Fleet maintenance management software: features, costs and how to choose

Telematics platforms with maintenance capabilities

None of the four publishes a per-vehicle rate, and all involve hardware alongside the subscription. Budget for installation and a multi-year term as well as the software, and expect the quote to move with fleet size.

All pricing verified 28 September 2026 from each vendor's own pricing page. FleetOS is Autograff's own product, included here on the same basis as the others.

Notes on the figures

• Fleetio lists Essential at $4 per vehicle per month billed annually or $5 billed monthly, Professional at $7 and Premium at $10, both annual-only. Prices shown assume a five-asset plan band; Fleetio prices by plan, fleet size range, contract term and payment term, and offers GSA pricing to eligible buyers.
• AUTOsist lists its All-in Maintenance package at $6 per vehicle per month billed annually or $7 monthly, with a $59 per month minimum for five vehicles and non-vehicle assets at $3. Maintenance with GPS and telematics is $28 per vehicle per month and with safety cameras $55, both billed annually with a five-vehicle minimum. Volume discounts apply above 100 vehicles.
• Whip Around prices through FixedUnlimited — a custom fixed price covering an unlimited number of vehicles, equipment and other assets, rather than a per-asset rate. Older public pages list $5 and $10 per asset for legacy Standard and Pro plans, explicitly labelled as old pricing, so those are not used here.
• Fullbay publishes tiered monthly pricing for its heavy-duty shop management product. Its fleet maintenance offering is quoted separately, so no published fleet starting price exists.
• ServiceUp does not publish pricing; it quotes against the fleet.
• Samsara, Geotab, Motive and Verizon Connect each route to a quote rather than publishing a per-vehicle rate.

A pattern worth noticing. Of the vendors above, only Fleetio and AUTOsist publish a per-vehicle rate — and both are maintenance record-keeping tools. Every product that handles repair coordination rather than maintenance records is quoted rather than listed. That isn't evasion so much as a structural difference: maintaining a service history costs roughly the same per vehicle whoever you are, while coordinating repairs depends on how many shops a fleet uses, how much work goes outside, and how the approval chain is built. Expect a conversation rather than a price page for anything in that second group.

Every figure above was taken from the vendor's own published pricing on 28 September 2026. Pricing changes — if anything here is out of date or wrong, tell us at contact@autograff.ai and we'll correct it.

What does vehicle downtime actually cost?

A vehicle off the road costs most fleets between $500 and $1,500 per day in lost revenue and fixed costs that keep accruing whether the vehicle earns or not — which is usually far more than the repair itself, and far more than the software.

This is the part of fleet maintenance that maintenance software has historically measured least well. Cost per mile, preventive maintenance compliance and mean time between failures all fall out of records a fleet already keeps. Duration does not. Measuring how long a repair event actually took requires knowing when the vehicle arrived, when it was diagnosed, when the estimate was issued, when it was approved, when parts were ordered, when work resumed and when the vehicle was collected — and several of those timestamps sit in a shop's system rather than the fleet's.

The result is that most fleets can state their maintenance spend to the dollar and cannot say where their downtime days went.

That matters because the causes have different owners. A vehicle waiting three days for one of the fleet's own approvers looks identical, on any maintenance report, to a vehicle waiting three days for a part or for a bay. They need opposite fixes, and a fleet that can't separate them usually concludes it has a slow shop.

The single most useful thing to start measuring is the interval between an estimate being sent and being authorized. It's typically the largest controllable block of downtime in a fleet, it sits entirely within the fleet's own control, and capturing it requires no cooperation from any repair shop.

• What vehicle downtime actually costs a fleet operator
• Why it takes so long to get a repair approved
• Calculate your fleet's downtime cost

What should fleet maintenance software include?

The capabilities that matter most are preventive maintenance scheduling, digital inspections, work orders, complete service history, cost tracking and downtime visibility — with parts and inventory mattering mainly to fleets that repair in-house.

Preventive maintenance scheduling. The system should create recurring schedules based on mileage, engine hours, time or manufacturer recommendations, and surface upcoming work before it becomes overdue — rather than relying on someone to remember. More on fleet maintenance scheduling software.

Vehicle inspections. Digital inspections replace paper forms with structured records that document condition, support compliance and trigger follow-up work. The useful systems connect a defect directly to the job that fixes it instead of leaving it in a separate record.

Work orders. A work order should show what needs repair, which vehicle, who is responsible, what has been completed, what parts were used and what it cost. For outsourced repairs it should also carry communication with the external shop and the current repair status.

Maintenance history. A complete record across a vehicle's operating life — preventive maintenance, repairs, inspections, parts, labor, costs, warranty, mileage, engine hours and vendor. This is what makes recurring-fault diagnosis and replace-or-repair decisions possible. More on what a fleet maintenance record should hold.

Parts and inventory. Central for fleets doing their own repairs, largely irrelevant for fleets that outsource. Worth checking you aren't paying for a module you'll never open.

Maintenance cost tracking. Cost by vehicle, asset, category, vendor or period, ideally with cost per mile.

Downtime tracking. Which vehicles are out of service, why, and for how long. A vehicle that is cheap to repair but unavailable for a week still costs the business $500 to $1,500 a day.

Diagnostics and telematics. Where maintenance software connects to telematics, mileage, engine hours and fault codes feed maintenance workflows directly, reducing manual entry. Geotab provides remote diagnostics with maintenance scheduling and cost reporting; Motive combines inspections, fault codes, preventive maintenance and work orders with its telematics data.

How to choose fleet maintenance software

Choose on how your fleet actually operates rather than feature count — specifically on fleet size, whether you repair in-house or outsource, and whether you need telematics at all.

1. How large is the fleet? A small fleet may need only reminders, inspections and service history. A larger one needs work-order workflows, vendor coordination, reporting and integrations.

2. Do you maintain in-house or use outside shops? The most important question on this list. In-house means parts, labor and inventory are central. Outsourced means repair authorization, vendor coordination and repair status matter more. Many fleets do both and need software that supports both. For the wider distinction, see shop management software vs fleet maintenance software.

3. Do you need telematics? If the requirement is maintenance management, a full telematics platform adds capability — and cost — you may not use.

4. How does it handle repair authorization? Ask specifically how approval works: what has been requested, what approved, what's outstanding, and whose turn it is. Then ask the harder version — does anything chase it, or does the system simply record the delay after the fact? Most fleet software does the latter. This is where most outsourced downtime accumulates, and the gap between a system that logs a three-day approval wait and one that prevents it is usually the whole return on the purchase.

5. Can you see the full maintenance history? From fleet-level view down to one vehicle, with service records, inspections, repairs, parts and costs in one connected record.

6. What will it actually cost? Check asset minimums, user limits, contract length, annual versus monthly billing, telematics hardware, implementation, modules, integrations, additional users, support and onboarding.

Fleet maintenance software for fleets using outside repair shops

The hardest problem for a fleet that outsources repairs is that the record fragments the moment the vehicle leaves — and most fleet software is built to record what a shop reported afterwards rather than what is happening now.

The fleet knows the vehicle needs service. What happens next travels by phone and email: the estimate is written by the shop, the approval sits with the fleet, and neither organization has a shared record of what was agreed or when it will be done. There are more than 300,000 independent repair shops in the United States, and a fleet of any size uses dozens of them, each relationship run slightly differently.

Sources: IBISWorld — auto mechanics industry business count

What good software does here is carry the process end to end — from the maintenance requirement through repair authorization, shop communication, status, costs and completed history — without requiring every repair shop to adopt the fleet's internal system.

The questions fleets ask about this, from approving estimates line by line to centralizing invoices from many shops, are answered in fleet repair coordination. If you run the shop rather than the fleet, see fleet repair shop software.

• How fleets track vehicles once they enter a repair shop
• Why repairs take longer than the work itself

Autograff FleetOS

Autograff FleetOS is fleet maintenance and repair software that runs the repair loop for you rather than recording it afterwards.

The approval chases itself. The interval between an estimate being sent and being authorized is usually the largest controllable block of downtime in a fleet — and it persists because chasing approvals is a real job nobody is hired to do. FleetOS handles that loop: the estimate reaches whoever can authorize it, the follow-up happens without anyone remembering to follow up, and you learn a vehicle is waiting on Friday afternoon rather than on Monday morning.

What runs that loop is an AI fleet administrator, which assists with repair authorization, vendor coordination and compliance around the clock, working within rules and guardrails the fleet defines. Where a repair falls inside those rules it can authorize it and keep the vehicle moving; where it does not, it routes the decision to the person who owns it and keeps asking until they answer. The fleet writes the policy either way — what the software removes is the waiting, not the judgment.

It works with any repair shop. When a fleet sends work to an external shop, the workflow still captures what it needs — the shop is not required to adopt ShopOS or any other system. Nothing here depends on your shops having heard of us.

Where the shop runs ShopOS, it stops being a chase at all. ShopOS is Autograff's shop management software, so where a shop uses it both sides work from the same live record. That changes what the software can see: not just that nobody has replied yet, but that the part landed, the bay freed up and the job actually moved. The coordination stops being messages passed between two systems and becomes one record two parties are reading.

Alongside that, FleetOS tracks vehicles and maintenance needs, coordinates repairs, maintains service history and monitors repair activity — for fleets using internal maintenance teams, external repair shops, or both.

FleetOS pricing is custom, based on the size and mix of the fleet rather than a single published per-vehicle rate. See FleetOS pricing.

Free fleet maintenance schedule template

Download a preventive maintenance schedule, service log and compliance tracker for a mixed fleet. Free, ungated, editable.

Seven tabs: PM schedules for light-duty and heavy-duty vehicles, a vehicle register, a tracker that calculates next-due mileage automatically, a service log, and a DOT compliance sheet for annual inspections and DVIR retention.

One thing it does that most templates don't: the service log records when an estimate was sent and when it was authorized, and works out the gap. Fill those two columns for a quarter and you'll know something most fleets can't tell you about their own operation.

What to include in a fleet preventive maintenance schedule

Typical industry ranges. The manufacturer's schedule for your vehicle always takes precedence, and severe duty — heavy idling, short trips, dust, towing, extreme temperatures — shortens most of them.

Heavy duty — Class 7–8 and vocational. Heavy-duty fleets usually run a tiered PM structure rather than a flat list, and engine hours matter more than miles on idle-heavy duty cycles.

What DOT compliance requires

For commercial motor vehicles, three parts of 49 CFR Part 396 set the floor.

Annual inspection (396.17). Every CMV must pass a periodic inspection at least once every 12 months, performed by a qualified inspector under 396.19, covering at minimum the items in Appendix A to Part 396. Documentation is retained for 14 months. A state periodic inspection meeting Appendix A standards can satisfy the requirement.

DVIR (396.11). A written driver vehicle inspection report is required at the end of a day when a defect is discovered by or reported to the driver. The no-defect DVIR was rescinded for property-carrying operations in 2014, so a report isn't required when nothing is found — passenger-carrying operations must still file one either way. Records are kept for three months. FMCSA confirmed in a rule effective 23 March 2026 that DVIRs may be created and kept electronically under 390.32.

Maintenance records (396.3). Carriers must keep systematic inspection, repair and maintenance records for vehicles under their control for more than 30 consecutive days.

Verify current requirements at ecfr.gov. This is a summary, not legal advice.

How to use the tracker

1. 1Fill in the vehicle register — unit number, description, current odometer, engine hours.
2. 2On the PM tracker, enter the last service date and odometer for each item you track, plus your interval.
3. 3Next-due mileage and status calculate automatically. Update the odometer weekly and the tracker stays current.
4. 4Log every repair event on the service log, including the estimate and approval dates.

Statuses are OVERDUE, DUE SOON within 500 miles, and OK.

Fleet maintenance software moves a fleet from reactive maintenance and scattered records to a structured process. The question isn't which product has the longest feature list — it's whether the system fits how your fleet actually operates, and whether it can see the repairs that happen somewhere else.