The real incumbent is Excel and Outlook
A desk evaluating one of the large chartering platforms has a budget, an ops team and a procurement process. A desk that buys Atlas is losing circulars in a mailbox and rebuilding the same position list every Monday. Those are different purchases, and pretending otherwise wastes everybody's afternoon. If you already run a full trading and operations platform and it works, this is not an upgrade.
What to actually compare on
Three things separate these products in practice, and none of them appears on a feature grid. Whether the fleet data comes with the software or has to be bought and loaded separately. Whether the thing you are pricing is a distance table, an estimate or a whole desk. And what happens to your fixture book if you stop paying. Every page below is written to answer those for one named alternative.
The comparisons
- Against Veson NauticalThe enterprise standard for trading and operations. What it does that this does not, and the size of desk where that stops being worth the difference.
- Against NetpasNetpas sells a distance table, and a distance table is one input to an estimate rather than an estimator. Where the two actually overlap.
There is also a guide to what chartering software costs, with the published figures that exist and a note on where the rest come from.