Compare / AfterShip Limited
Rutba vs AfterShip
The post-purchase layer: multi-carrier tracking, branded tracking pages and delivery notifications, for merchants who ship with everybody.
Checked 6 September 2026AfterShip — pricing and product ↗
What AfterShip is
A tracking and post-purchase platform that normalises status from many hundreds of carriers onto one branded page, sends the notifications, handles returns, and reports on carrier performance. Sold per shipment tracked, with tiers for the branded page, the notification channels and the returns portal.
Who it genuinely suits
- Merchants shipping through several carriers who want one page for all of them
- Ecommerce teams whose support inbox is mostly "where is my order"
- Anyone who wants returns self-served rather than emailed
- Businesses comparing carriers on delivered-on-time performance
Where they win
What AfterShip does better than us.
Every comparison page on this site has this section and none of them is empty. If it were, you would be right to discount the rest of the page.
Hundreds of carriers, normalised
Their whole value is that a status from any carrier looks the same on one page. We track our own consignments and the couriers we dispatch; we do not normalise the world's carriers, and for a merchant shipping through six of them that is the product.
A returns portal that works
Self-served returns with labels, rules and refund triggers. Ours is a named milestone; theirs is shipped and mature.
Notification channels, including the ones people read
Email, SMS, WhatsApp and app push, with templating and per-market rules. We send the recipient a link by mail; the rest is planned.
Carrier performance reporting
On-time rates by carrier, lane and service level, which is how a shipping manager decides who to stop using. Ours reports on our own deliveries only.
Where we win
What Rutba does that this does not.
Argued from how the products are built rather than from a feature list, because feature lists are the part of a comparison that goes stale first.
It is your page, on your domain, reading your record
A tracking page here is the tenant's, showing the tenant's own consignment. Theirs is a third party's page with a third party's data-processing agreement, and the customer's address passes through it.
No per-shipment meter on your own deliveries
Tracking your own consignment is not a metered event here. For an operator delivering their own goods, that is most of the bill.
The status comes from the record, not from a poll
Our status changes because the consignment changed. A tracking aggregator is always one carrier poll behind, and shows what the carrier said rather than what happened.
The delivery, the stock and the invoice are the same event
A delivered consignment moves stock and can trigger the invoice. AfterShip observes the delivery; it cannot act on it.
And the one that is not a feature
AfterShip Limited will not build what you ask for. We will.
That is not a criticism of them — a vendor at their scale has to weigh your request against every other customer it touches, and schedule it behind a roadmap set a year out. Your request is a rounding error in their planning, honestly so. We are small, and the people building the product are the people you talk to: what helps everyone goes into the product at no extra charge, what is specific to you is quoted as the work it is, and when the answer is no you get the reason.
Side by side
The same six questions the hub asks of everyone.
| Question | Rutba | AfterShip |
|---|---|---|
| Runs the businessCRM, stock, orders, production and the ledger, from one vendor | Included | Not covered |
| Runs the dayMail, files, documents, chat and meetings, included rather than licensed separately | Included | Not covered |
| One set of recordsDo the modules share the records, or integrate copies of them | Included | Not covered |
| Buy it yourselfCan you subscribe and start without a partner or a sales cycle | Included | Included |
| Parts sold separatelyCan you take one piece without committing to the platform | Included | Included |
| Run it yourselfIs there a path to your own hardware | Partly | Not covered |
On price: We do not reproduce AfterShip Limited’s prices here. A list price is published and fair to quote, and it is stale within a quarter — which would make this page quietly wrong in a way you could not see. Read today’s number from them, and ours is on our pricing page in full, tier by tier.
Moving
What leaving AfterShip actually involves.
The question that decides this is not whether you should move but whether you can. This is the honest version, including the parts that do not come across.
- 1
If you ship through third-party carriers, keep AfterShip — we do not replace multi-carrier normalisation and are not trying to.
- 2
The two sit together sensibly: our record for our own vans, theirs for the parcels handed to carriers.
- 3
Do not move for the branded page alone until the live position decision is taken; ours shows progress, not a dot.
No customer has done this yet. The steps above describe the mechanism — what exports, what imports, what has to be rebuilt — rather than a migration we have run. When one has been run, this section will say whose it was.
Our actual recommendation
AfterShip is the right answer for a merchant shipping through many carriers. We are the right answer when you deliver your own goods and the tracking page should read from the order rather than from a poll of somebody else's API. Most operators of any size will want both, and that is a perfectly good outcome.
If you did move
The products this comparison is about.
With their real availability labels, which apply inside a comparison exactly as they do everywhere else on this site.
Rutba Orders
Available nowOrder management (OMS) & delivery software
The order hub where web, counter, and phone orders all land — picked, packed, dispatched, delivered, and returned, with a rider app for the last mile.
- One queue for web, counter, and phone orders
- Pick and pack workflows with stock reserved automatically
- Delivery runs assigned to drivers, tracked live
Includes: Orders · Rider · Dispatch · Track
From $19 per user / month
Rutba Inventory
Available nowInventory management & warehouse (WMS) software
Stock levels, multi-location transfers, stocktakes, and valuation — the single source of truth every other part of the business reserves and deducts against.
- Live stock across unlimited locations and bins
- Transfers with in-transit visibility
- Scheduled and rolling stocktakes with variance reporting
Includes: Stock · Warehouse Control · Procurement
From $22 per user / month
Head to head
AfterShip against the others.
You are comparing AfterShip to something, and it may well not be us. These are written to the same standard as this page — sourced, dated, and naming where each product wins.
Weighing this against AfterShip?
Tell us what you run and how you use it. We will be specific about what would improve, what would get worse, and whether the move is worth it at all.