01 · Location data and routing services
HERE
What it is genuinely good at
HERE is a location data company, and the routing services it publishes carry commercial-vehicle attributes properly: height, width, length, weight, axle count and hazardous goods classes, evaluated against restriction data on the road network. Alongside routing it publishes geocoding, distance matrices, reachable-area calculations and traffic, and it licenses map data for use inside other companies' navigation products. Coverage is genuinely global, which matters if your lanes are not confined to one continent.
Where it stops
It is a location services business, and the boundary of what it does is the road. The freight in the trailer, where each item sits and what that does to the axle groups are outside its scope, and it does not publish an axle-weight solver or a bridge formula check. It will tell you a road your combination fits on. It has no way of knowing whether you will pass the scale sitting on it.
02 · Logistics optimisation, strongest in Europe
PTV Group
What it is genuinely good at
PTV approaches routing through transport optimisation rather than mapping. Its developer services cover truck attributes, toll costs and vehicle restrictions. The wider family also plans tours and fleet routes, including which vehicle serves each stop and in what order. European road, restriction and toll modelling is a long-standing strength.
Where it stops
The same boundary applies: it optimises journeys, not load distribution. The product family is not built around axle weights, the Federal Bridge Formula or US state weight tables. North American users should read the coverage documents rather than assume they match the European data.
03 · The North American mileage reference
Trimble MAPS
What it is genuinely good at
Trimble MAPS holds a distinct position here. Its mileage is a common reference for freight rating and settlement in North America, so its reported miles are often the paid miles. It also offers commercial-vehicle routing, restrictions, tolls, hours-aware trip planning and in-cab navigation. That reduces friction for carriers reconciling planned and billed miles.
Where it stops
Its subject is the road and mileage, not the trailer. It does not publish a per-axle solver based on freight position. A route that is legal for the declared gross weight still says nothing about weight distribution across axle groups.
04 · Mapping inside a cloud you may already run on
Azure Maps
What it is genuinely good at
Azure Maps offers truck routing with vehicle dimensions, weight and load type. It also includes geocoding, traffic, matrices and weather inside Microsoft's cloud. Its strongest argument is organisational: if your systems, identity and billing already live there, adding mapping is easier than adding a new supplier. The commercial and security review may already be done.
Where it stops
It is a general-purpose mapping service that supports commercial vehicles, not a freight product. There is no first-party in-cab navigation offering for drivers, no fleet telematics, and nothing that models the load itself. Toll cost modelling is not something we found published in a form comparable to the freight-focused suppliers, so the comparison below marks it as not published rather than assuming either way.
05 · Maps and navigation, with truck profiles
TomTom
What it is genuinely good at
TomTom publishes map data, routing and navigation with commercial vehicle profiles, so a route can be planned around a truck's dimensions and weight and then driven with turn-by-turn guidance built on the same data. The navigation heritage shows: the products are oriented towards what a driver sees and follows, rather than only towards a planning answer computed in an office.
Where it stops
As with the other mapping suppliers, the load is not modelled. Nothing in the product line solves axle weights from cargo placement or evaluates consecutive axle subsets, and its telematics business is no longer part of the same company, so fleet tracking is a separate purchase.
06 · Fleet management first, routing second
Verizon Connect
What it is genuinely good at
Verizon Connect is a fleet management business rather than a routing supplier. Its centre of gravity is vehicle tracking, driver behaviour, maintenance and logging-device compliance, with truck-aware navigation provided to drivers as part of that. If the problem you are solving is knowing where the fleet is and keeping the hours-of-service records straight, this is a different category of product from the five above and a reasonable answer to a different question.
Where it stops
It is not something you build a planning system on top of, and it does not publish routing as a service for other systems to call in the way HERE, PTV, Trimble MAPS, Azure Maps and TomTom do. Several of the capabilities in the comparison below are marked as not published for this reason rather than as absent — the product is documented for fleet managers, not for the people integrating it.