Compare / Samsara Inc.
Rutba vs Samsara
Telematics hardware, dashcams and driver-behaviour scoring — the category we deliberately do not enter, and the honest place to say why.
Checked 6 September 2026Samsara — platform and products ↗
What Samsara is
A connected-operations platform sold with its own hardware: vehicle gateways, AI dashcams, asset trackers and environmental sensors, feeding real-time location, driver-behaviour scoring, video review of incidents, electronic logging for hours-of-service, and equipment monitoring. Sold on multi-year hardware and licence contracts, usually through a sales cycle.
Who it genuinely suits
- Fleets large enough that a percentage point of fuel or insurance is real money
- Operators under hours-of-service regimes that require electronic logging
- Anyone whose insurer prices on telematics or camera evidence
- Businesses that want one vendor for the box, the video and the platform
Where they win
What Samsara 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.
The hardware, and everything that follows from it
Live position, harsh-braking events, video of the incident, fuel-efficiency scoring per driver. None of it exists without a box in the vehicle, and we do not sell one and do not plan to.
Video evidence when something happens
A dashcam clip attached to an incident settles arguments that nothing else settles, and it is a large part of why fleets buy this category. We record an incident with attachments; we do not record the road.
Compliance in regimes that require a device
Where electronic logging is mandated, the device is the compliance. Our duty-and-hours records are entered rather than captured, which is not the same evidential standard.
Scale, and the operations teams to match
Thousands of vehicles, installation programmes, dedicated support. We are not competing at that size and it would be silly to pretend to.
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.
You may not need any of it
A twelve-van operation that wants to know what is due for service, who is driving what, and what a kilometre costs is buying a telematics platform to read four numbers. That is the buyer we are for, and the honest comparison is not close on features — it is about whether the features are the ones you needed.
No hardware, no installation, no multi-year contract
Nothing to fit, nothing to remove when a vehicle leaves the fleet, and no term commitment tied to boxes bolted into vans.
We can read their box rather than replace it
Telematics ingest is the planned shape — the same one Fleetio chose. An operator who already has Samsara hardware is not somebody we ask to remove it.
Position is a decision here, not a default
Tracking a vehicle tracks a person. We took the decision not to key a position to somebody by default and wrote down that we had not taken it. Whether that is an advantage depends entirely on who you ask — a fleet manager and a driver will answer differently, and both answers are legitimate.
And the one that is not a feature
Samsara Inc. 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 | Samsara |
|---|---|---|
| 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 | Partly |
| 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 Samsara Inc.’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 Samsara 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
This is usually not a migration. An operator with Samsara hardware under contract should keep it.
- 2
The realistic overlap is us for maintenance, compliance and cost, reading position from their box once ingest is built.
- 3
If your insurance premium is priced on their telematics, that is a commercial fact no software comparison overrides.
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
Buy Samsara if you need the box: live position, video evidence, behaviour scoring or mandated electronic logging. We are not an alternative to that and this page will not pretend otherwise. We are an alternative to the spreadsheet a smaller operator keeps beside it.
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.
Note before you compare: Rutba Fleet, Rutba Facilities are not generally available yet. Any row above that we win on them is a claim about what ships, not about what you can buy today.
Rutba Fleet
Coming soonFleet management software
Vehicles and their operating profile on the asset register, drivers and licences, walkaround checks and defects, duty and hours, fuel and energy, incidents, and cost per kilometre.
- The vehicle profile on the asset register - no second vehicle table
- Drivers, licences and the checks they are due
- Walkaround checks and defects from the cab
Custom pricing
Rutba Facilities
Early accessAsset & facilities management software
Every asset the organisation owns — laptops, machines, vehicles, buildings and their spaces — in one register with custody events that never lose the trail, lifecycle with contracts and licences, and the work that keeps them running against the same asset the accountant and the HR officer see.
- One asset register the whole estate reads from
- Custody as insert-only events — who had what and when it was returned
- Sites, buildings and spaces, with assets attached to each
Includes: Assets · Facilities
From $9 per user / month
Head to head
Samsara against the others.
You are comparing Samsara 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 Samsara?
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.