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The order you drive your stops in matters more than the app you navigate with. Ten addresses can be visited in more than 3.6 million different orders, and only a handful of them are good. Pick a bad one and you pay for it in miles, fuel, and an evening that ends later than it should.
Here are seven ways to plan a route with multiple stops, from the free apps already on your phone to software that plans a whole team’s day. For each one: how it works, what it’s good for, and where it falls short.
Quick comparison
| Method | Stops per route | Puts stops in the best order? | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Maps | Up to 10 | No | A few errands |
| Apple Maps | About 15 | No | A short list on an iPhone |
| Waze | 1 added stop | No | One detour on the way |
| Sorting a list by area | Any | You do it by hand | A small route you know well |
| A spreadsheet and a map | Any | You do it by hand | Planning ahead at a desk |
| A route optimization app | Hundreds | Yes | Daily delivery routes |
| Dispatch software | Hundreds, across many drivers | Yes | Delivery teams |
1. Google Maps (up to 10 stops)
How it works: Enter your first destination, tap the three-dot menu (or “Add destination” on a computer), and choose Add stop. Repeat for each address, then drag stops up or down to change the order.
Good for: A few errands, or a short route you already know the order of. It’s free, it’s on every phone, and the traffic data is excellent.
Where it falls short: Google Maps limits a route to 10 stops, and it drives them in the order you typed them. It never rearranges them to shorten the drive. On a route with more than a few stops, getting the order right is the whole problem, and Google Maps leaves it to you.
Tip: If you’re stuck with Google Maps for a longer day, split the route into groups of nearby stops, at most 10 per group, and plan each group as its own route. It works, but you’re still the optimizer.
2. Apple Maps (about 15 stops)
How it works: Since iOS 16, Apple Maps supports multi-stop driving directions. Get directions to your first destination, tap Add Stop, and keep adding. Drag to reorder.
Good for: iPhone drivers with a short list who prefer Apple’s navigation and CarPlay integration.
Where it falls short: The limit is about 15 stops (some testers have only managed 13), it works for driving directions only, and like Google Maps it won’t reorder stops for you.
3. Waze (one added stop)
How it works: Set a destination, then tap Add stop to insert one waypoint, usually a gas station or a quick pickup on the way.
Good for: Live traffic, police and hazard reports, and turn-by-turn directions to one place at a time.
Where it falls short: Waze lets you add a single stop to a drive, so it isn’t a route planner at all. That’s fine: the best setup for many drivers is to plan the route somewhere else and let Waze navigate one stop at a time. RouteCheetah, for example, opens Waze, Google Maps, or Apple Maps for each next stop with one tap.
4. Sort the list by area, by hand
How it works: The old-school method. Write out your stops, group them by neighborhood or ZIP code, and draw a loop that visits each group once instead of zigzagging across town.
A few rules of thumb make it work better:
- Drive a loop, not a star. Going back to the same main road between every stop wastes miles.
- Start at one end. Begin with the farthest cluster and work back toward home, or the reverse, but don’t start in the middle.
- Respect the deadlines. Stops with a delivery window or a business that closes early go where they fit, not wherever they fall on the list.
- Pickups first. If you collect something at one stop and drop it at another, the pickup has to come first. It sounds obvious; it’s the first thing that goes wrong when a route is reshuffled in a hurry.
Good for: Small routes in an area you know well.
Where it falls short: It doesn’t scale. Ten stops have 3,628,800 possible orders. Fifteen stops have more than 1.3 trillion. Past a dozen or so stops, nobody finds the best order in their head, and every stop added mid-day means starting over.
5. A spreadsheet plus a map
How it works: Paste your addresses into a spreadsheet with columns for the customer, time window, notes, and package count. Sort by ZIP code or area to rough out an order, then import the sheet into a mapping tool such as Google My Maps to see the stops as pins.
Good for: Planning tomorrow’s route at a desk, and keeping a record of what each stop needs. If your work arrives as a list from a customer or a gig app, a spreadsheet is the natural place to clean it up.
Where it falls short: Everything is manual, the map doesn’t navigate, and nothing updates when the day changes. You’re still choosing the order by eye.
The good news: the spreadsheet you’ve built is exactly what a route optimization app wants. RouteCheetah imports stops from a spreadsheet on Solo Pro and every team plan, so the work you’ve already done isn’t wasted.
6. A route optimization app
How it works: Add your stops by typing, pasting, importing a spreadsheet, or scanning them from package labels. Tap Optimize and the app calculates the order with the least driving, then hands each stop to your navigation app as you go.
This is the point where planning stops being a chore. Instead of guessing, you get the shortest order for dozens of stops in about a second, and you can re-optimize whenever a stop is added or cancelled.
What to look for in a route optimizer:
- A stop limit that fits your day. Some free tiers cap routes at a handful of stops.
- Pickup-before-delivery sequencing. If you run pickups, the optimizer must keep each one ahead of its delivery.
- Re-optimizing mid-route without moving the stops you’ve already completed.
- Time windows, so a “deliver by 10 AM” stop doesn’t land at 2 PM.
- Traffic. The shortest route on a map isn’t always the fastest at 8 AM.
- Handoff to your maps app. You shouldn’t have to learn new turn-by-turn directions.
- Proof of delivery. A photo and signature at the door protect you when a package goes missing.
How RouteCheetah handles it: The Free plan optimizes up to 15 stops per route, keeps pickups ahead of deliveries, and captures signatures, with no credit card. Solo Pro adds up to 300 stops per route, time windows, photo proof, label scanning, spreadsheet import, and traffic-aware routing that shows the fastest route next to a fuel-saving one when they differ, with drive time, miles, and fuel for each. See route planning for drivers for the full picture.
Good for: Anyone who drives 10 or more stops a day, every day.
Where it falls short: A single-driver app doesn’t help you split work between drivers or see where everyone is. That’s the next step up.
7. Dispatch software for teams
How it works: When more than one driver is on the road, planning becomes two problems: which driver gets which stops, and what order each driver drives them in. Dispatch software handles both. Orders come in from your team, your customers, or a spreadsheet; you build and optimize a route for each driver; and you assign the route, or offer it for a driver to accept.
Once the day starts, you see every driver on a live map, with an ETA for every stop recalculated from real positions. Customers can get a text when their delivery is on the way, with a link to follow it live.
Good for: Courier companies, local delivery teams, and any business with two or more drivers.
How RouteCheetah handles it: The Team plan adds the dispatch console, live driver tracking, route offers, and customer ETA notifications, billed per driver with a 14-day free trial. Business adds a customer ordering portal, pricing from your own rate card, chain of custody scanning, and API access. See dispatch software for teams.
Which method should you use?
- A few stops, once in a while: Google Maps or Apple Maps. They’re free and good enough.
- More than 10 stops, or the same kind of route every day: a route optimization app. The time you save on the first day usually covers the effort of setting it up.
- More than one driver: dispatch software, so planning, tracking, and proof of delivery live in one place instead of in a group text.
If you’re driving your own routes, start with a free optimizer and see how much shorter your day gets. And once you’ve got the order right, read our delivery driver tips for the rest of the job: loading the vehicle, handling apartments, and protecting yourself with proof.