Milometry vs Driversnote

What Driversnote does well

Of every app on this page, Driversnote is the one we would point a British driver at if they did not want ours. It is built for HMRC rather than adapted to it, and that shows.

It knows what a UK mileage claim actually is. Most mileage apps are American products with a currency setting. Driversnote publishes in sterling, writes about HMRC rules, and produces logs in the shape HMRC expects. That is a different thing from an IRS app that will accept pounds.

The iBeacon is a genuinely good idea. For £33 on a monthly plan, or included with an annual plan bought on the web, you get a small dongle for the car. The phone then knows the difference between you driving and you sitting on a train, which is the single most annoying failure mode of every motion detection tracker including ours. If you cycle, or commute by rail, or are often a passenger, that dongle solves a real problem that software alone does not.

It is properly supported. A UK phone number, a published response time, and a hundred thousand ratings averaging 4.7. That is not nothing when your mileage log is evidence for a tax return.

What it costs

Free for fifteen trips a month. Pro is £8 a month for unlimited trips. Teams is £8 per licence a month for two to ten users, and there is a custom tier above that.

Fifteen trips is a tighter cap than it sounds. A round trip is two trips, so that is seven or eight journeys a month before it stops. Anyone using this seriously is on the £8 plan, which is £96 a year.

Where we think the trade goes the other way

Milometry is £9.99, once. Against £96 a year, the app pays for itself in the first six weeks, and nineteen business miles at the HMRC rate covers the purchase outright.

The deeper difference is what happens to the log. Driversnote keeps your trips on its servers, which is what makes the web dashboard, the team approval and the API work. Milometry has no server at all. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and the record of everywhere you have driven stays on your phone.

That matters most at the point you stop paying. A mileage log is evidence for a tax return, and HMRC can open an enquiry years later. A subscription log is readable for as long as the subscription lasts. A file on your phone is readable because it is a file on your phone.

Where Driversnote is genuinely better

The iBeacon. We have no answer to it. If passenger journeys and train commutes are polluting your log, their hardware fixes it and our software cannot fully.

Teams. They have real team management, admin validation and SSO. We have none of that and, with no server, will not.

The web app. Sorting three months of drives is faster with a keyboard. We are a phone app, and on that job a phone is worse.

A public API. If you want your mileage flowing into something else automatically, they publish an API and we do not.

Which one you should pick

Pick Driversnote if you need the iBeacon, if you are administering other people's mileage, or if you want a web dashboard. On those three things they beat us outright.

Pick Milometry if you are one driver, on a phone, who would rather pay once and keep the log in your own hands. And if fifteen trips a month genuinely covers you, their free tier is a reasonable thing to use and costs nothing.