Comparison
Quote automation or rate management — which does your desk need?
Rate management organises the pricing supply. Freitt focuses on the workflow from an incoming customer RFQ to a source-backed draft response. Some platforms do both, so compare the actual product rather than the label.
Last reviewed 10 September 2026Sources
Choose a dedicated rate-management platform when the main problem is collecting, normalising, comparing or distributing large volumes of carrier and agent rates — especially when live market connectivity and booking are central to how you sell. If your pricing team is drowning in tariffs from forty partners in thirty formats, that is the problem to solve first, and quote drafting will not solve it.
Choose Freitt when the rates already exist in approved sheets but the quote desk still spends its day reading customer emails, finding the applicable line, applying margins and composing the reply. Freitt stores rates and charges too, but its defining workflow begins in the RFQ inbox rather than in the rate supply.
| Dimension | Rate-management platform | Freitt |
|---|---|---|
| Where the work begins | The carrier, agent or internal rate supply. | A customer RFQ arriving by email.Confirm with vendor |
| The primary job | Normalise, compare, search and distribute rates. | Prepare a traceable customer quote for a person to review and send.Confirm with vendor |
| Live carrier pricing | Often central — but it varies enormously between products in this category. | Carrier rate integrations are included in the Growth plan.Confirm with vendor |
| Inbox and attachment parsing | Varies widely by vendor. Ask specifically, and ask about attachments as well as bodies. | The central product workflow, including PDF, Excel, Word and image attachments.Confirm with vendor |
| Human approval before send | Product dependent. | A person controls the customer send in every plan. Exception and approval routing rules are explicit, on Growth.Confirm with vendor |
| Relationship to your TMS | May replace or integrate with parts of the stack — sometimes a migration project. | Positioned beside the current TMS. Nothing to migrate.Confirm with vendor |
Where a source does not answer a question, this table says so. Nothing here is recorded as unsupported on the strength of a vendor not mentioning it.
Step
Rate-management platform
Freitt
01A new carrier tariff arrives
Rate-management platform:Ingested, normalised and made searchable across the whole rate estate. This is the category’s core strength.
Freitt:Uploaded as a sheet and mapped, in the layout it arrived in.
02A customer emails an RFQ
Rate-management platform:Someone reads it and searches the platform for a matching rate. The reading and the search are still manual.
Freitt:The request is read, structured, and matched against your mapped rates.
03Comparing options
Rate-management platform:Strong: rank and compare many rates, sometimes including live market pricing.
Freitt:Selects a valid approved line from your own sheets and shows which one it used.
04Producing the customer reply
Rate-management platform:Varies by product — some generate a quote document, some hand you numbers to paste.
Freitt:A customer-ready draft in your format, for a person to review and send.
Reasons not to choose Freitt.
Rate supply at scale.
Many carriers, many partners, many formats, changing constantly. Normalising that estate is a real and difficult job, and it is what these products are built for.
Live market connectivity and booking.
If you need spot rates, live capacity and direct carrier booking, that is a connectivity product. Freitt is not one.
Procurement and tendering.
Running a tender, benchmarking what you were offered, and deciding what to contract for next year.
They are not mutually exclusive.
A desk can normalise its rate supply in one system and answer customer RFQs in another. Ask both vendors what an integration would actually involve before assuming either.
Diagnose the bottleneck first.
Time one week honestly. If most of the delay is finding and trusting a rate, look at rate management. If most of it is reading emails, calculating and typing replies, look at quote automation.
Compare the product, not the label.
Several platforms in this category do some quoting, and some quoting products store rates. The category name on the website is not the answer — the demo is.
On pricing
Pricing in the rate-management category varies from per-seat to per-lane to platform fees, and much of it is quoted rather than published. Freitt publishes a per-user monthly price with no per-quote charge; see the pricing page for current figures.
Questions buyers actually ask
Yes — it stores your rates and charges, maps your sheets, and tracks validity. What it is not is a rate procurement or market-connectivity platform. The distinction is where the workflow starts: with a customer request, not with the rate supply.
Often, yes, and for a large rate estate that is the sensible shape. Ask each vendor what a supported integration actually looks like today rather than what is on a roadmap — and get it in writing.
It may be, for storing rates. Test the other half: when a customer emails an RFQ at 4pm, how much of the reply does the module produce, and how much does a person still assemble by hand?
Where every claim came from
Last reviewed 10 September 2026. Every row in the table above carries its own check date in the page source.
See it live
Bring one RFQ and its matching rate sheet
Thirty minutes on your own lane, not a demo dataset. Bring one rate request and the matching rate sheet — we will show you how Freitt reads it, prices it and drafts the reply.
30 minutes · no deck · your rates stay private