I spent twenty-plus years building vehicle routing models for companies that paid serious money for them, so when I went looking at RouteXL alternatives recently, I wasn’t shopping — I was checking out the neighborhood. RouteXL is probably the best-known free multi-stop route planner on the internet, and for good reason: paste in your addresses, get them back in a sensible order, free up to 20 stops. But 20 stops is exactly where a lot of real delivery days start, and that’s where the free tier ends. This post is an honest tour of what’s out there — including the free VRP tool I built and run myself — and which one fits which kind of routing problem.
What RouteXL gets right
Credit where due. RouteXL has been around since 2009, runs in the browser, and the free plan handles up to 20 stops per route with unlimited routes per day under a fair-use policy. You type addresses, it geocodes them, and it solves the stop order for one vehicle. For a single driver running a short delivery loop, that’s the whole job, done in minutes. Past 20 stops you’re on their paid plans — €35/month for up to 100 stops or €70/month for up to 200, with day passes if your big route is a once-in-a-while thing. Fair pricing for what it does. The thing to understand is what it does: it sequences stops for one vehicle. That’s a TSP — a traveling salesman problem. It is not fleet routing, and the difference matters more than most people realize when they start searching for alternatives.
Where the free route planners hit their ceiling
Every free multi-stop planner has a cap, and they cluster in the same place. Spoke’s free delivery planner (which is what you land on now if you visit the old Speedy Route address — it redirects there) gives you 20 stops per route and 3 optimized routes per day, no account needed. Google Maps, the tool everybody tries first, takes a maximum of 10 destinations and — this surprises people — doesn’t optimize their order at all. It drives them in the sequence you typed them (you get to be the optimization algorithm, congratulations). The caps aren’t the real ceiling, though. The real ceiling is structural: these tools plan one vehicle at a time with no concept of delivery time windows, vehicle capacity, or service times. If customer A needs delivery between 8 and 10 AM, or truck 2 can only carry 80 boxes, or you have three drivers and need the stops split between them intelligently — no free address-based planner I’ve found handles that. Those features live in paid dispatch software, because that’s where the industry put the paywall.
The free alternative I built: a real VRP solver
My VRP route optimizer exists because a $2M routing project I worked on died in the pandemic, and the model was too good to leave buried in a dead codebase (that story is its own post). I rebuilt it in Python on Google OR-Tools — the same solver family that powers serious logistics operations — and put it online, free, no account, no stop cap baked into a pricing table. It solves the actual vehicle routing problem: multiple vehicles, delivery time windows, vehicle capacities, per-stop service times, maximum route durations, and real drive times pulled from OSRM rather than straight-line guesses. The sample workbook that ships with it routes 113 stops across 10 vehicles. Solves typically run one to three minutes, because it’s doing real optimization work, not just sorting pins on a map.
Now the honest part, because a comparison post that hides its own product’s weaknesses is just an ad. My tool takes its input as a spreadsheet — you download the sample workbook, fill in your locations with latitude and longitude, vehicles, and parameters, and upload it. There’s no address box; geocoding is on the to-do list, not in the tool (I know, I know — it’s the first thing everyone asks for). There’s no turn-by-turn navigation and no driver phone app. If you want to type five addresses and start driving in ninety seconds, RouteXL or Spoke will serve you better, and I’d rather tell you that here than have you find out after downloading my workbook.
Which tool for which routing problem
After decades of doing this for employers and clients, here’s how I’d sort it. A single driver with up to 20 stops and no constraints: RouteXL or Spoke’s planner, whichever interface annoys you less — both are good at exactly this. Ten stops or fewer and you just want directions: Google Maps, but order the stops yourself. One driver with more than 20 stops: RouteXL’s paid tiers are the cheap path, or my tool if you don’t mind a spreadsheet. Multiple vehicles, time windows, capacities, or anything that smells like fleet logistics: that’s a vehicle routing problem, and you need a VRP solver — mine is free, and the paid dispatch platforms start at real monthly money and climb fast. High-volume courier operations needing live tracking, proof of delivery, and dispatching: that’s operations software, not route planning, and no free tool will carry you there honestly.
Why mine is free (and what the catch is)
There’s no catch in the usual sense — no trial clock, no card on file, no “contact sales.” The whole thing runs on a $7/month hosting plan, which I can carry indefinitely (early retirement math is forgiving when your infrastructure costs less than a sandwich). I built it to prove these models deserve a life outside Excel, and I keep it free because I want to see what people do with it. The realistic limitation is patience, not pricing: it’s a shared small server, so a big solve takes a couple of minutes, and the spreadsheet format makes you think about your data before you route it. Some people consider that a bug. The operations researcher in me considers it a feature.
If your routing problem has outgrown the 20-stop planners, take the VRP route optimizer for a spin — download the sample workbook, swap in your stops, and see what a real solver does with your day. And if you’re curious how a twenty-year-old Excel model becomes a web app, the whole build is documented in my OR tools series.
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