A route planner is the cheapest pay rise in delivery: the same stops in a smarter order is an hour less unpaid time, every day. Here's how the apps drivers actually use compare in 2026 - and a card on the table first: Routeonic is ours. We build it at Delivery Driver HQ, so we'll tell you exactly why we think it's the best tool for a working courier, and we'll be straight about where the others beat it.
The field at a glance
| App | Free tier | Paid | Standout |
|---|---|---|---|
| Routeonic (ours) | Free trial, full features | Subscription after the trial | Deliver Mode + lock-screen pace tracking, camera manifest scan, earnings log |
| Spoke (formerly Circuit) | All features, max 10 stops per route | £9.99-£19.99/month for unlimited stops | The most-used courier planner; polished optimisation |
| RoadWarrior | Limited optimisation capacity | Pro £14.99/month | Drag-and-drop reordering; long-standing favourite with US mail carriers |
| Zeo | 12 routes per month, unlimited stops | £15.99/month or £129.99/year | Generous free tier if you only drive a couple of days a week |
| Google Maps | Free | - | Everywhere and free - but ~10 stops and it will not reorder them for you |
Prices are the apps' listed rates at the time of writing and change often - check the store page before subscribing.
Why we built Routeonic - and why we'd pick it
We run a delivery driver job board. Talking to drivers every day kept surfacing the same three complaints about routing apps, so we built Routeonic around them:
- Getting stops in is the slow bit. Routeonic takes a pasted address list from an email or spreadsheet - or you point the camera at a printed manifest and it reads the stops, with country-aware address handling (proper UK postcodes included). One tap optimises the order; you can still drag stops around mid-route when reality intervenes.
- The delivering screen matters more than the planning screen. Deliver Mode is built for a moving day: big one-handed controls, proof-of-delivery photos straight to your camera roll, and a Live Activity on the lock screen showing your next stop and whether your pace hits your target finish time - without opening the app.
- Nobody tracks whether the day was worth it. Routeonic logs each route with earnings, stops and parcels and shows weekly trends - so you can tell a good route from a bad one with numbers, which regular readers will recognise as the whole game in courier pay.
That last one is the honest difference in philosophy: the other apps optimise the driving; Routeonic also cares whether the day paid. It's free to try, then a subscription - and it's made by the same team behind this site, so the roadmap is driven by what UK drivers ask for.
Where the others win
- You're on Android: Routeonic is iPhone-only today (and needs a current iOS version). Spoke, RoadWarrior and Zeo all run on Android - Spoke's free 10-stop tier is the best starting point there.
- You never want to pay anything: Zeo's 12-free-routes-a-month tier suits a weekend courier; Google Maps stays free forever if your rounds are under ~10 stops and you don't mind sequencing them yourself.
- You dispatch a team: multi-van dispatch with a back office is fleet-software territory - Spoke's team product and similar tools are built for that; Routeonic's batching covers a split load, not a depot.
Whichever you pick, run the numbers
A planner that saves 45 minutes a day pays for itself in the first week at any of these prices - the maths is in our courier pay breakdown. If you're new to multi-drop, start with the multi-drop guide, and when you're ready to put a better route to work, the multi-drop jobs and van driver jobs boards are free for drivers.