Milometry vs MileIQ

What MileIQ does well

MileIQ is the app most people mean when they say "mileage tracker", and it earned that position rather than bought it. Three things in particular are worth saying plainly before any comparison starts.

The swipe is the right idea. MileIQ built its whole interface around one gesture: a drive appears, you flick it right for business or left for personal, and it is filed. Every mileage app that has shipped since, this one included, is working in the shadow of that decision. It is genuinely hard to improve on, because the job really is binary and really does need to take less than a second.

It records without being asked. You do not open MileIQ to start a drive. It notices you are moving, records the route, and has the trip waiting when you stop. For anyone whose problem is forgetting rather than arithmetic, that is the whole product, and MileIQ has been doing it longer than anybody.

It is a known quantity. MileIQ points at more than eighty thousand five star ratings across the two app stores. If you are an employee submitting a claim to a finance team that has heard of exactly one mileage app, being that app has real value. Nobody has to be persuaded that your log is credible.

If what you want is automatic tracking with a swipe, from a company that will still be here next year, MileIQ is a reasonable answer and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

What it costs in the UK

MileIQ is a subscription. In the UK it publishes a free tier capped at forty drives every month, and an Unlimited plan at £7.91 a month billed annually, or £9.49 a month if you pay monthly.

The forty drive cap is the part worth thinking about, because it is not really a free tier so much as a trial that resets. Forty drives sounds generous until you count: a commute plus a couple of client visits is six drives in a day, and MileIQ counts each leg separately. A district nurse, a self employed electrician or anyone doing three or four calls a day will be through forty drives inside the second week, and a mileage log that stops recording in the second week of the month is worse than no log at all, because you have to reconstruct the rest by hand and you will not.

So for most people who actually need a mileage tracker, the real price is £7.91 a month.

Where we think the trade goes the other way

Milometry is £9.99, once. There is no subscription, no free tier and no account.

The arithmetic is not subtle. A year of MileIQ Unlimited on the annual plan is about £95. Milometry costs £9.99 and then costs nothing, ever again. In the second year the gap is roughly £180, and it keeps widening for as long as you drive. Nineteen business miles at the HMRC rate covers the whole purchase.

We think that matters more than it looks, because of what a subscription does to a mileage log. Your drives are the evidence behind a tax claim, and HMRC can ask you to support a claim years after you made it. Under a subscription, the record of where you drove is only readable for as long as you keep paying. Stop paying, and the thing you need in an enquiry is behind a paywall. Buying the app once removes that question entirely: the log is a file on your phone, and it stays readable whether or not we are still in business.

The second difference is where your drives live. MileIQ, like every subscription mileage app, keeps your trips on its servers, which is what makes the web dashboard and the team features work. Milometry has no server. There is no account to create, nothing is uploaded, and a list of everywhere you have driven for the last three years never leaves your phone. That is a real trade and it costs us real features, which is the next section.

Where MileIQ is genuinely better

We would rather you knew this from us than found it out after paying.

Teams. MileIQ has proper support for a manager collecting and approving claims from a group of drivers. Milometry has nothing of the sort, and because we have no server, we cannot build it in the way you would expect. If you need to administer other people's mileage, MileIQ is the better tool and this is not close.

The web dashboard. MileIQ lets you sit at a laptop and work through a month of drives with a keyboard. Sorting a backlog on a phone is worse, and if you let drives pile up for a quarter you will feel it.

Recovering a lost phone. Their copy is on a server, so a drowned phone is an inconvenience. Ours is on the phone, so a drowned phone is a lost log unless you have set up one of the backup destinations. We make that easy and we cannot make it automatic in the way a server can.

Being the app everyone knows. If someone in accounts payable has to accept your log, "it is from MileIQ" is a shorter conversation than "it is from Milometry".

Which one you should pick

Pick MileIQ if you manage other people's mileage, if you want to do your sorting on a laptop, or if a monthly cost is genuinely easier for you to carry than a one off purchase.

Pick Milometry if you are one driver logging your own miles, you would rather own the app than rent it, and you want the record of where you have driven to stay on your own phone and stay readable for as long as you might need it.

If you drive so little that forty drives a month is plenty, MileIQ's free tier is a perfectly sensible thing to use and costs you nothing. We would rather say that than sell you something you do not need.