How we compare
This page compares approaches rather than companies. Every claim on it is about us and can be checked against the running build in about ten minutes. That is a deliberate choice, and section 03 explains it rather than leaving you to notice.
What we actually doCheck it in the demoWhat is deliberately not in it
01 — The shapes of the choice
A forwarder in the Gulf with two to ten branches is usually choosing between three shapes, not between a list of products. The shapes have different economics and different failure modes, and the product names inside each one matter less than the shape does.
Spreadsheets and mailboxes is not doing nothing. It is a real system that a great many profitable forwarders run on, and it has the enormous advantage of costing nothing to change. It fails at scale and at handover: nothing has an owner, nothing has a clock, and the knowledge is in people rather than in a record.
A global platform buys you breadth — every mode, every geography, every adjacent function, and a road that keeps going long after you have stopped walking down it. The trade is that a five-branch forwarder uses a fraction of it, configures a great deal of it, and pays for the rest.
The whole of one job is what we built. Narrower on purpose: the commercial and operational loop of a forwarding job, complete, including the parts that usually fall out of it — free-time clocks, consolidation cost apportionment, per-mode chargeable weight, bilingual documents. Nothing here manages a warehouse, and nothing is going to.
21 seeded charge types, over six rating functions
per container5
flat6
per day4
per kg2
percent2
per unit2
| The question | Spreadsheets and mailboxes | A global platform | CargoSharksThis is our column |
|---|---|---|---|
| How a job gets priced | From a spreadsheet somebody maintains, by whoever knows where it is. A day and a half is normal. | From rate tables in the platform, once they have been loaded and kept current. Capability is not the constraint; the loading is. | From your own cards, by lane, mode and carrier, with validity dates that make two overlapping cards on a lane unrepresentable. Chargeable weight is calculated per mode — five modes, five different arithmetics. |
| Where the job actually lives | An inbox, a folder, a WhatsApp thread and someone’s memory. No two of them agree. | In the platform, if every step is entered into it. The gap between the platform and the mailbox is where the work leaks. | One record through six states — enquiry, quote, award, execution, documents, invoice — and it is never re-keyed into anything else. An enquiry emailed to a branch mailbox is read into a proposal a coordinator accepts or rejects. |
| Arabic | Whatever the person typing writes. Documents are usually English. | Available as a localisation, added to a product designed in English. You can tell, and so can your customer. | 2,727 interface strings in both languages, kept in sync, with right-to-left in the layout rather than applied to it. Documents generate bilingual from the job. |
| Where your data sits | On laptops, in an email provider, and in whatever else grew up around it. | In the vendor’s multi-tenant estate, in whichever regions the vendor operates. | One deployment per customer: your own database, in your own instance, in a region agreed with you. There is no tenant identifier in the schema, because there is no second tenant in the database. |
| What separation rests on | Who has been given the file. | Application code enforcing a customer identifier on every query. | Row-level security in the database. Ask for another branch’s shipment and it comes back not found, because the row is not in the answer at all — 197 policies across 88 tables, counted against a live database by the test suite rather than estimated. |
| What a change leaves behind | A newer version of the file. | Whatever the application chose to log. | An audit row written by a database trigger, carrying who, when, the whole row before and after, and the source IP — so a change made around the application is recorded too. Nothing is deleted; the application’s account holds no delete permission on any table. |
| Getting running | Already running. That is the point of it. | An implementation project, sized by how many entities and how much history you bring. | Fifteen working days for a pilot on your own data, from the day your data arrives rather than from signature. Fixed fee. Nothing built in it is thrown away. |
| Breadth | As broad as your spreadsheets. As deep as the person who wrote them. | Broad. Warehouse, transport networks, purchase orders, customs filing in the markets the vendor has built for. | Narrow and complete. No warehouse module, no purchase orders, no native apps, no Kuwait customs filing — each excluded by decision and listed on the home page rather than discovered in week three. |
| Whose brand your customer sees | Yours, on documents you build by hand. | Depends on the product and the tier. | Yours. No colour, logo or company name is written into the product anywhere — the operator is a setting, and there is no supplier badge on anything your customer ever sees. |
| If you leave | You keep the files. You lose nothing because nothing was ever consolidated. | An export, on the vendor’s terms and in the vendor’s formats. | An export in an open format, any day, at no charge, of a database that was never shared with anyone else’s. One honest qualification: a single self-service action producing that export is specified and not yet built — today it is assembled for you. Source escrow is available on request. |
02 — The honest half
Five situations where a global platform, an incumbent, or a spreadsheet is the better answer. Reading this before the demo saves you a fortnight.
03 — What this page will not do
There is a version of this page that names three or four competitors and prints a tick-and-cross grid against them. We are not going to publish one, for three reasons that have nothing to do with politeness.
It goes stale silently. A grid is a snapshot of somebody else’s roadmap. Every entry in it starts decaying the day it is published, and the thing about a decayed competitive claim is that the person it misleads is your prospect and the person who looks foolish is you.
We would be marking our own homework. We know our product properly and theirs from the outside. A grid written by one side is not a comparison; it is an argument with a table around it.
It would be the wrong argument anyway. The reason to choose us is not that somebody else is worse. It is that we are the whole of one job in this market, in this language, on your own database — and you can check every word of that yourself in about ten minutes.
So: if you are evaluating us alongside CargoWise, Logistaas or CARGOES Runner — which are the products a Gulf forwarder most often has on the same shortlist — ask us directly. You will get a written answer that cites what each vendor publishes itself, and where we do not know, you will get “we do not know”.
Every claim on this page is about us, and every one of them is checkable without talking to a salesperson.
04 — Do not take our word for it
Four of them, in the order they are quickest to test.
Open the demo and sign in as the customer contact. Then try to open the operations board. You will not get an empty list or an error — you will get nothing, because those rows are not in the answer to your request at all.
Switch the demo to Arabic and issue a document. Look at where the numbers sit, which way the layout runs, and whether the labels read as Arabic or as English with Arabic words in it. Four seconds is usually enough.
Take a job in the demo from enquiry through to invoice without leaving the record. Then read the scope columns and see whether anything you need is in the middle column, which is the one listing what we have decided not to build.
Find a container past its free days in the demo and look at what appeared on the job’s cost ledger without anybody entering it. That charge line is the one most forwarders are not billing today.
Where the claims on this page come from. The counts — 88 tables, 197 policies, 80 audit triggers, 2,727 interface strings — are asserted by the project’s own test suite against a live PostgreSQL 18.6 and against the two message catalogues. The per-mode chargeable-weight arithmetic is the seeded rule set in the pricing engine. The scope statements and the UAE e-invoicing dates are read from the specification’s build-status table. The export qualification in the last row of the table is from the same source, where a complete export as a single action is recorded as not implemented.
Claims about other companies’ products on this page: none. The three product names in section 03 are named only as products a prospect may be evaluating, with no statement made about any of them. The “global platform” column describes the shape of that choice in general and is not a description of any particular vendor.
05 — What the fifteen days are
Fixed fee, fifteen working days, starting the day your data arrives rather than the day you sign. This is the plan we work to, block by block, with what each one has to produce before the next begins. Nothing built in it is thrown away.
Fifteen working days, and what is finished on each of them
The comparison that matters is the one about your own operation, and it usually starts with something this page cannot answer. A named person replies, in writing, and says “we do not know” where that is the answer.
