Every tool here is useful. The handoffs are where answers break.
Routing, dispatch, telematics, onboard scales and permit services each own part of the run. This page shows where each responsibility stops and where AxleGuard carries the physical load into the next decision.
Six categories
29 named products
Public documentation, August 2026
The landscape
Six categories, and what each one was built to do.
Read the second paragraph of each card first. The first one is what the category is for, and it is not in dispute.
The road
Routing and navigation
What it is genuinely good at
Holding a road network at a level of detail nobody else holds it. Bridge heights, weight-restricted structures, hazmat exclusions, turn geometry for a 53-foot trailer. If you need a road a large vehicle can physically take, this is the category that knows.
Where it stops
A routing service takes weight as an input. You hand it a gross figure, it hands you a road. It has no view inside the trailer, so it cannot tell you that your drive tandem is over while the gross is comfortable. The road was never the thing that was wrong.
HERE Technologies, PTV Group, Trimble MAPS, TomTom, Azure Maps
This is the category closest to what we do, and the strongest of them are very good at it. Weight distribution from a body and payload, container and pallet packing, centre of gravity, specification work for a bodybuilder deciding where to put a tank.
Where it stops
They are built as desk tools, one load at a time, sitting beside the operation rather than inside it. The answer usually stops at the axle numbers rather than continuing into a road, a jurisdiction crossing, a permit or the next leg after freight comes off.
Running the business end of a freight company. Orders, rates, tendering, settlements, driver pay, customer portals, accounting. A carrier of any size lives inside one of these all day, and replacing it is a serious project.
Where it stops
A dispatch system records the weight on the order because the shipper wrote it there. It was never built to work out where that weight sits on the axles. Weight is a field on a record, not a physical quantity it reasons about.
McLeod LoadMaster, Trimble TMS, MercuryGate, Turvo, Rose Rocket, Alvys
Knowing what the truck is doing right now and what it did yesterday. Location, hours of service as the log of record, engine faults, harsh braking, dash camera footage, fuel and maintenance. Safety and compliance programmes are built on this data.
Where it stops
Everything it tells you is about a truck that has already been loaded and is already moving. Even where suspension pressure is read, the number arrives after the decision that caused it. It is the best possible record of a mistake you can no longer cheaply fix.
Measuring the real thing. A gauge or a display reading actual axle weight from air pressure or a load cell, in the cab or on the trailer, while the freight is going on. For a bulk or waste operation loading to the line, this is the tool that earns its money every day.
Where it stops
A scale measures. It does not plan, and it cannot answer a question about a load that does not physically exist yet. It tells you that you are 1,140 lb over on the drives. It does not tell you which pallets to move, how far, or whether the next state will agree.
Air-Weigh, Right Weigh, Vishay Precision Group and Vulcan, Stemco
The interface between your fleet and the enforcement system. Weigh station bypass, toll consolidation across dozens of agencies, oversize and overweight permit ordering, fuel tax reporting. Genuinely valuable, and mostly invisible when it works.
Where it stops
Bypass is granted on a carrier's safety record, not on whether today's specific load is legal. A green light is not a verdict on your axles. Permit services buy you a legal path for a load you already know is oversize — they do not tell you that an ordinary load has quietly gone over.
Counted from the capability matrix on this site. Twenty-four capabilities, checked against what these categories publish. Nine of them at least one category covers outright. Ten are covered partly, or by some products in a category and not others. Five are covered by nobody, and it is the same five every time.
The gap is not that these products are missing something. It is that nobody was ever given the job.
Twenty-four capabilities, by how far the other five categories reach
rows
38%
42%
21%
At least one category publishes it9 rows
Covered partly, or by some products and not others10 rows
No category publishes it at all5 rows
The five nobody covers: per-axle weight from cargo position, tire and axle ratings layered on statute, naming the rule that bound, the corrective move in holes and inches, and re-checking the verdict at every leg.
The seam
One number goes in. Five numbers come out.
This is the whole argument, and it is not a criticism of anybody. It is a description of where the categories meet and nothing is standing.
01
Everything upstream carries gross weight
The shipper writes one figure on the bill of lading. Dispatch stores that figure. The routing request sends that figure. Every system in the chain agrees, because they are all repeating the same single number.
02
Enforcement reads five, and then some
The scale reads the steer, the drives and the trailer group, then applies the bridge formula to every consecutive combination of them, then checks the tires and the axle ratings underneath. Gross is one of maybe fifteen tests, and rarely the one that fails.
03
The only tool that reads five is bolted to the truck
An onboard scale or a certified platform will give you the five numbers honestly. Both of them require the freight to already be on the trailer, which is exactly the moment fixing it stops being cheap.
The maximum gross weight on any one axle is 20,000 pounds. On a tandem axle it is 34,000 pounds. Neither of those is the number written on the bill of lading.
23 CFR 658.17, federal weight limits on the Interstate System
What we do with that gap
We answer the five numbers while the freight is still on the floor, name the rule that binds each one, and give the yard the correction as a physical move. Then we plan a road the truck can legally take with that freight aboard, and re-check the verdict at every leg. Everything else on this list stays exactly where it is.
Methodology
How these comparisons were made.
A comparison page written by a vendor is worth reading only if it tells you the rules it played by. These are ours.
01
Only what the vendor publishes
Every row starts from a vendor's own public product documentation, specification sheet or support material. Nothing here comes from a sales call, a rumour or a competitor's slide.
02
Silence is not a shortcoming
Where a vendor does not publish something, the cell reads not published rather than no. Plenty of these products do things they have never written a page about, and marking that as a failure would be dishonest.
03
Each product judged on its own job
We never score a dispatch system on axle physics as though it had been trying and failing. Each category page opens with what that category is genuinely good at, and only then describes the seam where it stops.
04
No invented numbers
There are no benchmark timings, no customer counts, no market share figures and no pricing on these pages. We have not run those tests, and the vendors have not published figures we could fairly compare.
05
Dated, and yours to check
Everything here reflects public documentation as of August 2026. These are active products that ship changes constantly. Before a row here decides anything for you, confirm it with the vendor.
Sources, and what is missing
Rows are drawn from publicly published product documentation as of August 2026. Where a vendor is silent, the cell reads not published, which is a statement about the documentation and not about the product.
Product names and trademarks belong to their owners and appear here for identification and comparison only. None of these vendors has reviewed, endorsed or contributed to these pages.
Check before you buy on it
Every product named here ships changes continuously. Treat these pages as a starting list of questions for the vendor, not as a substitute for asking them.
Why we included our own weak rows
The capability matrix still marks orders and invoicing as a plain no. It marks the HOS log as part because the append-only record, driver certification and development export exist while telematic/local transfer remains locked until registration evidence is recorded. The other readiness checks are visible but are not all enforced by that transfer gate yet. Physical hardware is optional and cannot be called accepted until signed truck samples pass commissioning. Those boundaries belong on the page.
Head to head
Eight specific comparisons.
Each one covers who the product is for, what it does well, the job it was not built for, and how the two work together on the same load.
No, and if a page here reads that way we have written it badly. Every product named on this site is good at the job it was designed for, and several of them are better at that job than anything we will ever build. The argument on these pages is about scope, not quality. Nobody in these five categories set out to answer where the freight has to sit so that five separate axle groups all come back legal, so nobody should be marked down for not answering it.
02Why compare against five categories instead of naming one competitor?
Because a fleet does not choose between us and one other product. A fleet already runs a dispatch system, probably runs telematics, may have onboard scales on some trailers and buys bypass from somebody. The real question is not which of these to replace, it is which question none of them is answering. That question is where the weight sits before the trailer is sealed.
03Where do you fit if we already have all five?
In the gap between the dispatch board and the dock. The order arrives from your existing system with a weight and a commodity on it. We work out how that freight has to be positioned for every axle group to come back legal in every jurisdiction on the route, give the yard the move in the units it uses, and hand the planned road back. Nothing else changes.
04What do you not do?
We are not your log of record for hours of service, we do not run your settlements or your invoicing, and we do not sell hardware. Where a load is genuinely oversize we point you at the permit pathway rather than pretending a legal position exists. Those rows are marked no in our own column on the matrix, on purpose.
05How current is any of this?
It reflects published documentation as of August 2026 and it will drift. If you find a row that is now wrong, that is worth telling us, and we would rather fix it than defend it. Verify anything that matters directly with the vendor before it decides a purchase.
Next step
Put your own load through the gap.
Bring a load one of these tools already cleared. Forty-five minutes, your trailer, your jurisdiction. If the two answers agree, you have learned something useful for free.