Comparisons
Trackberry, compared
Every comparison we publish, including the ones we lose. Each page cites the other company’s own site with the date we read it, and each says plainly where they are the better buy. A comparison page nobody would send to the vendor it compares against is a liability.
One thing to keep in mind across all of them: the first month is free and €15 per container after that, billed on containers that ship, not on seats. Most of the companies below do not publish a price at all, so that is the one line of every comparison you can check before you talk to anybody.
What you are probably doing now
The incumbents. Free, already working, and the ones we replace.
- A spreadsheet The real incumbent. 29% of packing lists do not reconcile against their own box count.
- Carrier tracking portals Maersk, MSC, CMA CGM and Hapag-Lloyd all track free. The cost is stitching four together.
- Your forwarder’s system CargoWise and Descartes run your forwarder’s business. You are on the other side of the shipment.
Container visibility platforms
The names a prospect has heard of, and the ones they search for.
- SeaRates Free per-container lookup, and a front door to a freight marketplace.
- Beacon Makes the spreadsheet update itself. We take the typing out of what fills it.
- Terminal49 The closest head-to-head here, built around US lanes and demurrage.
- project44 Multimodal decision intelligence for a thousand enterprise brands.
- FourKites Fortune 500 supply chain orchestration. They do publish document processing.
- Shippeo The European equivalent, grown up on road freight.
- Gnosis Freight Container lifecycle management, including payments we do not touch.
- Vizion A tracking API. We are the application at the other end of it.
Inside the produce trade
The few built for this industry, and mostly for the other side of it.
Adjacent, and worth knowing about
They solve a neighboring problem well enough that people ask about them.
Who we do not compare against
The tracking providers our own product is built on never appear here. Publishing a comparison against a company you buy from puts you on both sides of the same deal. The list of carriers we can follow is on the carriers page, which is the part that affects you anyway.
If you would rather understand the mechanics than the market, the container tracking guide explains where the data comes from and why the map is often wrong, and the glossary covers the vocabulary every vendor on this page uses differently. A buyer who knows which source a fact came from judges all of us better, ourselves included.
We also leave out companies too small for the attention to be fair. A comparison page is cheap to publish and expensive to retract, and pointing one at a startup with no customers would only advertise them at our own expense.
Questions buyers ask
- Why publish pages where somebody else wins?
- Because readers assume a comparison written by a vendor is rigged, and they look for the tell. Concede the cases where the other product is better and the rest of the page becomes believable. It is also the cheapest qualification we have: somebody who recognizes themselves in one of those lists was never going to buy, and would otherwise have spent an hour of both our time finding that out.
- What does Trackberry cost?
- The first month is free, with no card and no commitment, and €15 per container after that. You pay for containers that ship rather than for seats, so a quiet month is a cheap one. ERP integration is separate and quoted against the system you already run. All prices exclude VAT. Almost nobody else on this page publishes a number at all, which is worth noticing while you are comparing.
- How do you decide who to compare against?
- Two tests. Would a produce importer plausibly have both on a shortlist, or search for the other by name? And can every claim be carried back to something that company publishes about itself? If a page cannot pass the second test it does not get written.
- How current are these?
- Each page shows the date its sources were read, at the foot of the page. These companies reposition, and a comparison that has gone stale argues against a product that no longer exists, which is worse than no page at all. If something here is out of date, tell us and we will fix it.
- Do you compare against your own suppliers?
- Never. The tracking providers behind our own product do not appear on any of these pages, and a test in the codebase fails the build if one ever does.
Or skip the reading
Twenty minutes with your own container numbers and one supplier packing list answers most of what these pages cover, and faster.