Neptune Atlas

Buying

Best ship chartering software for small desks

There is no best ship chartering software in general. There is the tool that fits the work a desk does and the money it has. This guide is for a desk of one to ten brokers: what that desk needs, the products it can realistically buy, what each one publishes as a price, and where Neptune Atlas fits. We make Neptune Atlas, so read that section knowing who wrote it.

What a small desk needs

Strip away the feature lists and a small chartering desk does the same six things every week.

Most small desks cover these today with Outlook, Excel and a free tracking site. That is the real competitor for every product below, and it is a reasonable choice until the spreadsheet stops being trusted.

The options, and what they publish

Prices below are as published on 2 October 2026, read from each vendor's own site unless the row says otherwise. Check them before relying on them.

ProductWhat it isPublished price
Excel and OutlookA mailbox and a spreadsheetAlready paid for
NetpasDistance table, voyage estimator and a mail analyser, mostly Windows desktop software$190 to $1,262 per user per year; the mail analyser (MMA) is $635
ShipNextA marketplace with cargo to ship matching, position imports, a freight calculator and e-mail processingFree Limited Access; Trading Desk €799 a year; Professional €999 a year
SednaA shared e-mail platform for shipping teamsNone on its own site; listed on Capterra at £75 per user per month
ShipAtlas (Maritime Optima)AIS ship tracking with a sea route calculatorFree for 10 views; Standard €10 to €16 a month; Premium €65 to €80 a month
Shipfix (Veson)E-mail intelligence and market screens for brokersNot published; demo
KplerMarket data, with Kpler Inbox for e-mailNot published; demo
Signal Ocean and AXSMarineChartering platforms with AIS data and e-mail parsing; Signal Ocean announced it was buying AXSMarine in January 2026Not published
Neptune AtlasPositions, cargo enquiries, the world fleet register, fixtures, laytime and an estimatorFree account; Desk $59.99, Chartering $99.99, Fleet $149.99 a month for the first broker

Netpas, for distance and freight

Netpas is the cheapest serious tool in this market and publishes every price. Distance is $190 per user per year and the Estimator is $319, each with a cap of 150 distance queries a day. If what the desk needs is a distance and a freight number, Netpas is hard to beat on price. It is not a place to keep positions, cargoes and fixtures together, and most of the range runs as Windows desktop software. There is a longer comparison with Netpas on this site.

ShipNext, for a free start on a marketplace

ShipNext is a marketplace first. Its free Limited Access plan lets a desk try the board, and the paid plans add matching, position imports and a freight calculator (Trading Desk, €799 a year) and real-time e-mail processing (Professional, €999 a year). It suits a desk that wants to post and find cargo and tonnage in a shared market. See ShipNext compared.

Sedna, if the problem is the mailbox

Sedna is an e-mail platform built for shipping teams: shared inboxes, tagging and search over a high volume of mail. Sedna's site does not publish a price; Capterra lists it at £75 per user per month. It is a good answer when the problem is that nobody can find anything in the inbox. It is not a vessel register or a fixture book.

ShipAtlas and the free trackers, for a map

ShipAtlas, VesselFinder and MarineTraffic all show where a ship is from AIS. ShipAtlas and VesselFinder both publish a free tier, and a desk should use one. A map answers where a ship was a few hours ago. It does not say when she is open, what she has been offered or who to write to, which is why tracking sits beside chartering software rather than replacing it.

Shipfix, Kpler, Signal Ocean and AXSMarine, for bigger desks

These are strong products and none of them publishes a price. Shipfix says it processes more than 400,000 e-mails a day; Kpler and Signal Ocean bring market data built on AIS; AXSMarine sells dry bulk, tanker and container tools with its own e-mail reader. The buying process is a demonstration and a quote. Two public records give a sense of scale: a US Department of State award renewed a ten user Kpler subscription for 250,660 dollars for one year, and AXSMarine's published terms raise the fee by 4% at each renewal. For a desk of two, the price and the sales process usually decide the question before features do. See AXSMarine compared.

Where Neptune Atlas fits

Neptune Atlas is built for the small desk described at the top. It reads circulars and cargo enquiries from the mailbox the desk already uses, keeps them against the world fleet register with the four ownership roles, and records fixtures in a shared book. Every price is published.

Every paid plan starts with 7 free days. Where it is weaker, plainly: it is a young product without a long list of reference customers; it has no accounting, no sale and purchase module and no implementation team; its distances are computed rather than taken from a curated table; and it does not sell live weather routing. A desk that needs those should look elsewhere first.

How to choose

Whatever the shortlist, test two products for a week on your own circulars rather than on a demonstration. The one the desk still opens on Friday is the answer. For what this software costs across the whole market, including the enterprise end, see what ship chartering software costs.

References

What ship chartering software costsGovernment contract records put real numbers against products whose vendors will not quote one in public. Ship broker software vs spreadsheetsMost broking desks run on Excel and e-mail, and for a while that is the right answer. What breaks, in what order, and the point at which it stops being the right answer. Position list vs AIS vs port line-upThree things routinely confused in chartering: where a ship is, when she is free next, and what the port authority expects at the berth. What a ship broker doesThe job itself: two lists nobody publishes, a market with no screen, and a commission earned only when a deal concludes.

Neptune Atlas

Neptune Atlas keeps positions, cargo enquiries, the world fleet register and the fixture book in one place, at a published price. Every paid plan starts with 7 free days. A card is needed to start them, and cancelling before they end costs nothing.

Try 7 days free Chartering software for a small broking desk What each plan includes