Carrier Vetting Tools Compared: Prices, Tiers, and Which Fits a Small Brokerage

The main carrier vetting tools brokers compare are Truckstop RMIS, Descartes MyCarrierPortal, Highway, Carrier Assure, SaferWatch, and Draylo — and they split into two groups by price and job. The upper tier (RMIS from $340/month, MyCarrierPortal from $515/month, Highway quote-only and priced on brokerage volume) is onboarding-automation software: branded carrier-registration portals, deep TMS integration, and a compliance workflow built for brokerages that onboard hundreds of carriers. The lighter tier (Carrier Assure at $149/month, SaferWatch quote-based with a TMS-integrated tier advertised around $99.95/month, and Draylo starting at $49/month) is built to give you a fast read on a specific carrier before you tender.

So the real question isn't "which tool is best" — it's "which job are you buying for." If you run a 1–5 person brokerage tendering a handful of loads a week, the enterprise onboarding suites are priced and built for a problem you don't have. What you usually need is a live federal read, a clear verdict, verified insurance, and a dated record you can show later — the read-verify-audit layer, not the onboarding machine around it.

Most "carrier vetting tools" comparisons hide behind "contact sales." Here are the anchored starting prices side by side. The pattern is worth naming: the tools that publish a low entry price are built to be self-serve; the ones that quote on your brokerage volume are built to be sold to larger operations by a rep. If a tool won't tell you the price without a sales call, that tells you who it's priced for.

RMIS, MyCarrierPortal, and Highway are strong products — they're just built for a bigger job than most small brokerages have. Truckstop RMIS Lite gives you a branded carrier-registration site and daily compliance status updates, and the Premium tier (quote-only) adds live support and advanced carrier sourcing. Descartes MyCarrierPortal's Standard plan bundles onboarding, identity and fraud prevention, insurance validation, FMCSA and DOT monitoring, a prebuilt TMS integration, and a custom-branded portal for unlimited users — and it can auto-suspend a carrier from use if they fall out of compliance or drop (for example, a Carrier Assure score sliding from A to F) until you review them.

Highway takes a different shape: it's free for carriers and paid for brokers, centering on "Carrier Identity" verification and the Trusted Freight Exchange. In 2026 it became the exclusive reseller of Bluewire's Broker Package — three report types powered by a GAP Score built on 652,000+ carrier evaluations — and it partnered with Transfix to embed Highway vetting directly inside the Transfix TMS. That's real depth. If you need carrier self-registration at scale, vetting embedded in your booking flow, or a load-board exchange, this is the tier that delivers it.

One honest note on features: COI reading, insurance monitoring against your minimums, and append-only audit trails are now table stakes in this tier — MyCarrierPortal, RMIS, and Highway all read and verify COIs, and MyCarrierPortal shipped an append-only AuditLog. So the upper tier isn't behind on capability. The question is whether you need the whole onboarding-automation suite wrapped around those capabilities, and whether the price fits your load count.

Carrier Assure sits between the tiers. It produces a simple A–F score built from six factors — FMCSA and DOT safety records, insurance status, tracking reliability, community feedback, and more — and flags double-brokering, identity theft, and carrier impersonation. The Individual tier is free but limited to submitting SuspectCarrier reports; unlimited A–F scores and full data access start at $149/month (Premium), with an Enterprise tier for API and analytics. It's also integrated into MyCarrierPortal, so its scores can appear inside that platform's vetting.

SaferWatch, now owned by Truckstop and folded into its screening-and-monitoring lineup, offers unlimited requesting and monitoring of authority, insurance lapses, safety ratings, and complaints (stolen loads, fraud, double-brokering), plus identity changes and shared addresses or VINs. It positions explicitly on price — "hundreds, sometimes thousands, less per month than RMIS" — with a TMS-integrated tier advertised around $99.95/month and a broker-facing tier that's quote-based.

Draylo is the read-verify-audit layer, and it starts at $49/month (Starter) on a four-tier ladder — Starter $49, Growth $149, Pro $349, Scale $749 — that scales the carrier volume, seats, and features you get, not the standard of care. You enter a USDOT number and get a live FMCSA read, a red/yellow/green verdict, COI reading, an append-only audit trail, and daily monitoring on carriers you're using, on every paid tier. It also handles onboarding both ways: send a carrier a broker-branded link to upload their own packet and e-sign, or upload their documents yourself if you already have them. It's built for the small brokerage that wants a fast, correct answer and a defensible record — without paying enterprise onboarding-automation prices for it.

Where the tiers matter is a like-for-like comparison. Draylo Pro at $349/month is the honest peer to Truckstop RMIS at $340; Draylo Growth at $149 lines up against Carrier Assure at $149; and Draylo Starter at $49 is the entry point a small shop actually starts on. Draylo's honest wedge is price and simplicity, not feature uniqueness. As noted above, the upper tier reads COIs and keeps audit trails too. What's different is what you're paying for and how much there is to run: a Starter plan at a tenth of the RMIS or MyCarrierPortal starting price, and a tool you can use in the time it takes to read a rate confirmation.

Here's when NOT to pick Draylo, plainly: if you need vetting embedded inside your booking flow, a load-board exchange like Highway's Trusted Freight Exchange, or advanced carrier sourcing at scale, the upper tier wins — that's what it's for, and Draylo doesn't try to be that. Draylo does carrier vetting, onboarding, and the defensible record; it isn't a TMS or a marketplace. And if you'd rather do the checks by hand, our step-by-step guide to checking if a carrier is legit and the defensible carrier-file checklist walk the manual process.

A vetting tool is only as good as how fast it reflects FMCSA reality, and 2026 makes that concrete. FMCSA's new Motus registration system is phasing in through Q2 2026, with legacy registration systems beginning to yield to Motus on May 14, 2026. During a transition like this, a tool that reads live federal state will show you what's true today; a tool leaning on a stale daily cache can show "active" when the record has already moved — or the reverse.

So when you compare tools, ask each vendor a direct question: do you read the live FMCSA record at check time, or a cached copy refreshed on a schedule? Draylo reads live. For the full picture of why a cached tool can disagree with FMCSA right now, see FMCSA says active, your vetting tool says inactive — the Motus transition.

Match the tool to your volume and the job you actually have. If you onboard carriers at scale and need a branded registration portal, TMS-embedded booking, or advanced sourcing, price out RMIS, MyCarrierPortal, and Highway — and expect a sales call for the ones that don't publish. If you mostly need a scoring signal, Carrier Assure or SaferWatch give you that more cheaply. If you're a small brokerage that needs a fast live read, a clear verdict, verified insurance, and a defensible record — at a price that fits a handful of loads a week — that's the gap Draylo's Starter tier is built for, and the ladder above it ($149 / $349 / $749) is there for when your carrier volume and seat count grow.