Comparison
Carrier tracking portals, and what they leave you doing
Maersk, MSC, CMA CGM and Hapag-Lloyd all publish free container tracking, and all of them are good at it. The problem is not any one portal. It is that you have four of them and one book of cargo.
Free while in beta, then €10 a container · No commitment · No card required
- Carriers supported
- 435
- Shipments tracked
- 249
- Built for
- Fresh produce
Each portal is right about its own containers
Every major line publishes tracking on its own site, free and without an account: type a container or bill of lading number and you get that line's view of that box. It is authoritative — the carrier is the party that did the thing — and for one container it is as good an answer as exists.
The arithmetic is what hurts. An importer running a Peruvian avocado programme and a South African citrus one is rarely on a single line, and the mix changes every season. Four portals means four logins, four vocabularies for the same milestone, four places that do not know about each other, and a spreadsheet in the middle doing the reconciliation by hand.
And a portal is a place you go, not something that tells you. Nothing on a carrier's site will mention that a booking was rolled — it shows up as an absence, a vessel that sailed without your box on it, and only if you happen to look.
Four portals against one book
| The job | Carrier portals | Trackberry |
|---|---|---|
| One container, one carrier | Excellent, free, and the authoritative source. | The same milestones, from the same carriers. |
| Forty containers, four carriers | Four tabs and a spreadsheet keeping score. | One list, one vocabulary for the same event. |
| Finding out something changed | Next time you look. | An alert when the ETA drifts, the arrival is overdue, or tracking goes quiet. |
| A booking that was rolled | Shows as an absence. Nothing announces it. | A vessel that sailed with no load event for your box is the signal, and it is surfaced. |
| The supplier's paperwork | Not there. It never reaches the carrier. | Read out of your inbox and filed against the container. |
| Changing carrier next season | A new portal, and the old spreadsheet columns stop matching. | Nothing changes. It is your book, not theirs. |
When the carrier's own portal is all you need
Genuinely often — and it costs nothing, which is hard to argue with.
- You ship with one carrier and expect to keep doing so.
- You are checking a single container, once. That is what a portal is for and it is free.
- You need the carrier's own authoritative record for a dispute with that carrier.
- Your volume is low enough that four tabs is a minute a day rather than an hour a week.
- Nobody on your team is retyping packing lists, so the documents half does not apply.
What it costs
The portals are genuinely free. That is the strongest thing about them.
Carrier portals
Free
Every major line publishes container tracking on its own site at no charge and without an account. There is no bill to compare — the cost is the time spent stitching four of them together, which does not appear on any invoice.
Trackberry
Free in beta, then €10 / container
No card and no commitment while we are in beta. €10 per container once the beta ends — you pay for containers that ship, not for seats or a monthly subscription. ERP integration is a one-off from €2,000 plus maintenance from €50 a month, quoted against the system you already run. All prices exclude VAT.
Questions buyers ask
- The carrier portals are free. Why pay for anything?
- You should use them, and most of our customers still do for one-off lookups. The cost is not the portal, it is the stitching: one login per carrier, a different word for the same milestone on each, and a spreadsheet in the middle keeping score.
- How many carriers does a produce importer actually use?
- Usually more than one and rarely more than five, and the mix changes with the season — a Peruvian programme and a South African one are seldom on the same line. Every switch adds a portal and takes none away.
- Is your tracking data better than the carrier's?
- It largely is the carrier's. Milestones come from the lines through our providers, so on a single container a portal is as authoritative as we are — often more current. What a portal cannot do is show you the other thirty-nine boxes, or notice that one of them has gone quiet.
- What about the documents?
- No carrier portal has them, because your supplier's packing list and phytosanitary certificate never go near the carrier. They arrive in your inbox from the grower, which is where that half of the job lives.
See every comparison — including the ones where somebody else is the better buy.
Sources
Every claim on this page about another company comes from what that company publishes about itself, and each is dated. If something here is out of date or wrong, tell us at hello@trackberry.com and we will correct it.
- Maersk — track your shipment — checked
- MSC — track a shipment — checked
- CMA CGM — track a shipment — checked
- Hapag-Lloyd — track by container — checked
Keep the portals. Lose the stitching.
Bring container numbers from two different lines and see them in one list, with the documents that came with them.