Comparison · prices verified 2026-08-31

Load boards compared on what they actually charge

Three boards, three different units of pricing, which is why no two comparison articles agree on the numbers.

Every price below was read from the vendor's own page on 2026-08-31. None of it is quoted from another comparison site, because when we checked those against the vendors they were wrong.

Published prices, read from each vendor on 2026-08-31

BoardEntryMidTop publishedWhat the price buys
DAT One $59Standard $169Pro $339Office per accountBroker plans are priced separately, from $159 to $449 a month.
Truckstop $42Basic $135Advanced $159Pro per user, up to 3 usersA $42 non-refundable application fee applies, and the published prices exclude fees and taxes.
123Loadboard $39Standard $59Premium $79Premium Plus per fleet, up to 10 trucksA 10 day free trial is offered on all plans.

DAT publishes five carrier tiers, Truckstop three and 123Loadboard three. The middle column is each vendor's middle published tier, not an equivalent product.

The prices are not comparable, and that is the finding

Put the three side by side and the cheapest looks obvious. It is not, because the number after the dollar sign denotes a different thing in each row.

A two-driver operation pays Truckstop's Basic tier twice, at $84 a month plus the application fee, while 123Loadboard's $39 Standard would cover both and eight more trucks. At one truck the ordering reverses again. There is no single cheapest board; there is a cheapest board for a fleet size, and any table that does not state the unit is comparing numbers that do not mean the same thing.

The headline price is the least comparable number on the page.

What the other comparison tables get wrong

Before writing this we read seven published load board comparisons. They disagree with each other, and where they can be checked against a vendor's own page, they are wrong rather than merely stale. Widely repeated figures include a DAT tier called Power Select at $195 and another called Pro Premium at $345. Neither tier appears on DAT's rate card at all. Another quotes a DAT entry plan at $45 against a published $59.

How to check any of this in under a minute. Open the vendor link in each row above. If the price you find differs from ours, the vendor changed it and we are stale, which is exactly why the retrieval date sits at the top of this page rather than in a footer. Tell us and we will re-read it.
The part no comparison covers

The expensive risk on a load board is not the subscription

A subscription costs tens of dollars a month. An unpaid load costs thousands, and it turns on whether the broker who posted it holds valid operating authority.

FMCSA maintains a public register of every revoked operating authority. Filtered to brokers it holds 110,130 revocation orders across 94,250 distinct dockets, of which 98,369 were involuntary and 11,760 were the broker surrendering its own authority. Nobody publishes this as a rate, so here it is by year, counting the involuntary ones.

2013 to 2026 2013 is MAP-21, not a trend hover a point for its value involuntary only
10,89813 1,73314 2,01915 2,12416 2,58917 2,65818 3,40619 4,06420 4,21421 6,32322 8,69423 7,57224 4,82325 1,72226

This chart counts involuntary revocations only, and that is a property of the source rather than a choice. FMCSA populates the effective-date field for 96.6% of involuntary revocations and for 92 of 200,017 voluntary ones, so any series grouped by year excludes voluntary surrenders almost entirely. Do not read their absence here as evidence they are rare: across all licence types voluntary surrenders are 12.3% of every revocation order on file. The 2013 peak is a regulatory event rather than a trend, when MAP-21 raised the broker surety bond from $10,000 to $75,000 on 1 October 2013. The final points are the current and previous year, which understate because orders are entered with a lag.

Read the middle of that chart rather than the ends. Involuntary broker revocations climbed from 3,406 in 2019 to 8,694 in 2023, which is the freight downturn arriving in the authority register about a year after it arrived in rates.

What a revocation is not. It is an authority action, not a verdict on a business. The largest single cause is an administrative lapse such as an expired insurance filing, and many are reinstated within weeks. It is not a finding of fraud and it is not evidence that anyone failed to pay a carrier. What it does tell you is narrow and useful: on that date, that broker was not lawfully able to arrange your freight. ★ Which is why the check that matters is on the day you book, not the day you onboarded them.

Questions this page answers

How much does a load board cost per month in 2026?
Read from each vendor's own page on 2026-08-31: 123Loadboard runs $39 to $79 a month for a fleet of up to ten trucks, Truckstop $42 to $159 per user with a $42 non-refundable application fee, and DAT One $59 to $339 for a carrier account. Those figures are not directly comparable because the three price on different units.
Why do load board comparison articles disagree about the price?
Because most of them are not reading the vendor. Checked against DAT's current rate card, widely repeated figures such as "Power Select at $195" and "Pro Premium at $345" name tiers that do not exist. Prices also change without notice, so any figure without a retrieval date beside it should be treated as unverified.
Which load board is cheapest?
123Loadboard has the lowest published entry price at $39 a month, and it is also the only one of the three whose published price covers a fleet rather than a seat. Cheapest per month and cheapest for your situation are different questions once the unit differs.
What is the real risk of booking a load from a load board?
Not the subscription. It is the broker on the other end: FMCSA has revoked broker operating authority 110,130 times across 94,250 distinct dockets, and 89% of those were involuntary. Check the docket is active on the day you book, not the day you were onboarded.
Does a revoked broker authority mean the broker is a fraud?
No, and reading it that way is the most common mistake. The largest category is an administrative lapse such as an expired insurance filing, and many are reinstated within weeks. What it means is narrower and more useful: on the day of the revocation that broker was not lawfully able to arrange your load.
Revocation watch

A device leaves the FMCSA ELD registry most weeks. We mail when one does.

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Method

Prices were read from DAT, Truckstop and 123Loadboard on 2026-08-31 and are reproduced as published, including the units and fees each vendor states. Where a vendor does not publish a figure we print "not published" rather than an estimate.

Broker revocation counts are computed from the FMCSA FMCSA, Revocation - All With History dataset, 1,529,083 rows covering carriers, brokers and freight forwarders, filtered to type_license = BROKER. Source last updated 2026-08-30; retrieved 2026-08-31. 94,361 of 110,130 orders carry an effective date and only those are charted.

What this page does not do. It has not tested any load board, does not rank them, and takes no position on which is better. It reports published prices, the unit each is published in, and a public federal record. No board named here is a sponsor.

Cite this page

FreightProbe. "Load Boards Compared, With Prices Read From Each Vendor." Prices read from vendor pages 2026-08-31; broker revocation counts from FMCSA, retrieved 2026-08-31. https://freightprobe.com/load-boards

Quote the retrieval date with any figure. Vendor pricing changes without notice and we re-read it rather than carrying it forward.

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