Best Freight Quoting Software: 15 Tools Ranked by Seat

The best freight quoting software depends on which seat you occupy in the freight market, because "quoting freight" describes five different jobs done by five different kinds of software.

For shippers buying domestic truckload and LTL, Emerge is the best freight quoting software for that seat. For LTL-only operations, MyCarrier. For simple multi-mode rate comparison, Freightview. For one-off online quotes, Freightquote. For parcel, Shippo. For international ocean and air, Freightos. For rate intelligence, DAT and SMC3. Brokers should evaluate Greenscreens.ai (now part of Triumph Networks) and Tai TMS. Freight forwarders should evaluate Wisor.ai, Freightify, GoFreight, Magaya, and CargoWise.

If you buy freight rather than sell it, and your quotes still live in email threads and spreadsheet tabs, start at section 1.

Key Takeaways

• "Freight quoting software" is not one category. It is five: shipper procurement platforms, LTL rate shoppers, broker pricing engines, forwarder rate management systems, and parcel rate shoppers. Most buying mistakes in this category are category mistakes, not vendor mistakes.
• Two structural changes in 2025 and 2026 broke manual quoting. The NMFC moved to density-based classification on July 19, 2025, which means an LTL quote can no longer be produced from a commodity description alone. And dry van spot rates topped contract rates in June 2026 for the first time since February 2022, which means stale rate sheets are now systematically wrong in the expensive direction.
• Several tools here let you start without a contract. MyCarrier, Shippo, and Freightos all have free entry points. Emerge is usage-based: what you pay scales with the freight you actually move, not with a seat licence.
• Published pricing is rare. Of the 15 tools here, only a handful publish a number. We list every one we could verify, and say plainly when a vendor will not.
• The savings are measurable and benchmark-relative. Across Emerge's Dynamic Book It Now users, 85% secured rates below market, averaging 8.5% below, with the best lanes running 23% below.
• Emerge is the highest-rated tool on this list on G2, at 5.0 out of 5. Every rating in the comparison table was pulled from G2 in August 2026, and the two tools with no rating on any review platform are marked as such rather than quietly omitted.

A Disclosure, Because Every Other List Skips This

I work at Emerge. Emerge is number one on this list. You should weigh that accordingly.

What I can offer in exchange is a list that is honest about fit. Ten of the 15 tools below are not for shippers at all, and I say so on every single one. Every tool gets real cons, not softened ones. Every price is either a verified published figure or explicitly marked as unpublished, because "affordable" and "flexible pricing" are not data.

I also checked the competition. Of the pages currently ranking for this query, every single one ranks its own product first, and not one of them discloses it. Two of them promise pricing in a section header and then publish no numbers at all. One is a product homepage that names no tools whatsoever.

How this list was built

1. Category first. Every tool was assigned to a seat (shipper, broker, forwarder, parcel, rate data) before it was ranked. Tools are compared only against others in the same seat.
2. Verified against vendor sources. Every price, feature, and capability claim was checked against the vendor's own site or documentation in August 2026.
3. Third-party ratings where they exist. Every G2 star rating was pulled in August 2026 and is timestamped in the comparison table. Where a vendor has no rating on G2 or Capterra, the table says "No rating" rather than quietly dropping the vendor or leaving the cell blank. Where a listing moved after an acquisition, that is noted.
4. Market facts sourced to primary research. Rate data comes from DAT, logistics cost data from CSCMP, classification changes from NMFTA, and enforcement data from the Federal Register. Sources are linked at the bottom.
5. No pay-for-placement. No vendor on this list paid to be here, and no vendor was contacted for inclusion.

First, Which Product Are You Actually Shopping For?

This is the section every competing article skips, and it is the reason so many freight teams waste a quarter demoing the wrong software.

The phrase "freight quoting software" is used to describe five genuinely different products:

The single most useful rule: software built for the party selling you capacity is not software for the party buying it. A shipper who buys a forwarder RMS has bought a tool designed to help someone quote them. It happens constantly, and it happens because lists like this one usually blend all five categories without labeling them.

If you are a shipper and you want the fuller version of this argument, we wrote it up separately in The True Cost of Quoting Freight in Spreadsheets and Emails.

What Changed That Broke Spreadsheet Quoting

Most roundups treat freight quoting as a timeless convenience problem. It is not. Three specific things changed between mid-2025 and mid-2026 that made manual quoting materially more expensive.

1. LTL classification went density-based

On July 19, 2025, the National Motor Freight Traffic Association's Docket 2025-1 shifted the NMFC from commodity-based to density-based classification. Class is now determined primarily by pounds per cubic foot. Roughly 2,000 commodity listings were consolidated, and the density scale expanded to 13 subprovisions, adding Class 50 and Class 55.

Why this matters for quoting: you can no longer produce an accurate LTL quote from a commodity description. Dimensions became a mandatory input. Get them wrong and you get reclassified, re-rated, and charged a clerical fee. A spreadsheet does not check your density. Quoting software does.

Further cancellations and new special handling identifiers followed in Docket 2025-2 and Docket 2026-1 (February 6, 2026), so this is a moving target, not a one-time migration.

2. Spot rates passed contract rates

In June 2026, dry van spot rates topped contract rates for the first time since February 2022, per DAT Freight & Analytics. Van linehaul rose 21 cents to $2.37 per mile, a 45% year-over-year increase and the largest since June 2021. By July 2026, van spot and contract reached parity at $3.01 per mile including fuel surcharge.

As DAT's Dean Croke put it, spot rates moving ahead of contract rates has historically signaled a tightening market, and this one is capacity-driven: rates rose even as volumes declined.

Why this matters for quoting: when spot exceeds contract, every stale rate sheet in your organization is wrong in the direction that costs you money. Quoting against a number you negotiated last October is no longer conservative. It is fiction. This is exactly the scenario we cover in Spot vs. Contract Freight: Which Should You Use and When?.

3. Capacity left the market through enforcement, not economics

This is the most underreported driver of 2026 rate behavior, and the numbers are from the Federal Register, not a vendor blog.

Between January 1 and June 24, 2025, English Language Proficiency enforcement produced 7,812 violations and just 33 out-of-service orders. Between June 25, 2025 and March 19, 2026, the same enforcement produced 60,399 violations and 19,045 out-of-service orders.

That is a jump from 33 to 19,045 OOS orders in nine months. Separately, J.B. Hunt's own analysis projects that non-domiciled CDL restrictions could remove 5% to 12% of CDL holders, roughly 214,000 to 437,000 drivers, over two to three years. (That figure comes from a carrier, so weigh it accordingly; the Federal Register enforcement data does not need a caveat.)

Why this matters for quoting: capacity that exits through enforcement does not come back when rates rise. Carrier selection and coverage reliability became a quoting problem, not just a rate problem. Which is why carrier vetting and carrier scorecards belong inside your quoting workflow rather than beside it.

4. LTL general rate increases stopped being annual

Old Dominion implemented a 4.9% GRI effective November 3, 2025. ArcBest implemented 5.9% effective June 22, 2026, roughly six weeks ahead of an 11-month cadence. FreightWaves' assessment in June 2026 was blunt: LTL general rate increases are no longer an annual event.

Why this matters for quoting: rate currency is now a compounding problem. A quoting tool that refreshes rates automatically is worth more today than it was a few years ago, purely because the refresh interval shortened.

Against that backdrop, the argument for software is not "it is faster." It is that the error rate of the manual method went up while nobody was watching. Research on real-world operational spreadsheets is unambiguous here: across six field audits covering 85 spreadsheets, 94% contained errors (Panko, University of Hawaii).

The 15 Best Freight Quoting Software Tools

For shippers buying domestic freight

Shipping domestic freight and want only the shipper-side tools? We keep a narrower companion list: the 8 best freight quoting software platforms for shippers.

1. Emerge: Best overall for FTL and LTL procurement. 2. MyCarrier: Best free starting point for LTL shippers. 3. Freightview: Best simple multi-mode rate comparison. 4. Freightquote: Best instant online quoting for occasional shippers. 5. Shippo: Best for parcel and ecommerce.

For international shippers

6. Freightos: Best for importers and exporters.

For rate intelligence (any seat)

7. DAT One / DAT iQ: Best truckload rate data. 8. SMC3: Best LTL rating infrastructure.

For freight brokers

9. Greenscreens.ai (Triumph Networks): Best AI spot pricing. 10. Tai TMS: Best broker TMS with instant quoting.

For freight forwarders

11. Wisor.ai: Best AI email-to-quote automation. 12. Freightify: Best ocean rate management. 13. GoFreight: Best all-in-one forwarding platform. 14. Magaya: Best rate management with RFQ workflows. 15. CargoWise: Best enterprise global platform.

Quick Comparison Table

Emerge holds the highest G2 rating on this list at 5.0 out of 5. Ratings pulled from G2 in August 2026, except Tai TMS which is rated on Capterra because it has no comparable G2 listing. Freightquote and SMC3 have no rating on either platform. Greenscreens.ai is rated under the Triumph Networks listing following its acquisition.

Pricing Table: What These Tools Actually Cost

No competing article on this query publishes a full pricing table. Two of them have a section titled "pricing" containing no numbers. Here is every price we could verify from a vendor's own published materials in August 2026.

Sanity check on the unpublished half. For reference on what "custom" tends to mean at the platform end of this market, published industry analysis puts mid-market freight management platforms in the $100 to $400 per user per month range and enterprise platforms at $500 to $2,000+ per user per month, with enterprise implementations running $50,000 to $100,000 and up. Separately, ARC Advisory Group research puts a moderately complex TMS implementation at four to five months, with cloud deployments at three to six months and complex on-premise migrations at nine to twelve months.

That gap, between a lightweight usage-based platform and a six-figure, year-long implementation, is the entire argument for the light TMS category.

The 15 Tools, Reviewed

For Shippers Buying Domestic Freight

1. Emerge

Best for: Small and mid-market shippers buying domestic truckload and LTL who are still running quotes through email and spreadsheets, or who want spot and contract procurement in one workflow.

Why it ranks first for shippers. Most quoting tools return a number. Emerge returns the number plus the context that tells you whether to accept it, which is the part that changes what you pay.

One load entry reaches your incumbent carriers, your brokers, and a marketplace of 45,000+ pre-vetted asset-based carriers simultaneously. Every quote that comes back is scored against lane-specific market data through Rate Pulse spot benchmarking, which blends third-party market data, live shipper rates, and your own historical performance. You know whether a rate is good before you award it, not after the invoice arrives.

It also covers the whole procurement motion rather than one slice of it: daily spot quoting and quote execution, annual RFPs, mini bids, tendering, tracking and visibility, and carrier scorecards. Dynamic Book It Now auto-books within rate parameters you set, so routine loads stop consuming quoting time entirely. And in August 2026 we brought LTL into the same screen as truckload, with your own carriers and brokers alongside marketplace capacity.

The measurable part. Across shippers using Dynamic Book It Now, 85% secured rates below market, averaging 8.5% below market, with the best lanes running 23% below. Golden State Foods reported an 18% reduction in transportation costs. Dollar Tree forecast close to $6 million in year-over-year savings. Pepsi Bottling Ventures compressed bid events from months to hours while tripling the number of carriers invited, awarding $3.9M in freight across 355 primary and 172 backup carriers in 60 days. The full write-ups are in Resources.

Pros

• Spot, contract RFPs, and mini bids in one workflow, not three tools
• Lane-level market benchmarking attached to every quote
• Runs your existing carriers alongside marketplace capacity, so nothing is ripped out
• Dynamic Book It Now removes routine loads from the quoting queue entirely
• Carrier scorecards for acceptance, response, and on-time performance
• Connects to existing TMS platforms including Oracle OTM, MercuryGate, e2open, Princeton TMX, and IntelliTrans
• Usage-based pricing that scales with the freight you move, not per-seat licences
• Highest-rated platform on this list at 5.0 out of 5 on G2

Cons

• Built for US domestic freight. Global ocean and air networks need a forwarder platform or enterprise TMS instead.
• Deepest value shows up for truckload-heavy and LTL shippers. Parcel is not the focus.
• Not the tool for parcel-only or international-only programs, which need a dedicated rate shopper or forwarder platform.

Pricing: Usage-based. What you pay scales with the freight you actually move, not with how many people you give access to. Licensing ProcureOS to run procurement across your own carrier base is priced separately. See pricing.

2. MyCarrier

Best for: Small and mid-size shippers whose freight is predominantly LTL and who quote the same carrier group daily.

LTL quoting is its own discipline and MyCarrier does one thing well: it connects SMB shippers directly to their own LTL carriers for live rates in a single screen, then handles dispatch, BOLs, PRO numbers, and labels automatically. The NMFC freight class verification built into quoting is the quiet standout, and it became substantially more valuable after the July 2025 density-based reclassification, because it prevents the reclass surprises that wreck LTL invoices.

Pros

• Real-time carrier-direct LTL rates in one view
• Free to sign up and start booking
• Auto-generated BOLs, PROs, and labels at dispatch
• Freight class verification inside the quoting step
• Strong third-party validation at 4.7 on G2

Cons

• LTL-centered. Not built for truckload procurement, RFP events, or contract bidding.
• No market benchmarking, so you see your carriers' rates but not whether they are competitive
• Paid tier pricing is not published

Pricing: Free to sign up and start shipping. Paid plans exist, pricing unpublished.

3. Freightview

Best for: SMB shippers with a handful of carrier relationships who want comparison, booking, and basic analytics without a procurement platform or a TMS project.

Freightview solves a specific and common problem: your negotiated LTL, truckload, and parcel rates live in five different carrier portals and you keep re-keying the same shipment. It pulls your direct carrier rates and spot rates into one comparison screen, adds a freight class calculator and accessorials, and layers analytics on top so you can see what you actually pay by lane.

Pros

• Your own negotiated rates compared side by side
• Covers LTL, truckload, and parcel in one tool
• Invoice auditing and rate analytics included
• Published entry pricing and a 14-day free trial
• 4.7 on G2

Cons

• Comparison tool, not a procurement platform. No RFP events, no mini bids, no market benchmarking, no marketplace capacity.
• Volume tiers above 50 shipments/month require a custom quote
• Shows you your rates, not the market's rates, so you cannot tell whether your negotiated rate is good

Pricing: From $149/month for up to 50 shipments/month. Higher volumes custom. 14-day free trial.

4. Freightquote

Best for: Occasional shippers and small businesses who need a rate on a single shipment right now without onboarding software.

Freightquote is the instant online quoting front door for LTL and truckload, backed by C.H. Robinson's carrier network. Enter origin, destination, dimensions, and class, and you get bookable rates in seconds. No implementation, no contract, no login required to price a load.

It is included here because it is genuinely the right answer for a real segment, and because it is worth understanding what it is: a brokerage's digital quoting interface. The rates you see are that brokerage's rates. That is a perfectly good deal for a business shipping ten loads a year, and a structurally limited one for a business shipping ten loads a week.

Pros

• Genuinely instant, no onboarding or contract
• Backed by a large carrier network
• Covers both LTL and truckload
• Free to generate quotes

Cons

• Single-source pricing. You are comparing one brokerage's rates against nothing.
• No procurement workflow: no RFPs, no bidding, no award management, no scorecards
• No visibility into whether the rate is above or below market
• Not a system of record for a freight program
• No G2 or Capterra rating, so there is no independent user validation to check

Pricing: Free to quote. Not published beyond per-shipment rates.

5. Shippo

Best for: Ecommerce brands, marketplaces, and 3PLs shipping parcels who want the cheapest compliant label on every package.

If "freight" for you means parcels leaving an ecommerce warehouse, your quoting tool is a multi-carrier rate shopper. Shippo compares rates across 40+ carriers, prints labels, and tracks packages, with a clean API when you outgrow the dashboard. It is the parcel expression of the same principle this entire list rests on: compare before you buy.

Pros

• Rate comparison across 40+ carriers with discounted USPS, UPS, FedEx, and DHL rates
• A real free tier, not a trial
• Clean API for platforms and high-volume brands
• Fully transparent published pricing
• 4.2 on G2

Cons

• Parcel only. The moment your freight palletizes, you need different software.
• Per-label fee for connected carrier accounts on the free tier
• No LTL or truckload capability at all

Pricing: Starter free up to 30 labels/month. Pro from $17/month up to 10,000 labels. Premier custom.

For International Shippers

6. Freightos

Best for: Importers, exporters, and SMB shippers moving international ocean and air freight who want instant comparable quotes without a forwarder relationship on every lane.

For international freight the quoting problem inverts: you are comparing forwarders, not trucks. Freightos is the largest online marketplace for that comparison, with instant ocean and air rate comparison across thousands of forwarders, plus booking and shipment visibility. For a smaller importer it turns a week of emailing forwarders into an hour of comparison shopping.

Pros

• Instant international rate comparison, free to use
• Thousands of vetted forwarders competing on your shipment
• Booking and tracking in the same platform
• No logistics expertise required to start

Cons

• International focus. Not the tool for domestic US truckload or LTL programs.
• Marketplace model means the relationship sits with the platform more than with any one forwarder
• Lowest G2 rating on this list at 3.8

Pricing: Comparing quotes is free. You pay for the shipments you book.

For Rate Intelligence

7. DAT One / DAT iQ

Best for: Anyone in the US truckload market who needs an independent read on lane rates: carriers pricing freight, brokers sanity-checking margins, shippers benchmarking their programs.

Every good quote starts with knowing the market, and DAT is the dataset most of the US truckload industry argues from. RateView analytics show what lanes actually pay, and DAT's monthly rate reporting is the reference point cited throughout this article.

Strictly speaking DAT is rate intelligence and a load board rather than quoting software. It is included anyway, because quoting blind is how shippers overpay and carriers underprice. (If you want the distinction between load boards and marketplaces spelled out, we covered it in Trucking Load Boards vs. Freight Marketplaces.)

Pros

• The deepest spot market dataset in US truckload
• RateView and benchmark analytics by lane
• Published pricing for carrier and broker plans
• Load board network included
• 4.6 on G2

Cons

• Data and matching, not a quoting workflow. No RFQs, tendering, or award management.
• Shipper-grade analytics are custom-priced
• Benchmarking is a separate motion from quoting unless something connects the two for you

Pricing: Carrier plans published from $59 to $339/month. Broker plans tiered. Shipper solutions custom.

8. SMC3

Best for: Carriers, logistics service providers, technology teams, and high-volume LTL shippers who need rating infrastructure and APIs rather than a point-and-click screen.

Almost every LTL quote you have ever received had SMC3 somewhere underneath it. CzarLite and RateWare XL are the rating engines carriers, 3PLs, and technology providers use to calculate LTL prices at scale. If you are building or buying LTL quoting capability and need the rating layer itself, this is the industry standard, and most people quoting LTL every day have never heard its name.

Pros

• Industry-standard LTL rating engines
• Built for scale: batch rating, carrier transit data, bid tools
• Trusted across carriers, shippers, LSPs, and software vendors
• Directly relevant post-NMFC-restructure, since density rating is now the default

Cons

• Infrastructure, not an end-user application. You integrate it, you do not log into it.
• No published pricing
• Requires technical resources most shipper teams do not have
• No G2 or Capterra rating, which is typical for infrastructure products but leaves you without independent validation

Pricing: Custom.

For Freight Brokers

9. Greenscreens.ai (now part of Triumph Networks)

Best for: Freight brokerages that want dynamic, confidence-scored pricing on truckload spot freight without rebuilding their workflow.

Brokers live or die on quoting speed and margin accuracy, and Greenscreens became the reference AI for that job. It predicts buy and sell rates with confidence scores tuned to your own historical freight rather than generic market averages, and pushes guidance directly into your TMS or CRM.

Note on corporate status: Triumph Financial acquired Greenscreens.ai for $160 million, announced February 2025 and completed May 8, 2025. The G2 listing now resolves to Triumph Networks, rated 4.0, with legacy reviews inside still referencing Greenscreens. Worth knowing before you go looking for reviews.

Shippers should read this entry too, for one reason: this is what the other side of your negotiation may be using. If your broker is pricing with confidence-scored predictive models and you are pricing from a spreadsheet, that asymmetry has a cost.

Pros

• Buy and sell rate predictions tuned to your own history
• Confidence scoring on every prediction
• Integrates into existing TMS and CRM workflows
• Flat monthly fee with no transactional, user, or API fees

Cons

• Built for brokers. Not a shipper procurement tool.
• No published pricing
• Product identity is in transition post-acquisition, so evaluate the current roadmap rather than the 2024 reputation

Pricing: Flat monthly fee based on company size. Custom quote via demo.

10. Tai TMS

Best for: US freight brokerages handling FTL, LTL, and drayage that want quoting, booking, tracking, and billing in one system with heavy automation.

For a brokerage, quoting is not a feature, it is the front door of the operation. Tai builds instant quoting into a full broker TMS: market intelligence and carrier options in one view, AI that reads shipment details out of the inbox and builds the load, then automated tracking and billing behind it. The email-parsing piece alone removes the most tedious step in broker quoting.

Pros

• Instant quotes with market intelligence in the workflow
• AI email-to-shipment automation
• 500+ integrations across load boards, carriers, and accounting
• Automated tracking and invoice auditing
• 4.4 on Capterra

Cons

• Broker-side software. Shippers and forwarders are not the audience.
• Pricing requires a demo
• Full TMS scope means more implementation than a quoting-only tool

Pricing: Custom.

For Freight Forwarders

11. Wisor.ai

Best for: Freight forwarders whose sales teams quote out of email all day and lose business on response time.

Forwarder quoting has a speed problem: the request arrives by email, the rates live in ten places, and the customer books with whoever answers first. Wisor attacks exactly that, generating quotes in 10 to 30 seconds with email-to-quote automation inside Outlook and Gmail, centralized rate management, and an AI agent working the pipeline from the inbox itself.

Pros

• Quotes generated in 10 to 30 seconds
• Email-to-quote inside Outlook and Gmail, so no workflow change
• Centralized rates with TMS and ERP integration
• AI pipeline automation layered on top of quoting
• 4.7 on G2

Cons

• Forwarder-specific. Not relevant to shippers or brokers.
• No published pricing
• Quoting speed is the core value. If your bottleneck is rate coverage rather than response time, the gain is smaller than the marketing suggests.

Pricing: Custom.

12. Freightify

Best for: Freight forwarders that quote ocean freight daily and want rate aggregation plus a branded instant-quote experience for customers.

Ocean rate management is genuinely hard: FCL and LCL rates from carriers, NVOCCs, and truckers scattered across contracts and portals. Freightify aggregates them into one live database and lets forwarders produce a branded customer quote in under 30 seconds with margins applied and vessel schedules attached. The win-rate analytics by geography are a nice touch most quoting tools skip.

Pros

• Live FCL and LCL rates aggregated in one database
• Quotes with margins applied in under 30 seconds
• Branded customer-facing quoting portal
• Win-rate and quoting analytics
• 4.8 on G2, tied for the highest of the forwarder platforms here

Cons

• Ocean-forwarder focus. Not a domestic trucking tool.
• Plans are not published
• Rate aggregation only works as well as the contracts you feed it, so the value scales with how organized your rate estate already is

Pricing: Custom.

13. GoFreight

Best for: Ocean and air freight forwarders that want quoting, operations, and accounting unified rather than stitched together.

Some forwarders want quoting as part of one system rather than a bolt-on. GoFreight is that system: spot and contract rates in one interface turning into quotes instantly with vessel schedules included, alongside operations, invoicing, CRM, and tracking. Its AI reads contract rates so sales can answer pricing requests without hunting through PDFs.

Pros

• Spot and contract rates in one interface
• Instant quotes with vessel schedules attached
• Full forwarding operations behind the quote
• 4.8 on G2, tied for the highest of the forwarder platforms here

Cons

• Forwarder platform. Not for shippers buying capacity.
• Demo-based pricing
• Platform scope means implementation, not a same-week start

Pricing: Custom.

14. Magaya

Best for: Forwarders, NVOCCs, customs brokers, and 3PLs that need rate management, RFQ response, and compliance in one connected platform.

Magaya has quietly built one of the more complete rate management stacks for forwarders and 3PLs: searching and comparing rates, managing margins and allocation commitments, responding to RFQs, preparing quotes, and FMC tariff filing. It is proven in the messy multi-country reality most forwarders actually operate in.

Pros

• Rate search, comparison, and margin management
• RFQ response workflows built in
• FMC tariff filing compliance
• Warehouse, accounting, and operations in the same suite
• 4.4 on G2

Cons

• Breadth means more platform than a team that only wants quoting
• No published pricing
• User-reported friction around interface age is a recurring theme in reviews

Pricing: Custom.

15. CargoWise

Best for: Large and enterprise freight forwarders and logistics providers consolidating global operations onto one system.

At global enterprise scale, quoting stops being a standalone tool and becomes one function inside the platform running the entire forwarding operation. CargoWise is that platform for many of the world's largest logistics companies, with rate management inside a single system covering forwarding, customs, warehousing, and transport across modes and borders.

Nobody buys CargoWise to quote. Companies buy it to run everything, and quoting comes with it.

Pros

• One platform across forwarding, customs, warehouse, and transport
• Rate management within a genuinely global system
• Proven at the largest scale

Cons

• Enterprise implementation and enterprise commitment. Budget in quarters, not weeks.
• Massive overkill if quoting is your only problem
• Pricing via Value Packs, not published
• 4.3 on G2, the lowest-rated of the forwarder platforms on this list

Pricing: Custom Value Packs.

How to Choose: 4 Questions That Do the Work

1. Which seat are you in?

This one question eliminates two thirds of the list. Shippers should never end up demoing forwarder software, and vice versa. It happens constantly, because most roundups do not label the seat.

Shipper? Sections 1 through 6. Broker? Sections 9 and 10. Forwarder? Sections 11 through 15.

2. Do you need a quote, or a procurement process?

A quote is a number. A procurement process is knowing the market rate for the lane, comparing your incumbent carriers against fresh capacity, awarding, tendering, tracking, and learning from every load so the next quote is better.

If you are a shipper and your team still assembles that process manually across email and spreadsheets, closing that gap is worth more than any individual rate. That is the problem Emerge was built to solve, and the mechanics are laid out in How Is a Spot Rate Estimate Calculated? and How to Run a Freight RFP (Without It Taking Months).

A useful tiebreaker: if you find yourself running the same lane repeatedly, you have a procurement problem, not a quoting problem. Mini bids exist precisely for that middle ground between a spot quote and an annual RFP.

3. Does the tool tell you whether the number is any good?

This is the question almost nobody asks, and it separates rate shoppers from procurement platforms.

Comparison tools show you your own rates. Benchmarking tools show you the market's. Both are useful. Only the second one tells you whether the quote in front of you is a win. With spot and contract at parity in mid-2026, "cheapest of the three quotes I collected" and "good rate" have stopped being the same statement. Benchmarking your freight rates is the difference, and it is also how you prove savings to your CFO in a market where year-over-year spend comparisons flatter nobody.

4. Does the price of a quote include what happens after it?

Fuel, accessorials, detention, reclasses. And workflow: can you tender, track, and audit from the same place you quoted? A tool that saves five minutes on quoting and sends everything else back to email did not solve your problem. It moved it.

How to Get Freight Quotes: The 4 Methods

This is the practical question underneath the software question, so here it is answered directly.

There are four ways to get a freight quote.

1. Instant online quoting tools. Enter shipment details, get bookable rates in seconds. Best for occasional shipments. You are seeing one provider's rates.
2. Freight brokers. Email or call, get a quote back in minutes to hours. Best for complex, oversized, or urgent freight where expertise matters. Rate quality depends entirely on the relationship.
3. Direct carrier rates. Negotiated contract rates with carriers you have a relationship with. Best rates on consistent lanes, but limited to that carrier's coverage and requires volume to earn.
4. Freight procurement software. Collects quotes from all of the above simultaneously, benchmarks them against market, and manages the award. Best once you have enough volume that manual collection is a real cost.

What information you need to get an accurate quote

• Origin and destination ZIP codes (city and state alone will produce a rough estimate, not a quote)
• Weight in pounds
• Dimensions in inches, per pallet or piece. Since the NMFC restructure of July 2025 this is mandatory for LTL, not optional, because class is now density-based.
• Freight class or enough density information to calculate it
• Pieces and packaging type (pallets, crates, loose)
• Ready date and any delivery appointment requirements
• Accessorials: liftgate, residential, inside delivery, limited access, appointment scheduling
• Commodity description and declared value for insurance and liability
• Special handling: hazmat, temperature control, stackability

Typical turnaround

• Instant online tools: seconds
• Broker quote: 15 minutes to a few hours
• Direct carrier rate on a contracted lane: instant if it is on your rate sheet
• Manual multi-carrier email collection: hours to a full business day, which is the whole problem
• Procurement software with automated collection: minutes

When to move from manual quoting to software

The honest threshold: when the time your team spends collecting quotes exceeds the money you save by collecting them, or when you can no longer answer "was that a good rate?" for the last ten loads you booked. Whichever comes first. If you want the fuller cost breakdown, we wrote it up in The True Cost of Quoting Freight in Spreadsheets and Emails.

What Makes Good Quoting Software? A Checklist

Since "what is a good quoting software" is one of the most common follow-up questions on this topic, here is the answer as a testable checklist rather than an adjective.

Good freight quoting software should:

1. Ingest rates from every source you use. Contracted carrier rates, broker rates, spot market rates, and marketplace capacity. If it only reads one source, it is a rate viewer, not a quoting tool.
2. Cover the modes you actually ship. LTL, FTL, parcel, ocean, air. Most tools cover one or two well. Match this to your freight mix before anything else.
3. Benchmark against market. Return a rate and the context to judge it. This is the single most commonly missing capability in the category.
4. Calculate class and density correctly for LTL. Post-July-2025 this is non-negotiable.
5. Apply your rules automatically. Margin, markup, approved carriers, service requirements, rate ceilings.
6. Produce a quote your customer or stakeholder can act on, in their format, with your branding where relevant.
7. Hand off cleanly to booking. Quote to tender to track without re-keying anything.
8. Keep an audit trail. Who quoted what, when, at what rate, and who awarded it. This is what turns quoting into data you can improve from.
9. Integrate with the systems you already run.TMS, ERP, and accounting. Rip-and-replace is a red flag, not a feature.
10. Refresh rates automatically. With GRIs arriving off-cycle and spot rates moving monthly, manual rate maintenance is now a permanent tax.

If a tool fails four or more of these, it is a rate lookup with a nice interface.

Related Categories: 2 Bounded Lists

These come up constantly alongside this search, and conflating them is the most expensive mistake in this category. Here they are, clearly separated.

Top 10 freight forwarding software platforms

Freight forwarding software is not freight quoting software. Forwarding software runs a forwarder's entire business: quoting, operations, customs, documentation, and accounting. If you are a shipper, none of these are for you.

1. CargoWise
2. Descartes
3. Magaya
4. GoFreight
5. Logitude World
6. Shipthis
7. Freightify
8. Linbis
9. Quotiss
10. Wisor.ai

Top 10 TMS platforms

A TMS is not quoting software either. A transportation management system runs execution: planning, tendering, tracking, settlement, and reporting. Quoting is usually a module inside it, and often a weak one.

1. Oracle Transportation Management (OTM)
2. MercuryGate (Infios)
3. Blue Yonder
4. e2open
5. Manhattan Associates
6. Alpega
7. Trimble
8. Shipwell
9. Princeton TMX
10. IntelliTrans

You need a TMS instead of quoting software when your problem is executing and settling shipments at scale, not sourcing rates. You need both when you have a TMS running execution and no structured way to source the rates feeding it, which is the most common situation we see. That is why Emerge integrates with the major TMS platforms rather than competing with them, and why the light TMS category exists between the two.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best freight quoting software?

There is no single answer across the industry, and any list claiming one is skipping the most important variable: your role. For shippers buying domestic truckload and LTL, Emerge is the best choice. For LTL-only, MyCarrier. For simple multi-mode comparison, Freightview. For parcel, Shippo. For international importers, Freightos. For brokers, Greenscreens.ai or Tai TMS. For forwarders, Wisor.ai, Freightify, GoFreight, Magaya, or CargoWise depending on scale.

What is the best freight quoting software for shippers?

For US shippers: Emerge for truckload and LTL procurement with built-in market benchmarking, MyCarrier for LTL-only operations, Freightview for simple multi-mode comparison, Freightquote for occasional one-off shipments, Freightos for international, and Shippo for parcel.

What does freight quoting software cost?

It ranges from genuinely free to six figures. Emerge is usage-based, so what you pay scales with the freight you move rather than with seats; see pricing. Published pricing elsewhere in August 2026: Shippo free up to 30 labels/month with Pro from $17/month; Freightview from $149/month; DAT carrier plans from $59 to $339/month. MyCarrier, Freightos, and Freightquote are free to start. Forwarder platforms including CargoWise, Magaya, GoFreight, Freightify, and Wisor do not publish pricing.

Is freight quoting software the same as a TMS?

No. Quoting software sources and compares prices. A TMS runs execution: planning, tendering, tracking, and settlement. The best modern tools blur the line. Emerge covers quoting through full procurement and integrates with the TMS you already run, while enterprise platforms like CargoWise put quoting inside a full operations system.

Can freight quoting software use my existing carrier rates?

The good ones do. Emerge runs your incumbent carriers and brokers alongside marketplace capacity. Freightview and MyCarrier pull your negotiated rates directly. Forwarder platforms aggregate your contracted ocean rates. If a tool ignores relationships you already have, keep looking.

How long does it take to implement freight quoting software?

It depends entirely on the category. A rate shopper or marketplace can be live the same day. A procurement platform typically deploys in days to weeks. A full TMS is a different animal: ARC Advisory Group research puts a moderately complex implementation at four to five months, with cloud deployments at three to six months and complex on-premise migrations at nine to twelve months. Match the implementation cost to the problem you actually have.

Does freight quoting software actually save money?

It can, but only if it benchmarks. A tool that collects quotes faster saves time. A tool that tells you where each quote sits against market saves money. Across Emerge's Dynamic Book It Now users, 85% secured rates below market, averaging 8.5% below with the best lanes at 23% below. Golden State Foods reported an 18% reduction in transportation costs.

What is the difference between spot and contract freight quoting?

Spot quoting prices a single shipment at today's market. Contract quoting locks rates over a period, usually through an RFP or bid event. Most shippers need both, and the right mix shifts with the market. In June 2026 dry van spot rates topped contract rates for the first time since February 2022, and by July they were at parity at $3.01 per mile, which changes that calculus. See Spot vs. Contract Freight.

Why did LTL quoting get harder in 2025 and 2026?

The NMFC moved to density-based classification effective July 19, 2025, consolidating roughly 2,000 commodity listings and expanding the density scale to 13 subprovisions. Class is now driven by weight and dimensions rather than commodity description, so accurate dimensions became a mandatory quoting input. Get them wrong and you get reclassified and re-rated. Separately, LTL general rate increases stopped following an annual cadence, so rate currency requires more maintenance than it used to.

Do I need freight quoting software if I only ship a few loads a month?

Probably not. Use an instant quoting tool or a broker. The threshold is roughly when the time your team spends collecting quotes exceeds the savings from collecting them, or when you can no longer tell whether the last ten rates you paid were good ones.

Which freight quoting software has the best user reviews?

Emerge holds the highest G2 rating of any tool on this list at 5.0 out of 5. GoFreight and Freightify follow at 4.8, then MyCarrier, Freightview, DAT, and Wisor.ai at 4.7 and 4.6. Magaya and Tai TMS sit at 4.4, CargoWise at 4.3, Shippo at 4.2, Greenscreens.ai at 4.0 under its Triumph Networks listing, and Freightos at 3.8. Freightquote and SMC3 have no rating on G2 or Capterra. All ratings pulled August 2026.

What is the best free freight quoting software?

Four genuinely free options as of August 2026: MyCarrier is free to sign up and book LTL, Shippo has a free tier up to 30 labels per month, and Freightos and Freightquote are both free to generate and compare quotes. Emerge is not on that list: it is usage-based rather than free, and priced against the freight you move.

How do I get freight quotes without software?

Contact carriers directly for contracted lanes, use a broker for complex or urgent freight, or use an instant online quoting tool for one-offs. Have origin and destination ZIPs, weight, dimensions, class, pieces, ready date, and accessorials ready before you ask. Expect a broker quote in 15 minutes to a few hours, and expect manual multi-carrier collection to take most of a business day.

The Bottom Line

"Best freight quoting software" is really fifteen answers to five different questions, and the fastest way to waste a quarter is evaluating tools built for someone else's seat.

The market did not stay still while everyone kept quoting the same way. LTL classification became density-based. Spot rates caught contract rates for the first time in four years. Capacity left through enforcement rather than economics, and general rate increases stopped waiting for the calendar. Every one of those changes raised the cost of a stale number in a spreadsheet.

If you are a shipper, and especially if your quoting still lives in email threads and spreadsheet tabs, start where the procurement problem actually gets solved: Emerge. Your existing carriers come with you, pricing is usage-based, and the market context attached to every quote is the difference between getting a number and knowing whether it is a good one. See a demo or see pricing.

Everyone else on this list earned their place for their seat. Find yours.