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. Credit where it’s due on one point: RouteXL’s own API does let you set a time window on a stop (a “ready” and “due” minute) and even sequence a pickup before its matching delivery, so it’s not entirely blind to timing the way I first made it sound. What none of them do, at any price tier, is split stops across more than one vehicle or account for a vehicle’s carrying capacity. If truck 2 can only hold 80 boxes, or you’ve got three drivers and need the day’s stops divided between them intelligently, that’s a fleet problem, not a stop-sequencing one, and no free address-based planner I’ve found — RouteXL included — solves it. That’s the gap a real multi-vehicle VRP solver exists to close.
There’s one more constraint worth calling out, because it trips up every address-based planner: routes where the truck has to pick something up at one stop before dropping it at another, with the two linked. That precedence rule — pickup before delivery, both on the same vehicle — is its own flavor of fleet routing, and I broke it down in a separate post on pickup and delivery route optimization.
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. Every solve is hard-capped at 2 minutes (120 seconds) of search time, you can ask for less, never more, 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 — street addresses work now after a recent round of upgrades, so no coordinates required — along with vehicles, time windows, and parameters, then upload it (or paste a Google Sheets link if you’d rather skip Excel entirely). 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.” It runs on a small Render instance, not a funded SaaS business, so there’s no seat-based or per-stop pricing waiting to phase in once you’re hooked. 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: every solve is hard-capped at 2 minutes (120 seconds) of search time, 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.
A few common questions
How many stops can it handle? The sample dataset routes 113 stops across 10 vehicles comfortably inside the 2-minute search cap described above. RouteXL, by contrast, caps stops per route directly against your plan (20/100/200) no matter how many vehicles you have, because it only ever plans one.
Does it actually split stops across multiple vehicles, unlike RouteXL? Yes — that’s the core structural difference at any RouteXL tier. Each vehicle in the workbook gets its own capacity and cost, and the solver assigns stops across all of them instead of sequencing one long route for a single truck.
Can I use Google Sheets instead of Excel? Yes, there’s a copyable Sheets template — paste the link in instead of uploading a file.
Can I resume from a previous solution? Yes. There’s a warm-start option: if the solution sheet has routes from a prior run and the parameter is set to use it, the solver starts from there instead of from scratch.
Do I need to know how to code? No. Upload a workbook, or paste a Sheets link, click run, and download a map and CSV. The OR-Tools solver runs behind the scenes.
Try it
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. I ran the same honest comparison against three other routing platforms too: a Route4Me alternative, an Onfleet alternative, and a Routific alternative, if one of those is what you’re actually shopping against.
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