ITS Dispatch is for carriers. Keelway is for brokers.

What ITS Dispatch is, honestly

ITS Dispatch is the TMS arm of Truckstop, the load board company. It is built around the asset-based carrier and the owner-operator: the person whose week is dispatching drivers, filing IFTA returns, cutting driver settlements, generating fuel reports, and pulling loads off the Truckstop board. For that buyer, ITS Dispatch is a credible and reasonably priced answer — especially the free entry tier, which is genuinely useful for a brand-new MC running their first few months.

Where ITS Dispatch is weaker is on the brokerage side. Customer billing, carrier confirmations, broker-side rate management, and — most importantly — inbound carrier email all feel layered onto a carrier-first product. There is no inbox AI. There is no rate extraction from carrier reply emails. There is no per-reply FMCSA trust scoring. Brokers who try to run a pure brokerage on ITS Dispatch tend to outgrow it once carrier-email volume gets serious.

Side-by-side: ITS Dispatch vs Keelway TMS

What ITS Dispatch is

ITS Dispatch is Truckstop's in-house TMS, sold alongside its load board. The product audience is unambiguously the asset-based carrier and the owner-operator. The free entry tier is aimed at brand-new motor carriers who need a single-user system to enter loads, generate basic paperwork, and start filing IFTA. Paid tiers in the roughly $70-$140 per user per month band add multi-user, document management, accounting hooks (QuickBooks etc.), and deeper reporting.

Where ITS Dispatch wins

For a carrier or owner-operator, ITS Dispatch has real strengths and Keelway does not pretend to compete on them:

• IFTA fuel tax reporting. ITS Dispatch generates quarterly IFTA returns from fuel purchase and trip data. For an asset-based fleet, that alone justifies a TMS.
• Driver settlements. Per-load and per-mile settlement calculations, deductions, advances, and printable driver statements are first-class.
• Dispatch for owned trucks. Assigning a load to a driver, tracking the truck, and closing the load out the way a carrier needs it.
• Truckstop load board integration. If you live in the Truckstop ecosystem already, ITS Dispatch is the path of least resistance.
• The free tier really is free. For a single-user new MC running low volume, the free tier is a serious value proposition. Keelway is $799/month from day one — we are not the answer for a one-truck operation.

Where Keelway wins

For a pure freight brokerage — three or more people, no owned trucks, 50-300 loads per month — the comparison flips:

• Inbox AI is the core product. Keelway reads every inbound carrier reply, parses the offered rate from the body, scores the carrier against FMCSA on every reply (not just at onboarding), and ranks the top five offers inside Gmail. ITS Dispatch has none of this; it was not designed to.
• Pricing that doesn't scale against you. ITS Dispatch's per-user pricing model means a 10-person shop pays $700-$1,400/month before load board fees. Keelway is $799/month flat, regardless of headcount, with no setup and no contract.
• Broker-first workflows. Customer rate management, margin protection, carrier confirmation generation, and the day-to-day of covering loads — these are the whole product at Keelway, not a side panel.
• Continuous trust scoring. ITS Dispatch lets you look up a carrier's FMCSA record. Keelway scores every inbound reply automatically and flags identity drift, insurance lapses, and authority changes between when you posted the load and when the carrier replied.

The bottom line

ITS Dispatch and Keelway are not really competitors — they serve different buyers. ITS Dispatch is the right tool for the owner-operator and the small asset-based carrier; it has IFTA, settlements, dispatch, and a genuinely free entry tier that makes sense for a new MC. Keelway is the right tool for the pure freight brokerage that does not own trucks and whose biggest operational problem is the carrier email firehose. If you are running a brokerage and currently squeezing ITS Dispatch to do broker work, you will feel the upgrade to Keelway in the first week — and at $799/mo flat versus $700-$1,400/mo on ITS Dispatch's per-user math, you'll probably pay less while you're at it.