A Netpas alternative, and where Netpas is still better

Netpas Distance is a ready-made table of distances from port to port, with a set of named routing points. The Netpas estimator is a voyage calculator that uses this table. Seafuture Inc. sells it from Seoul. Most of the products are Windows desktop software, with a phone app for distances. Of the desktop products, only Tramper Business has a cloud server.

The distance table is the core of the company. People have decided, route by route, which way a ship really goes: near the coast or further out, which side of a sandbank, which of two straits in which season. That work is expensive and cannot be taken from a map. The calculator is the easy part to copy.

A Netpas licence gives 150 distance queries a day and 30 weather queries a day, for the term of the licence. Their order page does not sell more of either, so you cannot go over that limit.

Neptune Atlas has no limit on distances. There is no daily quota on the voyage router, because we do not sell distances as the product. We calculate each route over a map of sea depths, in cells of about three miles, built from depth measurements one arc minute apart. We do not look it up in a table. So you can enter any two points on Earth, by coordinates, and neither has to be a port someone has already added.

To see a route before you sign up, the free sea distance calculator uses the same router between any two of about 1,600 ports. It needs no account and answers up to 100 routes a day for one visitor.

Five things, and Netpas is clearly better at each one. If one of them is what your desk needs most, choose Netpas.

Their distance table is checked by people. Ours is calculated. A route calculated from sea depths knows where a ship can go. It does not know which way a captain really takes a ship. Our own accuracy test checks five routes against the common commercial tables and requires them to be within eight per cent. Eight per cent is an allowed margin, not a match: it is wide enough to allow for normal map error and tight enough to catch a route going the wrong way round a continent. If you need the exact distance that the parties to a charterparty (the charter contract) will use in a dispute, you need a table, and Netpas sells one.

They sell a live weather forecast for the route, and we do not. Neptune Atlas uses standard weather margins by ocean and season, applied to the ship's speed rather than to time. That is a planning rule, not a forecast. We chose not to build forecasts, and it remains a gap.

Their Vessel Manager stores your own ships' speed and fuel use. Ours estimates these by size class and shows this on every row that uses the estimate. If your desk has entered its own ships, Netpas is better here, and no data source sells the real figures for us to use.

Their estimate sheet converts currency and ours does not. Everything here is in US dollars. That is a problem for port costs and agency fees if your costs are not in dollars.

A price that needs no approval. At 190 to 319 dollars a year, a broker can simply pay for Netpas without asking a manager. Netpas has also been in shipping much longer than we have. People already trust it and already have it installed. New features from us do not change that.

One smaller point: our North American emission control area boundaries are accurate to about thirty miles, where the regulation gives a distance from the coast rather than an exact line. The enclosed seas are exact, because there the regulation gives the line and we copied it.

Netpas is cheaper. These are their published prices per user, billed yearly in advance, as read on 25 August 2026.

Every figure above is from netpas.net/order, read on 25 August 2026.

Netpas Estimator, at $319 a year, is a Windows calculator for one person with a daily limit. The closest Neptune Atlas plan is Chartering, which costs about three times as much. It has the estimator plus the register of the world's ships, the position list, the cargo enquiries, the fixture records, laytime from a signed statement of facts, three connected mailboxes per broker, and unlimited distances. Whether that is worth the difference depends on whether you need only a calculator or a tool for the whole desk.

If you only need a distance and a freight number, Netpas is the better buy. Our plans and what each one includes are published in full, and you can try the calculations for free first: the TCE calculator and the laytime calculator need no account.

Also compared: AXSMarine, ShipNext and the best ship chartering software for small desks.