You need a warehouse management system
Inventory, locations, pick and pack. There is no warehouse module and there will not be one; it is a product in its own right. If warehousing is half your business, buy something that does it.
Freight forwarding software compared, and who CargoSharks is not for
Three ways to run a forwarding operation, what each costs, and the cases where we are the wrong choice. Every claim about us can be checked in the running demo in about ten minutes.
Three ways to run a forwarding operation
A Gulf forwarder with two to ten branches is usually choosing between three shapes rather than between products. They have different economics and fail in different ways.
Spreadsheets and mailboxes
A real system that many profitable forwarders run on, and it costs 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
Breadth: every mode, every geography, every adjacent function. 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
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.
21 named charge types, over six ways of pricing them
Pricing basis · count
- Per container5
- Ocean Freight, Terminal Handling — Origin, Terminal Handling — Destination, Haulage, Out of Gauge
- Flat6
- Road Freight, Documentation, Customs Clearance, Delivery Order, Inspection, Permit
- Per day4
- Reefer Monitoring, Demurrage, Detention, Storage
- Per kg2
- Air Freight, Security Surcharge
- Percent2
- Fuel Surcharge, Cargo Insurance
- Per unit2
- Dangerous Goods, Legalisation
The three side by side
The middle column describes that kind of choice in general, not any particular vendor.
| The question | Spreadsheets and mailboxes | A global platform | CargoSharks |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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. The loading is the constraint. | From your own cards, by lane, mode and carrier, with validity dates that make two overlapping cards on a lane impossible. Chargeable weight is calculated per mode: five modes, five arithmetics. |
| Where the job 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 from enquiry, quote and award through execution and documents to invoice, never re-keyed. 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. | A localisation added to a product designed in English. You can tell, and so can your customer. | Every interface string in both languages, kept in step by a check that fails the build, with right-to-left in the layout. 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 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, on every table. Ask for another branch’s shipment and it comes back not found, because the row is not in the answer at all. |
| 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: who, when, the whole row before and after, and the source IP, so a change made around the application is recorded too. The application’s account cannot delete from 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 of paid setup and onboarding on your own data, from the day your data arrives. 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 What we do. |
| 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; the operator is a setting, and no supplier badge appears on anything your customer sees. |
| If you leave | You keep the files. Nothing was ever consolidated, so nothing is lost. | An export, on the vendor’s terms and in the vendor’s formats. | An export in an open format, any day, at no charge. A single self-service export action is specified and not yet built; today we assemble it for you. Source escrow is available on request. |
Who CargoSharks is not for
Four situations where a global platform, an incumbent or a spreadsheet is the better answer. Reading them before the demo saves you a fortnight.
You need customs declarations filed directly
In Kuwait, clearance runs through a system a forwarder cannot buy an interface to. We track declarations and estimate duty from a tariff table; we do not file, and are not planning to.
You are one person with fifteen shipments a month
A spreadsheet and a shared mailbox work at that size, and setup would cost more than the leak. Come back at three or four coordinators, or when a second branch appears.
You buy on certification rather than inspection
There is no SOC 2 report, no ISO 27001 certificate and no independent penetration test. There is a running system you can open without asking, and claims checked by an automated test suite against a live database.
What we say about other vendors
CargoWise, Logistaas and CARGOES Runner are the products a Gulf forwarder most often has on the same shortlist. Each comparison page quotes what that vendor says about itself, with the page and the date it was read, and says where that vendor is the better choice before it says anything about us.
None of them prints a tick-and-cross grid. A grid is a snapshot of somebody else’s roadmap that goes stale silently, and written by one side it is an argument with a table around it. Ask us directly at hellocargosharks.com and you get a written answer that cites what each vendor publishes, and “we do not know” where we do not.
Check it yourself in about ten minutes
Four claims, in the order they are quickest to test, in the live demo. No sign-up.
Where these claims come from. The separation, audit and language-parity claims are asserted by the product’s automated test suite against a live PostgreSQL database and both message catalogues. The per-mode chargeable-weight arithmetic is the seeded rule set in the pricing engine. The scope statements and the export qualification come from the specification’s build-status table. No claim on this page is about another company’s product.
- 1
Separation is enforced by the database
Sign in to the demo as the customer contact and try to open the operations board. You get nothing: no empty list and no error, because those rows are not in the answer at all.
- 2
Bilingual from the start
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. A few seconds is usually enough.
- 3
The whole of one job
Take a job in the demo from enquiry to invoice without leaving the record. Then read the scope on What we do and see whether anything you need is on the list of what we decided not to build.
- 4
Free time counts itself
Find a container past its free days 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.
Onboarding on your own data, with the days written down
Paid setup and onboarding at a fixed fee: fifteen working days, starting the day your data arrives rather than the day you sign. Each block has to produce its output before the next begins, and nothing built in it is thrown away.
Fifteen working days, and what is finished in each block
Working days
Data intake, days 1–2
we can read your rate card and know it will import
Foundation, days 3–5
two entities, users, roles, your branding on every screen
Pricing, days 6–7
a real lane prices in under ten seconds, as a sendable PDF
Enquiry queue, days 8–9
owner, status and an SLA clock on every enquiry
Jobs and documents, days 10–11
a populated operations board
Tracking, days 12
public tracking page and customer portal
The details that sell, days 13
a customs hold and a demurrage clock, live
Arabic, days 14
native RTL, reviewed by a native speaker
Rehearsal, days 15
two people can each run the demo cold
- Setup
- Ready to demonstrate
Ask us the awkward question.
The comparison that matters is the one about your own operation. Write to hellocargosharks.com: a named person replies in writing, and says “we do not know” where that is the answer.