Route Planning Software and Fuel Costs: 17 Platforms Checked Against What Their Own Sites Claim

Quick answer: we read the sites of 17 route planning and delivery optimization platforms on 17 September 2026 and wrote down every savings number each one publishes. Six publish a number about fuel or miles. Four of those six put a named customer next to it. None of the six publishes the baseline, the measurement period or the method behind the number. One publishes two different figures for the same customer on two of its own pages.

Checked and updated 17 September 2026. Every number below was read on the vendor's own site that day.

That is the honest state of the evidence a carrier is handed when shopping for routing software. It does not mean the software does nothing. It means the percentage on the homepage is a marketing figure, not a forecast for your fleet, and the only number that will ever apply to your trucks is one you measure yourself.

What the Number on a Vendor Homepage Actually Is

A savings percentage on a product page is an outcome from someone else's operation: their stop density, their baseline, their dispatcher, their year. Two fleets of the same size running the same trucks can sit a long way apart on that scale, because most of the saving comes from how bad the routing was before the software arrived.

That is why the interesting question is not "how much do they claim" but "what would you need to know to check the claim". Three things: what was measured before, over how long, and how. We looked for those three on every page carrying a number.

Which of the 17 Platforms Publishes a Fuel or Mileage Number?

Every cell is what the platform says on its own site, word for word, read 17 September 2026. Ratings are the TruckMyApps directory score that day.

Four of the seventeen publish no savings percentage at all, and two of those four are among the largest names on the list. That is worth noticing before treating a big number as evidence of a better product: the vendors with the longest track record in truck routing are the ones putting no percentage on the page.

What Is Missing Behind Every One of Those Numbers

Take the best-documented case on the list. Wise Systems publishes a case study titled "Cut Fuel Costs 20%" about Second Harvest Food Bank, with the transportation manager named and quoted, and a stat block reading "20% Reduction in miles traveled and fuel consumption". It is more than most vendors offer. The page still does not say what the fuel use was before, over what period the comparison runs, or whether the routes carried the same volume on both sides of it. The full study sits behind a lead form.

Route4Me's 7% is attributed to a named person at a named company, Frank Del Campo of Matthews Aurora Funeral Solutions. Same gap: no before, no period, no method.

PODFather goes one further and publishes two different numbers for the same customer. Its homepage stat block reads "50,000 / Annual mileage saving / Shawston". Its own Shawston case page reads "30,000 / Miles saved each year". Both pages were live on 17 September 2026. We are not saying either figure is wrong. We are saying that a figure which changes by 20,000 miles between two pages of the same site cannot carry a purchase decision.

None of this is unusual, and none of it makes the vendors liars. Marketing pages are written to sell, and a percentage with a customer name attached is already better practice than a percentage without one. The point is narrower: these numbers are not measurements you can inherit.

What the Software Actually Changes on the Road

Strip the percentages and there is a real mechanism underneath, and it is the same one on every platform in the table.

Optimization software solves the stop-sequencing problem properly. A dispatcher ordering 15 stops by hand is doing hard combinatorial arithmetic under time pressure, and the routes that come out of it tend to crisscross the same few miles. Live traffic data reroutes a truck around a jam instead of leaving it idling in one. Truck-legal routing keeps a vehicle off roads its height, weight or hazmat class does not belong on, which prevents the wrong turn and the backtrack that follows it. Hours-of-service-aware planning builds the route around the clock the driver is actually running.

Every one of those removes miles or removes stopped time. How many, on your operation, is exactly the number nobody in the table can tell you.

How to Get a Number That Applies to Your Fleet

Measure before you switch. Pull four weeks of total miles and total gallons, and divide both by stops completed, not by days. Miles per stop and gallons per stop are the pair that survives a change in volume; total fuel spend does not, because a busier month looks like a worse result.

Then run the software for four weeks and divide the same way. If your stop count moves by more than a fifth between the two periods, extend the window rather than trusting the comparison. Two fleets, two seasons and two dispatchers are enough to move a routing result by more than any of the percentages in the table above.

And when a vendor quotes you a number, ask the three questions their websites do not answer: measured against what baseline, over what period, and by which method. The answer tells you as much about the vendor as the number does.

Running route optimization software already, and did you measure the before?

Almost nobody publishes the baseline, which is why the next carrier choosing between two platforms is reading marketing percentages instead of results.

Rate your routing platform on TruckMyApps →

FAQ

How much does route optimization software save on fuel?

Nobody publishes a figure you can rely on. Of the 17 platforms we checked on 17 September 2026, six publish a number about fuel or miles, ranging from 7% to 45%, and none of the six publishes the baseline, the period or the method behind it. The honest answer is that the saving depends mostly on how inefficient the current routing is, and that the only number that applies to your trucks is one you measure yourself.

Which platforms publish a fuel number at all?

Six of the seventeen: PODFather, Route4Me, Wise Systems, Routal, Onfleet and OptimoRoute. Four of those six put a named customer beside it. Four other platforms, including Trimble and Tookan, publish no savings percentage anywhere on the pages we read.

Is route optimization software worth it for a small fleet?

It depends on stops per day, not on truck count. The platforms in the table are built around multi-stop routing, so the value scales with how many stops a vehicle makes and how much the sequence changes day to day. A truck running a fixed route with three stops has little for an optimizer to solve; the same truck running 20 variable stops has a lot.

What is the difference between GPS tracking and route optimization software?

Tracking tells you where a vehicle is now. Optimization decides where it should go next and in what order. Several products in the table do both, which is why the categories blur in marketing copy, but they answer different questions and are worth pricing separately.

Does route optimization work for long-haul, or only for local delivery?

The platforms in this table are built primarily for multi-stop local and regional work. Long-haul lane planning is a different problem, handled by TMS and truck navigation products, several of which sit in the Tracking and Visibility category alongside them.