises assets. Brokers measure quotes sent, win rate and margin.
6. Start the signup or demo form. A required "how many vehicles do you operate?" field with no zero option is the clearest structural tell there is.
7. Search the whole site for three words: margin, buy rate, rate grid. A product designed for buying and reselling transport talks about all three on its own pages. A fleet product usually mentions none of them, because for its intended user the sell price is derived from cost per kilometre, not from a purchased tariff.

Two caveats keep this honest. Some suites genuinely serve both professions and will show both vocabularies; in that case, ask which modules are included in your plan rather than which exist in the product. And a vendor failing these checks has not made a mistake — Akanea, a French publisher, sells to hauliers, logistics providers and commissionnaires de transport alike, and that breadth is a deliberate strategy. The checks tell you who the software was designed around, which is what predicts your daily experience.

Removing the fleet removes about half of what a transport management system is normally sold to do, and the price should reflect that. Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and transport commissionaires without a fleet, and its plan limits are written in brokerage units for that reason: team members, customers, quotes per month, rate grids. Nothing is counted in vehicles, because there are none to count.

The published figures in this category, taken from each vendor's own pricing page, span a very wide range. Tai TMS publishes 995 $ per month for its Growth plan and 7,925 $ per month for Pro. Turvo publishes a Core TMS "starting at 5,000 $ per month". Rose Rocket publishes "starting at 2,080 $ per month". AscendTMS publishes 69 $, 119 $ and 149 $ per user per month. Cargavo publishes 49 €, 149 € and 399 € per month per organisation. Several of the largest vendors — Transporeon, Alpega, Descartes, Magaya, Dashdoc — publish no figure at all, which is the category norm rather than an exception.

Most of that spread buys integration inventory: pre-built carrier APIs, EDI mappings, load-board feeds. A broker whose prices come from negotiated tariffs sitting in an Excel file does not consume any of it, because the rate never travels over an integration. That single fact, plus the absence of fleet modules, is what makes a two-figure monthly price defensible rather than suspicious.

A worked example, presented as an example and not as market data: a brokerage issuing 400 quotes a month on a 149 € plan pays 0.37 € per quote. The same brokerage on a per-user plan at 119 $ per user per month with five operators pays 595 $ per month regardless of whether it quotes 400 times or 40. Choose the unit before you compare the numbers. If you are still deciding whether to leave spreadsheets at all, the threshold test is in when a brokerage outgrows spreadsheets, and the plan limits are on the pricing page.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and transport commissionaires without a fleet, sold at 49 € per month (Starter), 149 € per month (Growth) and 399 € per month (Scale), billed per organisation, with a 14-day free trial requiring no credit card. Every plan includes the same engine: the four grid models weight_zone, pallet, mpl_bracket and hybrid_weight; chargeable weight with a loading-metre floor and a configurable volumetric ratio; configurable rounding; margins as a percentage using p/(1−m) or as an absolute amount; an indexed fuel surcharge; and options for tail lift, ADR, ad valorem insurance and timed delivery. Buy prices and margins are computed server-side and never leave it. The interface runs in English, French, Spanish and German, and quotes can be issued in EUR, USD, GBP, CHF, CAD, MAD and PLN.

The limits are as important as the features, because they decide whether the comparison in this guide applies to you.

• No carrier API or EDI connectivity. Carriers are onboarded by rebuilding the rate sheet they already email you. If you need live rates from carrier systems, Cargavo is the wrong tool and a platform in the higher price band is the honest answer.
• No fleet management, dispatch, route optimisation, telematics, driving hours or driver app. If you own trucks and need to run them, buy a fleet TMS — that is the whole argument of this guide, applied to us.
• No eCMR, no freight exchange or load board, no invoicing or accounting, no customs. Cargavo prices and records the commercial transaction; the rest stays in the tools you already use.

Hybrid cases deserve a straight answer. A brokerage that also runs two or three of its own vehicles can use Cargavo for the bought side — grids, margins, quotes, customer portal — but will still need something else for the vehicles, and should count that second subscription in the budget. A pure asset-based haulier should not be reading this guide at all. Definitions for every term used above are in the glossary, and the wider buyer's guide is the TMS guide for small freight brokers.