3PL Central is a WMS. Keelway is a freight broker TMS.

What 3PL Central / Extensiv actually is

3PL Central launched in 2006 as a cloud WMS for third-party logistics providers — specifically the warehouse-and-fulfillment kind of 3PL, not the asset-light freight-broker kind. In 2023 the company rebranded to Extensiv and expanded the lineup: Extensiv Warehouse Manager (the original WMS), Order Manager (multichannel order routing for e-commerce), Integration Manager (EDI and marketplace connectors), and a Transportation module that does parcel and LTL rate shopping for the shipments leaving those warehouses.

That is a credible product stack for its target buyer: a fulfillment 3PL warehousing inventory for e-commerce brands, picking and packing orders, generating shipping labels, billing each brand-client for warehouse services. It is not a freight broker TMS. There is no load board, no carrier procurement, no broker-carrier rate-con flow, no FMCSA trust scoring, no carrier-quote-email handling. Those are not gaps to fix — they are out of scope by design.

Why freight brokers end up on this page

The confusion is mostly the name. "3PL" in industry usage covers three very different businesses that all get lumped together: (1) warehousing 3PLs, (2) freight brokerages, and (3) asset-based 3PLs that own trucks. 3PL Central was always (1). The phrase "TMS for 3PL" surfaces Extensiv's TMS module in search results, and brokers looking for a freight broker TMS land on a product built for warehouse operators. Within five minutes of a demo the mismatch is clear.

Side-by-side: 3PL Central / Extensiv vs Keelway

What a freight broker TMS actually does

A freight broker TMS handles the brokerage workflow end to end. Shippers tender loads. The brokerage posts those loads (DAT, Truckstop, direct carrier email). MC-numbered motor carriers reply with quotes — usually 10-40 replies per posted load, scattered across email, phone, and load-board messages. The brokerage screens those carriers against FMCSA authority and safety, picks one, sends a rate confirmation, dispatches, tracks, settles. The product job is to make the broker faster at that whole loop without missing fraud signals.

None of this exists in a WMS. Extensiv's transportation module ships parcels out of warehouses — a fundamentally different problem with fundamentally different vendors (FedEx, UPS, USPS rate APIs) and a fundamentally different buyer (a warehouse operations manager, not a freight broker).

Where Keelway fits

Keelway is the freight broker TMS half of the picture. Three things to know:

• Inbox AI is the core product. Keelway reads every inbound carrier reply on a posted load, extracts the offered rate from the email body or attached rate sheet, scores the carrier against FMCSA in real time, and ranks the top five carriers inside Gmail. This is what brokers spend their day on. WMS products do not touch this.
• Pricing is published. $799/mo flat, unlimited users, no setup fee, no annual contract. Printed on the TMS landing page. No demo to find out what it costs.
• SMB-native onboarding. A 5-person brokerage can sign up, import carriers and customers via CSV, and run a real load in the same business day. There is no implementation project, no consulting engagement, no professional services line item.

The bottom line

If you operate a fulfillment warehouse, Extensiv (3PL Central) is a credible WMS and you should evaluate it on those merits. If you operate a freight brokerage, you are in the wrong category — you want a broker-first TMS, and at $799/mo flat with native AI carrier-email triage, Keelway is the SMB-priced answer. The two products would, if anything, sit side by side in a hybrid operation (warehouse + brokerage) — they don't compete, they just keep getting confused.