Route optimization software in Italy: how to choose

People looking for delivery route software usually start from a list of features: Excel import, driver app, tracking, time windows. Almost every product in the category has them, and a comparison built that way ends on price. The differences that matter sit elsewhere. They are in how each tool handles the constraints of your hardest route, in the data it agrees to run a trial on, and in what it can tell you beyond tomorrow’s plan.

This guide is for whoever, at a distribution company, a logistics provider or a courier, has to choose a planning tool and wants to walk into the demo with the right questions. It does not say which product is best, because the answer changes from one fleet to the next; it says how to find out on your own. We write it as a vendor, which is why there is a section at the end on where Optivo fits. The product capabilities mentioned were verified on 19 October 2026.

In short

Five families of tools are sold under the same name: self-service planners, on-demand dispatch platforms, telematics with a routing module, enterprise suites and platforms with assisted onboarding. They solve different problems.
In Italy a few constraints decide: multiple time windows, limited traffic zones (ZTL) with different rules in every municipality, owner-operators alongside company vehicles, fixed routes and, from 1 July 2026, driving-time rules for part of the van fleet too.
The trial runs on your own data, on the hardest day of the month, and is compared with the plan you actually ran on kilometers, vehicles used, hours and time windows met.
Planning software also helps decide the structure: how many vehicles you need, what a customer costs to serve, whether a fixed route still holds up. There the answer is worth something when it comes with feasible routes, not with an average.
For the order of magnitude of savings, the literature points to 5% to 20% of transportation costs. Where a fleet falls depends on its constraints and on how good its starting planning is.

The families of tools

For many, the starting point is an Excel sheet and a navigation app. Navigation finds the road between stops that are already in order; it does not decide which vehicle serves which customer, or in what sequence. Optimization software solves that second problem, known as the Vehicle Routing Problem, each product in its own way. Knowing which family a product belongs to saves half the pointless demos.

Family	Problem it solves	How it is usually bought	What to check in the demo
Self-service planners	Daily routes with standard constraints such as time windows and capacity	Public price per driver or per stop, free trial, self-activation	Whether it handles the constraints of your sector, and who helps when something does not add up
On-demand dispatch	Orders arriving during the day, independent drivers, customer notifications	Subscription tied to delivery volume	Whether it plans routes with many constraints or only assigns in real time
Telematics with a routing module	Knowing where vehicles are; routing is an add-on	Fee per vehicle, often with the device	Whether it assigns stops across several vehicles or reorders those of a single one, and up to how many
Enterprise suites	Operational, tactical and strategic planning for large networks, including multi-country	Quote and implementation project, often with a partner	Time, cost and people for the rollout, and who governs the integrations
Platforms with assisted onboarding	Planned routes with sector constraints, onboarding done with the vendor’s team	Quote based on fleet, modules and volumes	How long onboarding takes and what happens when one of your constraints is missing

Optivo sits in the last row, and we come back to it at the end. The families are not watertight: some self-service planners handle advanced constraints, and some suites also sell to mid-sized companies. They exist to put the right question to the right vendor.

The constraints that decide in Italy

The difference between a plan on paper and a plan that survives its first morning lies in the constraints. Some weigh more in Italy than elsewhere, and they are the first to test.

Multiple, strict time windows. Shops open 8-12 and 15-18, pharmacies, restaurants that only receive before service, dock slots booked at retail distribution centres. The tool has to accept several windows on the same stop and treat a dock slot as a fixed time.
ZTL and historic centres. Each municipality writes its own rules: access hours, permits tied to the individual vehicle, size limits. Ask how the tool represents them: as a zone with its hours, as a vehicle authorization, as a size limit on the single stop, or not at all. The rules changing urban deliveries in 2026 are covered in a separate guide.
Capacity on several dimensions. Weight, volume and parcels together, plus the separate temperature compartments of food and pharma, which cannot swap goods between them.
Several depots and several departures. Vehicles leaving one warehouse and returning to another, or coming back at midday to sort and go out again.
Owner-operators and carriers. A cost per delivery or per day next to the hourly cost of company vehicles, and routes that start or end away from the depot. If the two costs are not in the same calculation, the plan assigns stops badly, as we explain in route planning with owner-operators.
Driving times. For fleets subject to Regulation 561/2006, which from 1 July 2026 also covers part of the vans above 2.5 tonnes, breaks and driving limits belong inside the plan rather than being checked at the end of the day. Who is covered and from when is explained in our guide to driving and rest times under the Mobility Package.
Fixed routes. Pharmaceutical, grocery and food distribution run on recurring routes that drift from optimal as customers and volumes change. You need to recalculate them and change only where it pays, without upsetting drivers’ and customers’ habits.
Paired pickups and deliveries. Returns, returnable containers, goods collected in the morning that go back out in the afternoon.

The quickest way not to waste time is to write down your own constraints before the demo and ask the vendor to say, for each one, whether it can already be activated or has to be developed, and how long that takes. For Optivo’s constraints the answer is already public: with the Optivo constraint check you select the constraints that really apply to your operation and see in two minutes which ones the engine already handles, without booking a demo.

Which fleet each family fits

There is no right tool in absolute terms, only the right one for a certain way of delivering. The table matches the most common situations with the family to look at first.

If your situation is this	What matters most	Look first at
Few vehicles, simple routes, nobody who can spend time on onboarding	Clear pricing and self-activation	Self-service planners
Deliveries arriving during the day, with riders or independent drivers	Real-time assignment and customer notifications	On-demand dispatch
You already have telematics and need to order the stops of a few vehicles	Working inside the tool you already use	Your telematics’ routing module, checking its limits
Large network, several countries, an IT team governing integrations	Planning depth and ERP integrations	Enterprise suites
Dozens of vehicles on planned routes, sector constraints, owner-operators, fixed routes	Constraints and onboarding with people who know the problem	Platforms with assisted onboarding

The room for improvement grows with vehicles and stops. Below 10-15 deliveries a day per vehicle it is smaller; above that, manual planning almost always leaves efficiency on the table. Who plans today matters too: if it is one person with an Excel file, the first criterion is that the tool accepts that file as it is.

Tomorrow’s routes and the structure of the fleet

Most comparisons stop at the daily plan. The questions worth more come up less often:

How many vehicles do we really need? Take one out of the scenario, recalculate, and check whether the routes still fit the windows and the shifts.
What does it cost to serve a customer, or to open an area? You need the full cost of the stops, not the marginal cost of adding one to a route that leaves anyway.
Do our fixed routes still hold up? Recalculated every month with updated data, they show where efficiency has been lost.
What do we commit to in a tender or a contract? In public tenders the vehicles and kilometers of the transport plan become points first and obligations afterwards.

Operational, tactical and strategic planning are the three classic levels of supply chain planning, and it is worth asking every vendor which ones their product works on. In Italian distribution the question matters, because a delivery costs mostly time. In our model of a pharmacy delivery, built only from public sources, between 49% and 64% of the full cost is time rather than kilometers. Decisions that remove hours or vehicles weigh more than those that shave kilometers.

The criterion is a single one. Is the scenario built on your data and with your constraints, and does it return routes or only a total? A spreadsheet can say that two vehicles fewer will do; an engine that respects your constraints says it by showing the routes that work without them, stop by stop.

Questions to ask a vendor

What data will we run the trial on? Yours, from a difficult day, not a demo dataset. It is the only way to see the constraints at work.
How do orders get in? With a fixed format to prepare, or with the file you already have? Does it accept PDFs, photos, plain text? And what happens when a field is missing?
Which of my constraints can be activated today and which have to be developed? Get it in writing, item by item, with timings.
How do you handle the ZTL? Zone with hours, vehicle authorization, size limit on the stop, or nothing.
Do you assign stops across vehicles or put in order those of a single vehicle? Up to how many stops and vehicles?
How close to optimal is your solution, and how do you know? There are public instances with a best known solution, such as the Gehring and Homberger set. A vendor that has measured its engine can state the gap and the computing time.
Can I simulate a scenario and compare it with today’s plan? One vehicle fewer, a new customer, a different window.
How does it connect to my management system? Documented APIs, Excel or CSV exports, who develops what. Planning software should work alongside your ERP, not ask you to replace it.
What does the driver do? What they install, how they log in, how many steps it takes to close a delivery, what they see when the network comes and goes.
What gets measured afterwards? Is the plan compared with the route actually driven, or does it stay a theoretical exercise?
How is the price built? Per driver, per stop or on planned volumes, what happens when volumes grow, and what is included among devices, onboarding and support.
Who runs the onboarding, how long does it take, and in which language is support?

How to run the trial

Pick one or two real weeks, including the worst days: peaks, absences, customers with narrow windows.
Fix the measures first: kilometers, vehicles used, driving hours, windows met and time to prepare the plan.
Compare against the plan you actually ran on those days, not against an ideal.
Have your planner review the routes. A route that someone who knows the territory rejects does not count as a saving.
If you can, have part of the routes driven and compare planned with executed.

For the order of magnitude there is a classic reference. The real-world applications collected in Toth and Vigo, SIAM 2002 show that planning with computerized procedures generally saves between 5% and 20% of transportation costs. If a promise sits far outside that range, ask what data it was measured on. To run the numbers on your own fleet, see our deep dive on the ROI of route optimization software.

Where Optivo fits

Optivo is an Italian platform and belongs to the family of platforms with assisted onboarding. It works with companies in pharmaceutical and food distribution. It is built for those who deliver on planned routes, with constraints that Italian cases have made specific.

OptivoRoute plans routes on a library of constraints that can already be activated: temperature compartments with variable geometry, paired pickups and deliveries, transfers away from the depot, owner-operators paid per delivery alongside company vehicles, fixed routes on a weekly calendar, ZTL as a vehicle authorization. If a constraint is missing, we build it with the customer.
Orders come in as they arrive, from Excel, CSV, PDF, photos or text, uploaded or pasted. If a field is missing the system looks for it in the history and, if it does not add up, asks.
Drivers work from a browser app and close a delivery in three taps; the Control Tower follows routes during the day; OptivoTrack tracks vehicles with an OBD device, through the CAN bus or with no hardware, using the manufacturer’s data.
The same engine is used to simulate fleet decisions on the customer’s own data and constraints.
On the public C1_10_1 benchmark (1,000 orders with time windows, from the Gehring and Homberger set) the engine comes within 0.04% of the best known solution in 34.5 seconds.
We do not publish a price list: the quote is sized on the fleet, the modules and the volumes you plan, agreed upfront. Onboarding can be immediate for standard configurations and take up to a few weeks with customizations or training, always with our team.

It is not designed for instant dispatch, such as food delivery or on-demand riders: that is what the tools in the second family are for.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best route optimization software in Italy?

There is no best one in absolute terms. The choice depends on four things: whether routes are planned or deliveries arrive during the day, how many constraints there are and which ones, how many vehicles and stops are involved, and whether you only need tomorrow’s routes or also decisions on the structure of the fleet. The most reliable way to choose is a trial on your own data, on the hardest day of the month.

How much does route optimization software cost?

There are three models: a price per driver per month, a price per stop or per delivery, or a quote built on fleet, modules and volumes. In the comparison, what matters is what is included (tracking devices, onboarding, support) and what happens when volumes grow. Optivo works on quotes, with no public price list.

How long does it take to get started?

A self-service planner can be activated within a day. With sector constraints, integrations and driver training it usually takes a few weeks. The real time depends on how tidy the starting data already is and on how many constraints need configuring.

Do I need to change my management system?

No. Planning software should work alongside your ERP: it receives orders through an Excel or CSV export or through APIs, and returns the routes. Master data, order cycle and invoicing stay where they are.

Isn’t Google Maps enough?

For one vehicle with a few stops already in order, yes. When you have to decide which vehicle serves which customer, in what sequence and under which constraints, it is a different problem. The difference is explained in the practical guide to optimizing delivery routes.

The next step

If you want to run the trial on your own data, book a demo and bring the hardest day of the month: we go through it together, with your constraints.

Sources consulted on 19 October 2026. Toth and Vigo, The Vehicle Routing Problem, SIAM 2002, ch. 1 · Gehring and Homberger, VRPTW instances with 1,000 customers and their best known solutions · OptivoRoute constraint library, items that can be activated as of 19 October 2026 · Model of the cost of a pharmacy delivery, public sources as of 10 September 2026.