KEY TAKEAWAYS
Circuit Route Planner is now Spoke Route Planner. Same app, same company, new name. If you searched for Circuit and landed somewhere called Spoke, you're in the right place.
Free plans compared: Geo2 gives you 15 stops per route. Circuit/Spoke gives you 10.
Unlimited stops: Geo2 Pro is $7.99/month. Spoke Standard is $20/month. That's the single biggest reason drivers switch.
Proof of delivery: free on Geo2. Circuit/Spoke doesn't offer proof of delivery in its app at all, so if you need photo or signature confirmation on a drop, it's a hard miss for them.
Geo2 has an AI voice assistant on the free plan (10 requests per day in the mobile app). Almost no competitor offers one at any price.
Circuit/Spoke is genuinely good. It's been downloaded by over 10 million drivers, the app is polished, and the optimizer is fast. You're not switching because it's bad. You're switching because of what it costs.
Other alternatives worth knowing: Route4Me, Zeo, RoadWarrior, OptimoRoute. All are listed below with honest notes.
Wait, why is Circuit called Spoke now?
Circuit rebranded to Spoke. The driver app is Spoke Route Planner. The dispatch product is Spoke Dispatch. It's the same company and the same software, so if you've been using Circuit for years, nothing under the bonnet changed.
Worth knowing because half the comparison articles out there still say "Circuit" and quote pricing from two rebrands ago. Check the date on anything you read, including this.
What is the best free alternative to Circuit Route Planner?
Geo2 is the best free alternative to Circuit Route Planner, because it gives you more stops on the free plan and includes proof of delivery, which Circuit doesn't offer at all.
No free plan is unlimited. Circuit/Spoke gives you 10 stops per route. Geo2 gives you 15. Neither is a full day's work for a real multi-drop courier. If you're doing 60 or 80 drops, you will be paying somebody, and the only question is how much.
Where the free plans actually differ is what's in them:
What is the cheapest alternative to Circuit for unlimited stops?
Geo2 Pro at $7.99/month is the cheapest route planner with unlimited stops. Spoke Standard is $20/month for the same thing.
That gap is the whole argument. Over a year it's roughly $96 against $240. For a self-employed courier that is not a rounding error, it's a tank and a half of diesel.
Spoke also runs a Lite plan at $10/month, but it's a cut-down feature set rather than the full app.
What if I run a small fleet?
This post is about the driver app, so briefly: Spoke has a separate dispatch product with its own web dashboard. If you run 3 to 10 drivers, Geo2 Advanced is $15.99 per user per month with multi-driver dispatch, live tracking and time windows, at a published per-user price. Where Geo2 pulls ahead for a fleet is the driver-side experience: the AI assistant, voice stop adding and free POD your drivers use on every round.
What does Circuit/Spoke actually do better?
Scale and reliability. Over 10 million drivers have downloaded it. It's been battle-tested on more rounds than most planners will ever see.
Reviews. Circuit/Spoke has hundreds of thousands of ratings. Geo2 has a 4.5 average from 74 combined reviews (4.6 from 11 on the App Store, 4.4 from 63 on Google Play). We're the newer app and the review count says so. If you want the safe, boring, everyone-uses-it choice, that's them, not us.
Polish. The Circuit app is genuinely slick. Stop entry is fast and the optimizer is quick.
No ads on free. Circuit's free plan has no ads. Geo2's does. That's a genuine point in Circuit's favour.
What it doesn't have: an AI voice assistant, height and weight restriction routing on the free tier, or a $7.99 unlimited price.
The other Circuit alternatives
Geo2 is not the only option, so here is the rest of the field.
Zeo Route Planner optimises up to 12 stops per route free with unlimited routes, and charges $15.99 a month for unlimited stops per route. It has an unusually wide range of ways to add stops, including Excel import. It has no AI assistant. See our Zeo route planner alternative comparison.
RoadWarrior gives 8 stops per route free, and those routes are locked to the device that created them. Pro costs $14.99 a month and caps routes at 120 stops. See our RoadWarrior alternative comparison.
Route4Me's app gives 10 stops free but deletes each route after 7 days, and charges $9.99 a month for unlimited. Their web platform is a separate enterprise product sold by sales quote. See our Route4Me alternative comparison.
Google Maps caps at 9 stops and never reorders them, which makes it a navigation app rather than a multi stop route planner.