Raft alternatives

Raft describes itself as "the agentic platform that empowers your teams to ship more, solve more, and scale with confidence", sold to freight forwarders, customs brokers and trade finance providers. Its freight forwarding page groups the work into three areas: customs (data extraction from commercial invoices, packing lists, bills of lading and certificates of origin), finance (carrier invoice extraction and validation against customs documents, EDI feeds and the TMS or ERP) and operations (pre-built agents for tracking updates, document indexing and customs data extraction, plus custom agents).

The platform is built in five layers, in Raft's words: organisation data, contextual LLMs "fine-tuned with your data", an orchestration layer that applies your business rules, specialised agents with guardrails and audit trails, and an application layer of "collaborative workspaces, dashboards, and real-time operational views". Exceptions are flagged in real time and escalation paths are "defined by you". Raft adds dedicated customer success managers, implementation teams and 24/7 support.

Raft is a well-funded company: founded in 2017 as Vector.ai, it raised a $30 million Series B led by Eight Roads in July 2023, had more than 95 employees across the UK, India and the US at the time, and named EMO Trans, OIA Global, The Scarbrough Group, NNR Global Logistics and Navia Freight as customers. Pricing is not public; the pricing page asks for a demo.

Mirage is a forward-deployed AI engineering company. Its engineers deploy agents inside the client's own TMS, ERP and customs tools, following five steps (Observe, Map, Build, Run, Expand), rather than adding a workspace of their own. The published logistics results are per deployment: 90%+ of standard freight RFQs answered automatically at OFRET Groupe, and 70% less manual data entry on freight documents at Transwin. A proof of concept on the client's own documents comes one week after the first meeting; the first workflow reaches production in 4 to 6 weeks.

The practical difference is where the work lands and who does the integration. Raft's agents run in Raft's application layer, connected to the TMS through what its customers call "deep TMS integrations", and your team runs them. Mirage's agents write into the TMS, ERP or customs system directly, through the interface each one provides, and Mirage's engineers build, run and extend them. Raft does not foreground freight quoting; Mirage runs it as a first workflow.

Start with the screen your operators will work in. If you want a vendor workspace with an intelligent inbox and dashboards on top of the TMS, Raft is built that way. If you want the TMS, ERP and customs tool to stay the only screens, with agents writing validated data into them, that is Mirage's deployment.

Then the first workflow. Raft's pages lead with customs data, accounts payable and tracking. Mirage leads with whichever of quotes, documents, customs data or carrier invoices costs you the most hours, and quotes are the one Raft does not foreground.

Then who runs it. Raft's model is vendor implementation, then your team on the platform with 24/7 support. Mirage's model is its own engineers inside your operation, from the proof of concept through production. A forwarder with a strong internal systems team may prefer the first; one without may prefer the second.