Last Updated on October 15, 2026 by Team TBH
Choosing a warehouse or distribution center location is two decisions made at once. One is about geography: where customers and suppliers are, and how many of them a candidate building can reach in a day’s drive. The other is about money: what the whole network costs to run once that building is in it.
A map answers the first question. An optimization model answers the second, and it needs far more data to do it.
Map First or Model First
Warehouse location software falls on a scale between those two jobs. Network optimization platforms compare whole networks on cost and service. Business mapping tools show where demand is and what each candidate site can reach.
Greenfield analysis places new facilities from scratch, working only from customer locations and demand, instead of choosing among buildings already on a shortlist. Cost-to-serve is the full cost of supplying one customer or region, including freight, handling and inventory. An isochrone, also called a drive-time polygon, is the boundary around a site that encloses every point reachable within a set travel time.
Coupa and Optilogic work in greenfield models and cost-to-serve. CARTO, Maptive, Mapline and Smappen work in isochrones and distances, with CARTO nearest the middle.
Most teams start at the mapping end, because the demand file already exists as a spreadsheet of ship-to addresses. Maptive’s location intelligence solution, for example, plots that spreadsheet and draws the area each candidate site can reach, which is often enough to rule out a building that misses the main customer clusters.
Network Optimization Software for Warehouse Location
Both tools in this group answer the cost question directly. Both expect tables of customers, demand, lanes and costs before they return anything useful.
1. Coupa Supply Chain Optimization (formerly LLamasoft)
Coupa Supply Chain Optimization is the enterprise supply chain design suite Coupa built from LLamasoft, and it still lists the LLamasoft modeler, Supply Chain Guru, among its capabilities. Its Network Optimization page names greenfield analysis, flow optimization and cost-to-serve analysis, and its product page mentions evaluating new production sites.
That set of engines separates Coupa from the rest of this list. It tests network scenarios, such as adding or closing a distribution center, and judges them on cost-to-serve rather than distance alone. Rapid Network Explorer points the modeler to the scenarios with the largest effect.
Coupa uses usage-based pricing, sold as one package with unlimited users. No price is published. There is no free trial, and buying starts with a demo request.
App Studio gives planners low-code screens for running scenarios, but Coupa still describes building the model as work for modelers. Coupa’s product pages never mention map output in their text, only “visualizations.”
Best for: enterprises redesigning a multi-node footprint with a modeling team or Coupa’s services in place.
2. Optilogic Cosmic Frog
Optilogic sells Cosmic Frog, a cloud network design platform with optimization, simulation and greenfield engines in one product. Of the two optimization tools here, it is the only one a team can try without a sales call. Optilogic offers a free account, though the site does not state its limits on model size or solves.
Its greenfield engine, Triad, sets the number of distribution centers, where they go and which customers each one serves. It runs on two tables, Customers and Customer Demand, plus greenfield settings. The help center calls the output “best suited as initial information” for a fuller optimization or simulation model.
A Maps section in the same help center covers layers, points and flows. Paid plans are quote-only, and the customer examples, such as Kohler and Cencora, point to mid-sized and large networks.
Best for: an analyst testing a greenfield model before there is budget for paid software.
Mapping Tools for Demand and Drive-Time Coverage
The four tools in this group start from a list of addresses, and none of them models freight cost.
3. CARTO
CARTO’s tool for this job is a component called Create Isolines. It draws travel-time or distance areas around candidate hubs by car, bike or on foot, and it runs on the company’s own data warehouse, such as BigQuery or Snowflake. Those areas can be laid over the company’s order history or over datasets from CARTO’s catalog.
Most of the setup cost is in people and data. CARTO lists “Supply Chain Optimization” as a solution, but its pages describe a use case under that name, not a facility-location solver. CSV import does not geocode addresses, meaning it does not turn them into map coordinates. A ship-to list without latitude and longitude needs a separate geocoding step, and that step spends location data credits. No prices are published, and even the Pay As You Go plan comes with a 12-month contract.
Best for: a company whose order history already lives in a cloud warehouse, with an analyst to run the workflows.
4. Maptive
The most direct Maptive tool for a warehouse shortlist is the Distance Matrix Calculator. It works out travel time or distance between many origins and destinations at once and returns a table. Set candidate sites as origins and customers as destinations, and the table shows how far each building is from each account.
The Distance Radius tool draws circles in miles or kilometers around a candidate address, and the rows inside export to xlsx, tsv or csv with straight-line or driving distance attached. Drive-time areas export too, and a boundary export lists the ZIP codes or counties that fall fully or partly inside one.
Maptive has no facility-location solver, and no freight-cost, center-of-gravity or inventory model. (A center-of-gravity model finds the point that minimizes weighted distance to all demand.) Its tables stop at distance and time, and no freight cost enters the comparison.
Best for: an operations team with a customer spreadsheet and a handful of candidate buildings.
5. Mapline
Mapline is web-based business mapping software that turns pasted or imported spreadsheet rows into pins. For a distribution center search, it draws drive-time polygons and radius circles around each candidate pin.
Mapline also plans routes. The Pro plan adds multi-route, multi-vehicle routing, which lets a team sketch how deliveries would run out of a candidate building. The base paid plan handles a single route.
Its free Starter plan does not expire.
Best for: a regional distributor that wants coverage maps and delivery-route sketches in one tool.
6. Smappen
Smappen is a web-based trade-area mapping tool from Toulouse, France, built around isochrones. A team can draw one from each candidate site and keep them all on a single map, which shows where two buildings’ reach overlaps and which customer areas neither covers. Isochrones come with every plan, the free one included.
Imports are capped at 100 pins on Free, 1,000 on Essential, 10,000 on Pro and 100,000 on Advanced, so a distributor with a large customer file needs an upper plan. Smappen does no network or cost modeling.
Essential costs $99 per month billed monthly, or $89 per month billed yearly.
Best for: a fast first look at how far each candidate building’s drive-time area extends.
When to Move From a Mapping Tool to Network Optimization
A mapping tool is usually enough while the question is where one new building goes. Three signals show the question has become the network itself:
- Node count. Once several warehouses serve overlapping regions, moving one shifts volume onto the others, and a map cannot total that.
- When inbound supplier freight matters as much as outbound delivery, both directions have to be weighed at once.
- Cost variables. When labor, lease or inventory costs differ enough between sites to change the ranking, only a cost model can compare them.
A team that sees none of these can decide from coverage maps and distance tables. Two or more point to a greenfield model. Optilogic’s free account is one way to learn whether a team’s customer and demand tables are clean enough to run one.
To read more content like this, explore The Brand Hopper
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