Driversnote Alternative 2026: Free with Unlimited Trips

Driversnote has earned its place in the UK market: a clean app, solid HMRC report formats, and an optional iBeacon that makes vehicle detection reliable in shared cars. The economics are the sticking point. The free plan logs 15 trips a month — for a courier, that is Tuesday lunchtime. Unlimited trips cost $11 a month on Pro, and the iBeacon ships free only with an annual commitment.

Disclosure up front: MileTrack is our product, so this comparison deliberately includes the cases where Driversnote is still the better buy.

The comparison at a glance

Criteria	MileTrack	Driversnote
Price	£0 (currently free)	Free: 15 trips/mo; Pro: $11/mo; Teams: $11/licence
Trip limit	Unlimited	15/month on free plan
Automatic detection	Yes — phone sensors, no hardware	Yes — improved by iBeacon (free with annual plan, otherwise extra)
Classification	Business / commute / personal	Business / personal, rules by workplace
Data storage	On-device	Vendor cloud
Exports	PDF, CSV, XLSX with HMRC-expected fields	HMRC-format reports
Web dashboard	No	Yes
Team features	No	Yes (Teams / Teams+)
Platform	iPhone (no Android yet)	iOS, Android, web

Where Driversnote still wins

• Android and web. Driversnote runs everywhere; MileTrack is iPhone-only for now.
• Shared vehicles. The iBeacon ties detection to a specific car — genuinely useful when two drivers share one vehicle or one driver switches between several.
• Teams reporting. Admin collection of logs across employees is a real workflow MileTrack does not attempt.
• A web dashboard for editing logs on a big screen.

Where MileTrack wins

• Fifteen trips is not a free tier, it is a demo. MileTrack logs every journey, free. For a self-employed mileage claim the difference is not convenience — untracked journeys are unclaimable miles.
• No hardware dependency. Nothing to buy, charge, or leave in the glovebox; detection works in any vehicle you drive, including hire cars.
• Price. £0 against roughly £105 a year for Pro at current exchange rates — money that otherwise comes straight out of a claim built on 45p per mile.
• Commute as a first-class category. Ordinary commuting is not business mileage; MileTrack separates it by default instead of relying on workplace rules to catch it.
• Privacy by architecture. Journeys stay on the device and leave it only as your own export.

The honest limits: iPhone-only, no team features, free early access with a growing feature set.

The maths that actually matters

The point of the log is the claim: 45p per mile for the first 10,000 business miles each tax year, 25p beyond. At 8,000 business miles that is £3,600 of relief — provable only for journeys that actually made it into the log. A 15-trip cap does not cost you $11; it costs you every untracked journey from the 4th of the month onwards. Completeness is the entire game, which is why the HMRC logbook rules put “recorded at or near the time” at the centre of the standard.

Switching without losing your history

1. Export your Driversnote reports for every year claimed — HMRC’s record window runs at least five years after the 31 January deadline.
2. Pick a clean start date — the 6th of April or the 1st of a month.
3. Record the odometer in the first entry of the new log.
4. Run both apps for two weeks on your real routes; compare what each captured before cancelling.
5. Cancel Pro, keep the archive. If you had an annual plan with the free iBeacon, check the terms on returning it.

MileTrack is free on the App Store — no account, no card, no beacon. The wider four-app market test is in the UK mileage app comparison, and the MileIQ alternative guide covers the other household name.

Tax note: this article is general orientation, not tax advice. Competitor pricing verified 2026-09-03 — check the linked official pages before deciding.