Why Dispatchers Run DAT and Truckstop Together

Ask a working dispatcher whether they use DAT or Truckstop, and the honest answer is usually both. Not because anyone enjoys paying two subscriptions or keeping two tabs open, but because the two boards do not carry the same freight. A load posted on one is not guaranteed to appear on the other. A broker who posts everything to DAT may post nothing to Truckstop, and the reverse happens just as often. If you search only one, you are looking at a slice of the market and calling it the whole picture.

That gap is the entire reason the dual-board habit exists. The freight you can see is the freight you can book, and no single board shows you everything that is available on your lane right now. Running both is not redundancy. It is the difference between a complete view of your options and a partial one, and on a tight lane that difference decides whether the truck rolls loaded or deadheads to the next pickup.

Two boards, two different pools of freight

The simplest case for running both comes down to overlap, or the lack of it. When a broker posts a load, they choose where it goes. Some post to every board they pay for. Many do not. A broker might default to DAT because that is where their team has always worked, post to Truckstop only when a load sits too long, or run an exclusive on one board for a key customer. The result is that a meaningful share of postings live on one board and never touch the other.

For a dispatcher, that means searching a single board systematically hides freight. You will not see what you are missing, because a board can only show you what was posted to it. The loads that went to the other platform are invisible to you, and so is the better rate or the cleaner backhaul that might have been sitting there. The cost of single-board search is not a visible error. It is the quiet, compounding loss of options you never knew existed.

This is why the question is rarely "which board is better." Both are large, both are legitimate, and both have freight the other lacks. The better framing is coverage: every additional source you search widens the pool of loads you can actually compete for. DAT and Truckstop together cover more of the market than either alone, and on a deadhead-sensitive lane, more options is the whole game. With industry deadhead running roughly 15 to 30 percent of miles, every extra qualified load in view is a chance to cut empty miles you would otherwise eat.

DAT and Truckstop have different strengths

The two boards are not interchangeable, and the differences run deeper than which loads happen to be posted. They have different scale, different broker mixes, and different regional and equipment strengths, and those differences are exactly why covering both beats picking one.

DAT is the larger network by most measures. Its public figures describe a network spanning more than 1.7 million trucks and over 500,000 loads posted per day, drawn from a broker base of roughly 27,000. That scale makes DAT the deeper well for raw load volume, for rate benchmarking, and for thinly traded lanes where you need every posting you can find. When a lane is quiet, the bigger network is more likely to have the one load that fits.

Truckstop carries its own following, and its broker mix is not a carbon copy of DAT's. Some brokers favor Truckstop, some post there first, and some regional and specialized freight surfaces there in ways it does not on DAT. The point is not to rank one above the other on a single number. It is that the two pools are populated by overlapping but distinct sets of brokers and lanes, so each board reaches freight the other underrepresents.

Here is how the strengths line up in practice.

The table is not an argument for one or the other. Read across the rows and the conclusion is the opposite: the strengths are complementary, not competing. DAT's volume and Truckstop's distinct broker reach add up to broader coverage than either delivers on its own. Picking one means accepting a permanent blind spot in exchange for a slightly simpler workflow, and on a thin lane that is a bad trade.

What single-board search actually costs you

The case for both boards is easy to wave away until you put it in terms of empty miles and missed rate. Consider a dispatcher covering a lane out of a secondary market. The good load for tomorrow morning might be on Truckstop because that broker posts there first, while DAT shows three mediocre options at a soft rate. Search only DAT and you book the mediocre load, because you never saw the better one. The decision felt informed. It was not.

Multiply that across a week and a fleet. With around 787,000 active carriers in the market and the vast majority running ten trucks or fewer, most dispatch happens in small operations where one missed backhaul is a real hit to the week's margin. Small fleets do not have the slack to leave coverage on the table. For them, the difference between searching one board and searching both is not a nice-to-have. It shows up directly in deadhead percentage and revenue per truck.

The missed-load problem is also invisible by design, which is what makes it dangerous. A board cannot tell you about freight that was never posted to it, so single-board dispatchers have no error signal. Everything looks fine. The deadhead creeps up, the rates run soft, and there is no flashing light pointing at the cause, because the cause is the option you could not see. Widening the search across both boards is the only way to close a gap you would otherwise never detect.

The real cost of both: double the screens

If running both boards is so clearly correct, why does anyone hesitate? Because in practice it means two subscriptions, two logins, two interfaces, two sets of filters, and two windows to keep refreshing. The dispatcher who wants full coverage pays for it in friction. You search DAT, then search Truckstop, then try to hold both result sets in your head to compare a lane across them. You re-enter the same origin, destination, equipment, and date range twice. You miss a refresh on one while you are working the other.

That friction is real, and it is why some dispatchers quietly drift toward one board despite knowing better. The workflow tax of covering both is high enough that, under pressure, people cut the corner. The coverage argument loses to the clock. A fast-moving load gets booked off whichever board happened to be on screen, and the better option on the other board ages out before anyone looks.

So the genuine problem is not whether to cover both boards. The freight makes that decision for you. The problem is doing it without doubling the screens, the logins, and the manual comparison. The goal is full coverage at single-board effort: see DAT and Truckstop freight side by side, filtered once, compared in one view, without the tab-switching tax that pushes dispatchers back toward a partial search.

Cover both without the tab-switching

The fix is not to choose a board. It is to stop treating them as two separate searches. When DAT and Truckstop freight lands in one place, filtered by the same rules and compared in the same view, the coverage argument and the friction argument stop fighting each other. You get the full pool of loads without paying for it in screens and logins, which is exactly the workflow the dual-board habit was always reaching for.

Numeo Spot is built to do this. It searches DAT and Truckstop together and brings both pools of freight into a single view, so a dispatcher runs one search, applies one set of filters, and compares loads across both boards at once. You keep the coverage that comes from both networks, and you drop the part nobody wanted: the double entry, the two open windows, and the constant context-switching that made single-board search tempting in the first place.

The takeaway is simple. DAT and Truckstop carry different freight, with different broker mixes and different regional strengths, so covering both is the only way to see your full set of options and keep deadhead down. The catch was always the workflow cost of running two boards in parallel. Remove that cost, and there is no longer any reason to settle for half the market. Search both, compare in one place, and book the best load that is actually out there, not just the best one that happened to be on the board you opened first.