Transporeon, Alpega and Cargobase sit one tier above the marketplaces most importers use. They are worth understanding even if you will never buy one, because knowing where they start tells you when you have outgrown a marketplace — and knowing what they are shaped like tells you when they will not fit at all.
Compared using each platform's own public statements, checked 14 August 2026. These companies are independent of CargoLinked and their products change — verify current details on their site before deciding.
The short answer
All three are enterprise transport platforms sold to companies with substantial freight volume and a procurement function. Transporeon (part of Trimble since 2023) connects 1,500+ shippers with 210,000+ carriers and blends marketplace sourcing with deployed modules. Alpega is Europe-centric and road-shaped, running the Wtransnet, Teleroute and BursaTransport exchanges. Cargobase positions itself simply as a "Transportation Management System (TMS) for Enterprise Shippers". None of them is where you go to find a forwarder for your first shipment from Shenzhen.
Side by side
| Transporeon | Alpega | Cargobase | CargoLinked | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Positioning | Transportation management platform; "newest member of the Trimble family" | "End-to-end transportation and logistics software platform for Europe" | "TMS for Enterprise Shippers" | Open freight marketplace and directory |
| Audience | Shippers, retailers, carriers | Shippers, carriers, LSPs and forwarders | Enterprise shippers | Any shipper; forwarders seeking cargo |
| Scale claims | 1,500+ shippers and retailers; 210,000+ carriers | 80,000+ verified carriers; 350,000 daily freight offers; 80 countries | Not stated | ~29,000 listings; 194 countries |
| Shape | Hybrid marketplace + modules | Road freight, Europe — three freight exchanges | Deployed TMS | International ocean, air, road, rail |
| Pricing | Not stated | Not stated | Not stated | Published: free; $29/mo or $299/yr |
A note on Cargobase: its site is client-rendered and returns little to a plain fetch, so the only claim we can verify is its own one-line positioning above. We are not going to describe features we could not confirm.
Alpega is road and Europe — that is the key fact
Alpega's exchanges — Wtransnet, Teleroute, BursaTransport — are among the largest road-freight exchanges in Europe, with 350,000 daily freight offers by their own count. If you move trucks around Europe, that is a serious market and we do not compete with it in any meaningful way. If you are importing a container from Asia, a European road exchange is not the tool, however large it is. Matching the platform to the mode matters more than matching it to the marketing.
What the enterprise tier gives you
- Structured tendering — running an annual rate tender across dozens of lanes and carriers, scored consistently.
- Rate management — holding contracted rates and enforcing them against invoices.
- Execution and visibility at a scale where individual shipment management stops being feasible.
- Governance — allocation rules, carrier scorecards, audit trails. This is often the real reason a company buys.
What it does not give you
- New providers. These systems run the carrier base you have. Discovery is not the product.
- A quick answer. They are implementations with onboarding, not signups.
- A price you can see. All three are demo-gated.
- A fit at low volume. Below a few hundred shipments a year the governance overhead exceeds the benefit.
Where CargoLinked sits
Deliberately below this tier. We do discovery and quoting: post a shipment, forwarders on the lane compete, you contract directly. No tendering module, no rate management, no invoice audit, no implementation. For a business moving a few shipments a month, that is the whole job; for one moving five hundred a year, it is the front half and something like Transporeon is the back half.
The honest signal that you have outgrown a marketplace: you are managing spreadsheets of contracted rates and arguing about invoice discrepancies. That is a procurement problem, and we do not solve it.
Related: marketplace vs procurement software, CargoLinked vs GoComet, and freight marketplaces compared.
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