A Tailwind TMS alternative, priced for the whole company

The short answer

Tailwind does more than a carrier needs. It covers carriers, brokers and freight forwarders in one product, which is a strength if you broker freight as well as haul it. If you only haul, you are paying for a brokerage side you will never open.

It is priced per user. That is the thing to check before anything else. Two or three logins - you, the dispatcher, whoever does the billing - and a per-seat price is several times a flat one. Tailwind now sits inside the CargoWise product line and does not publish a price on its own page any more; you request a demo or start a subscription from there.

RIZE is one price for the company. $39 a month, unlimited trucks, unlimited people. Add a dispatcher, add your spouse who does the invoices, add ten trucks - same bill.

Side by side

Checked October 2026 against what each company publishes. Tailwind's pricing now runs through CargoWise rather than its own site, so get the current per-seat figure from them before you compare.

The per-user question

This is the whole decision for most small carriers. Software sold per seat quietly pushes you to share one login, which is how you end up unable to tell who changed a rate, and why a driver never gets his own access. On a flat price you give everybody their own login because it costs nothing: the dispatcher sees loads, the driver sees only his own, and the owner sees the money.

Where Tailwind is the better fit

• You broker freight as well as haul it, and want both sides in one system.
• You need EDI or deep integrations with large shippers.
• You are heading towards the enterprise end, where the CargoWise family is a strength rather than a weight.

Where RIZE is the better fit

• You haul the freight yourself and want the carrier half done well.
• More than one person touches the system and you do not want to pay per head.
• You want the invoice, the rate con and the signed POD to go to the broker as one packet, in one click.
• Some of your drivers read Spanish and would rather the app did too.
• You would like to know the price without talking to anybody.

What switching looks like

Start a trial while your current system is still running. Put next week's loads in both for a week - it is the only honest test. Everything in RIZE exports to CSV if you want it out again, and when a trial ends nothing is deleted: the account goes read-only, and you can still see and export every record.