Carrier Vetting Software in 2026: A Buyer's Guide for Brokers and Shippers

A broker I know paid for a carrier vetting platform for three years. Good tool. Green checkmarks, clean dashboard, the whole team used it.

Then a reefer load went sideways. A carrier, call it MC-1572046, rear-ended a passenger car in Ohio, and the demand letter came in at $2.4 million. The broker's attorney asked a simple question: "Show me what you looked at before you gave them the load."

The software had the carrier's current profile. It did not have a dated record of what the carrier's authority, insurance and safety data looked like on the morning of tender, or who on the team approved it, or why. The checkmark was green in March. Nobody could prove it was green in January.

That's the gap this guide is about. Not "which tool has the nicest dashboard," but which tool leaves you with something you can actually hand to an insurer, an attorney or a jury.

Why the buying criteria changed this year

On May 14, 2026, the Supreme Court decided Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC (No. 24-1238) unanimously. The holding: the FAAAA's safety exception preserves state-law negligent-selection claims against freight brokers. The preemption defense a lot of brokers were quietly counting on is gone.

Shippers should read that closely too. Negligent selection is a state-law theory about whoever chose the carrier. If your team picks carriers directly, or picks the broker who picks the carrier, a plaintiff's lawyer is going to ask how you made that choice.

So the question for any vetting software is no longer just "does it catch bad carriers?" It's also "when I'm asked to explain this selection two years from now, what does the tool give me?"

The seven things vetting software has to do now

1. Pull live data at the moment you tender

Authority status, insurance filings, out-of-service orders and safety data change. A tool that shows you a cached profile from last week is giving you last week's carrier.

The FMCSR baseline here is 49 CFR § 387.9: for-hire carriers hauling general freight in interstate commerce need at least $750,000 in public liability coverage on file. The load-tender "so what": your tool should show the BIPD filing that's actually on file with FMCSA today, and flag it when the coverage is cancelled or pending cancellation, before you dispatch, not after.

2. Catch identity fraud, not just bad safety scores

Double brokering, chameleon carriers and hijacked MC numbers don't show up in a safety rating. Look for related-entity checks (shared phones, emails, addresses and officers across DOT numbers), prior revoked authorities, and some way to confirm the truck that shows up is the truck you booked.

3. Read the insurance certificate, not just the FMCSA filing

The FMCSA filing tells you a carrier has liability coverage on file. It doesn't tell you their cargo limit, their reefer breakdown exclusion, or whether the COI they emailed you was issued to a different company. Ask whether the tool reads the actual certificate and checks the named insured against the carrier you're screening.

4. Keep watching after you approve

A carrier you approved in June can lose authority in August. Monitoring with alerts is table stakes now. The better question is what happens to your file when something changes. Do you just get an email, or does the tool record that you saw it and re-screened?

5. Vet brokers too (this one's for shippers)

If you're a shipper handing freight to a broker, the broker is your carrier selection. Under 49 CFR § 387.307, a property broker has to maintain $75,000 in financial security, a BMC-84 surety bond or a BMC-85 trust fund. The load-tender "so what": check that the broker's authority is active and that the bond or trust is actually on file before you tender, and know that $75,000 is shared across every claim against that broker. It's not your cargo coverage.

6. Produce a record you can hand to someone

This is the one most buyers skip, and it's the one that matters when something goes wrong. You want a dated, organized record of:

• what data you reviewed and when
• what your policy required
• who approved the carrier, and any exception they signed off on
• proof the record wasn't edited after the fact

If the tool can't export that as a single document, you're relying on screenshots and memory.

7. Be priced like something you'll use on every load

If the price punishes you for screening (per-lookup fees, caps, "contact sales for more seats"), your team will screen less. Unlimited screening at a published price is the setup that actually gets used.

How the main tools line up

I'll keep this fair. Every tool below has real strengths, and plenty of teams run more than one. Competitor details come from each company's own public website as of October 2026. Prices change, so confirm with them directly.

Highway is built around carrier identity: verifying identity, authority and insurance before the load is awarded, secure rate-con delivery, per-load protection (Load Lock) and a Know Your Driver check near pickup. It has named TMS integrations and a Performance Guarantee of up to $100K on qualifying shipments. Pricing isn't published; brokers book a demo. Shippers aren't a listed audience. Full comparison: DOTScreener vs Highway

RMIS (now Truckstop RMIS) is an established onboarding and compliance platform: a document portal, continuous compliance monitoring with alerts, and identity badges that compare a selfie to a government ID. It sells shipper plans and integrates with major TMS providers. Truckstop lists RMIS Lite starting at $340/month, with RMIS Pro by quote. Full comparison: DOTScreener vs RMIS

Carrier Assure grades carriers A through F against similar-sized peers, recalculated daily, using FMCSA data, tracking data and related-entity checks. It has a free Individual plan and lists Premium at $149/month after an offer period. Its own FAQ says it doesn't yet vet insurance policies (it analyzes FMCSA insurance data), and shippers are listed as "coming soon." Full comparison: DOTScreener vs Carrier Assure

DOTScreener is the one I built, so weigh my opinion accordingly. It screens carriers against your written policy with live FMCSA data, screens brokers' authority and BMC-84/85 security, reads COIs with AI and quarantines a certificate issued to the wrong company, monitors approved carriers daily, and produces a timestamped Carrier Selection Record with a hash-chained audit trail on every screen. When a monitored carrier's result gets worse, it re-screens and files a fresh, dated record. It's $99/month plus $14.99 per additional user with unlimited screens and a 14-day free trial. It doesn't have named TMS integrations yet and doesn't insure loads.

Ten questions to ask on every demo

Bring these to any vendor, including us:

1. Is the data pulled live when I screen, or from a cache? How old can it be?

2. Can I see the carrier's FMCSA insurance filing and read their COI in the same place?

3. What happens if the COI's named insured doesn't match the carrier?

4. How do you catch a carrier that shares a phone, email or address with a revoked authority?

5. After I approve a carrier, what triggers an alert, and what gets added to my file?

6. Can I screen a broker, including their BMC-84/85 security?

7. Can I export one document showing what we reviewed, when, and who approved it?

8. How would I prove that document wasn't edited later?

9. Is screening unlimited? What does a second, fifth or tenth user cost?

10. Can I start today without a sales call?

If a vendor gets vague on 7 and 8, that tells you what you'll have when the demand letter shows up.

How I document this

When I evaluate a carrier, my file for that load has five things, all dated the day of tender:

1. The FMCSA authority status and the BIPD filing on record, checked against the § 387.9 minimum for that freight

2. The COI, with the named insured matched to the MC/DOT I'm screening

3. The result against my written carrier-selection policy, PASS / WARN / FAIL, with the specific checks that drove it

4. If it was a WARN I approved anyway, the reason in plain English and the name of the person who approved it

5. Any monitoring alert after approval, and what I did about it

That's the file. A tool should build it for me as a byproduct of screening, not as a second job. If yours doesn't, start keeping it by hand today. A dated note in your TMS beats a green checkmark nobody can reproduce.

If you want to see what that looks like as one document, here's a sample Carrier Selection Record.

— Mason Lavallet

Founder, DOTScreener.com