Open-Source vs Commercial Route Optimization Software: What You Actually Get

The open-source routing world is mature. Road-network routing engines built on OpenStreetMap data compute drive times and turn-by-turn routes for any pair of points; vehicle routing solvers built on top of them take a set of stops, vehicles and constraints and return optimized routes; and general-purpose optimization libraries let a developer model almost any rule a fleet can describe. The solvers are used in production by real logistics companies, and a developer can have a forty-stop problem optimized on a laptop in an afternoon. The licence cost is zero.

Everything around the solver. Map data has to be downloaded, kept current and hosted; the engine has to run on a server someone maintains; historical and live traffic is not in the free data, so drive times are averages. There is no dispatcher screen, no driver app that shows the next stop and captures proof of delivery, no customer notification, no live view of where the vans are, and no way to re-sequence the afternoon when a truck breaks down, because the solver does not know where the trucks are. Each of those is a project, and the fleet is now a software company with a routing product to maintain and a developer it cannot lose.

For a fleet with an engineering team and an unusual problem — a rule no product supports, a scale where per-vehicle licensing hurts — building on open source is the right call. For most fleets of ten to two hundred vehicles, the licence saved is smaller than the first year of development.

A commercial routing product, and especially one on the Geotab Marketplace, arrives with the pieces the fleet would otherwise build: maintained maps with traffic, the dispatcher's planning screen, the driver app with proof of delivery, customer ETAs, and — the part that matters most — a live connection to the vehicles. The optimizer knows where every van is, how long stops really take from the geofence data, and can replan mid-day. It is priced per vehicle per month, the vendor keeps it running, and the fleet's developer, if it has one, spends their time on integrations with the order system rather than on routing.

Some fleets do both: a Marketplace routing tool for daily dispatch, and an open-source solver for the strategic questions — territory design, depot location, fleet sizing — that are run a few times a year by an analyst rather than every morning by a dispatcher. The telematics data feeds both. High Point GPS integrates commercial routing tools with MyGeotab and builds custom add-ins for fleets whose routing needs sit outside what the products offer.