Comparison
A SeaRates alternative for fresh produce importers
SeaRates does one thing well and gives it away: type in a container number, see where the box is. If that is all you need, keep using it. This page is for the importer who has noticed that knowing where the box is turns out to be the small part of the job.
Free while in beta, then €10 a container · No commitment · No card required
- Carriers supported
- 435
- Shipments tracked
- 249
- Built for
- Fresh produce
What SeaRates gives you
Their tracking system covers sea, air, rail and parcel in one place. You can start from a bill of lading, a container number or a booking number. It draws the position on an interactive world map using AIS data, shows shipment history including ETAs, customs clearance, delays and transshipments, and sends notifications when a status changes. There is a published pricing page for the tracking product, and premium functionality comes free if you book your freight through them.
That last detail is the one worth understanding, because it explains the whole product. The tracking is excellent as a free front door to a freight marketplace. It exists to bring you into a booking flow, and it is designed for the enormous population of people who need to look up one shipment — a consignee waiting on a delivery, somebody checking a supplier's claim, an importer with three boxes a year.
If you are that person, you do not have a problem to solve. Genuinely: bookmark it and stop reading.
What a tracking lookup leaves you doing by hand
A produce importer's week is not spent wondering where one container is. It is spent on three things a lookup tool does not reach.
The paperwork nobody else will read. Every container arrives with a packing list formatted however that grower formats packing lists, a bill of lading, a phytosanitary certificate and often an EUR1. Those arrive by email from your supplier, not from any carrier, and a tracking tool has no reason to want them. Somebody on your team is retyping them.
Forty boxes, not one. The question is never "where is this container" — it is "which of these forty is the one to do something about today". That means reading arrivals against free time, against what you sold forward, and against the export season the fruit left in. A per-container lookup answers a question you did not ask.
The map is the least reliable thing on the page. Not a criticism of any one product — it is how the data works. AIS reports the vessel, not your container, so the dot stays confidently wrong for as long as your box sits on a quay after transshipment. We wrote up why tracking positions are wrong so you can judge any vendor's map, ours included.
When a free tracking tool is the right answer
This is most people, and saying so costs us nothing we were going to get anyway.
- You are tracking a handful of containers a year — a free lookup and a spreadsheet is the correct amount of tooling.
- You want a rate quote or to book freight. SeaRates is a marketplace; we do not book, quote or negotiate anything.
- You need air, rail or parcel visibility as your main use case rather than ocean reefers.
- You are a consignee waiting on one delivery, not the company buying the cargo.
- Nobody on your team is retyping supplier documents, because that is the half we exist for.
What to look for in an alternative
Written as evaluation criteria rather than as our feature list, because you should hold us to these too.
Does it read the supplier documents?
Packing lists, certificates and invoices arrive from growers in every format there is. If a tool cannot take them out of your inbox and file them against the container, the retyping stays. Trackberry does this, and shows every extracted value next to the document it came from so you can check it.
Does it show you your whole book at once?
Not one container per lookup. Every shipment, across every carrier and forwarder, with one vocabulary for the same milestone.
Is it honest about where positions come from?
Ask any vendor whether the dot is a carrier milestone or an AIS vessel fix, and how old it is. A product that blends both into one confident line is telling you less than it appears to.
Does it know what a reefer is?
Setpoint, the stages where a cold chain breaks, and the arrival inspection kept with the shipment for when a claim follows. Generic tracking treats a reefer as a container that happens to be cold.
Does the record belong to you?
If a claim needs assembling months later, the documents and timestamps should be in your account — not in a portal belonging to a company whose plans you do not control.
Can you talk to someone who can change it?
We are small and in beta. The trade-off is honest in both directions: a young product, and direct access to the people building it.
What it costs
Both free at the point of use, for different reasons — and only one of them says what happens after that.
SeaRates
Free with a booking
Premium tracking comes free if you book your freight through them — the tool is a front door to a freight marketplace. A pricing page for the tracking system exists; it published no figures we could read on the date below.
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
- Is SeaRates any good?
- For what it is, yes. It tracks across sea, air, rail and parcel, takes a bill of lading, container or booking number, draws the position on a map from AIS and sends notifications on status changes. For looking up where one box is, that is a genuinely useful free tool and this page is not going to pretend otherwise.
- Then why would I need anything else?
- Because looking up where a box is was never the expensive part of your week. The expensive part is the packing list somebody retypes, the certificate nobody can find, and working out which of forty containers is the one to worry about today. A tracking lookup does not touch any of that.
- Is Trackberry free like SeaRates?
- Free while in beta, with no card and no commitment, and €10 a container after that. The honest difference is that SeaRates is free as a front door to a freight marketplace, and we are free because we are early. Neither is charity and it is worth knowing which is which.
- Can I just use both?
- Plenty of people will, and that is a reasonable answer. Use a free lookup for a one-off box; use something that reads your documents and watches your whole book when the volume makes retyping expensive. The question is not which tool is better, it is which job you are trying to stop doing.
- I only move a few containers a year. What should I use?
- A free tracking tool and a spreadsheet, honestly. The case for us starts when the documents become the bottleneck, and at low volume they do not. We would rather say that than sell you something you will not use.
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.
- SeaRates — multimodal tracking system overview — checked
- SeaRates — container tracking — checked
- SeaRates — tracking system pricing — checked
Bring twenty container numbers and one packing list
That is the comparison that actually settles it: your whole book in one view, and your worst-formatted supplier file read back against the container it belongs to.