SOURCED AND DATED, LINE BY LINE

Basestation vs Docket: which dumpster software should you choose?

A fair comparison of two vendors, from their own pages, with the URL and the date on every line. Where Basestation wins, where Docket wins, and where Dumpster Controls fits at $0.

• Basestation: price not published, demo required
• Docket: price not published, demo required; card rates 3.0% or 2.8% + 30c
• Dumpster Controls: $0 a month for any fleet size, card processing only
• Facts checked between 2026-08-23 and 2026-09-24; re-verified every 90 days

Create your free accountSee every published price

4.7 on the App Store (12 ratings, Sep 2026) Available in all 50 US states and Canada

Last updated September 28, 2026 Published by Dumpster Controls, built by a software group led by a founder with 20+ years in enterprise IT who also ran a roll-off business for four years

Neither Basestation nor Docket publishes a price; both sell through a booked demo, and both are listed with no free trial. Basestation, made in Toronto, sells one system for six service lines: commercial front load, roll-off, residential curbside, portable toilets, septic pumping and dump trucks. Docket started with roll-off in 2019, added front-load and residential routes in March 2026, and ships IronRouteAI, an AI router in production since the end of 2025; portable toilets and septic sit on the ServiceCore side of the same company. If you run toilets or septic next to dumpsters in one system, Basestation. If roll-off is the main business and you want AI routing today with printed card rates, Docket.

The driver apps differ in a checkable way: Docket's is on the App Store (version 4.6.0, 30 ratings) and Google Play (5K+ downloads); Basestation's site carries no store link, its driver login is a web page at driver.thebasestation.com, and searches of both stores on 2026-09-24 returned no app from Basestation Inc. Both name QuickBooks; Docket documents the sync direction, Basestation does not. Basestation holds a 4.7 on 27 Capterra reviews and Docket a self-reported 4.9 on 84 Google reviews. Neither publishes API documentation. Dumpster Controls is the free third option, near the end.

How to read this page: every claim about Basestation or Docket links to the page it came from and shows the date we read it. "Not found" means we looked on that date at the URLs listed and did not find it, which is not proof that a capability does not exist. Prices are quoted in the vendor's own words. Where we did not research a line, the cell says so instead of guessing. If we got something wrong, write to daniel@dumpstercontrols.io and we will correct it with a dated note.

Basestation, Docket and Dumpster Controls, side by side

The third column is ours. Its facts are checkable without an account: the pricing page, the public manual, the App Store listing and the developer documentation are all linked from each cell.

Competitor lines from their own pages and the public app stores, checked on the date shown in each cell. Published September 24, 2026. Re-verification is scheduled every 90 days.

Where Basestation wins

Six service lines in one system. Basestation's home page names commercial front load, roll-off and dumpster rental, residential curbside, portable toilets, septic pumping and dump trucks, and calls the product purpose-built for multi-service operations. Docket covers roll-off, front-load and residential; toilets and septic are on the ServiceCore side of the company, in a different product.

Scale tickets flow to invoices: their billing page says scale ticket data uploads automatically to invoices, with cards and ACH in one system and auto-pay. Docket's plan rows list Streamlined Billing, Payments and ACH, and its published integrations are QuickBooks Online, Mailchimp, Samsara, Verizon Connect and Dumpsters.com.

The review sample is larger and better on the one platform where both can be compared by a third party: 4.7 out of 5 on 27 Capterra reviews, 100% positive, plus self-published Software Advice badges for Best Customer Support in 2026. Docket's driver app holds 3.53 on 30 App Store ratings, and its 4.9 on 84 Google reviews is self-reported on its own home page.

Per-customer pricing is on the customer management page: customizable pricing to get it right for each customer. Docket's pricing page lists plan rows and card rates.

A Canadian vendor, made in Toronto. For a hauler in Canada who wants a vendor in the same country, that is a fact Docket, based in Denver, cannot match.

Where Docket wins

AI routing is in production. IronRouteAI shipped publicly at the end of 2025 after about a year in beta with over 100 customers and weighs dump fees, materials, bin sizes, distance, fuel, driver wages and overtime. Basestation's routing page says smart routing that optimizes every mile, and no AI feature was found at the five URLs we tried on 2026-09-24.

The driver app is in both stores: Docket - Work Simplified on iOS (version 4.6.0, updated 2026-08-05, 30 ratings) and Docket on Android (5K+ downloads, 54 reviews). Basestation's site carries no store link and its driver login is a web page; Capterra lists deployment on Web, Android and iPhone/iPad.

Online ordering is a product with a name. DocketShop lets the customer pick a dumpster, location, date and time and pay, with zip-code pricing and material selection, and Grow and Pro include a hosted WordPress website. Basestation's site says boost revenue with online ordering on its customer management page, with no page of its own and no zip-code pricing described.

The money lines are printed: card 3.0% + 30c on Grow, 2.8% + 30c on Pro, ACH 1%, 500 or 1,000 texts a month. Basestation publishes no price, does not name its card processor or rate, and publishes no SMS quota.

QuickBooks is documented, direction included, on a public support site with release notes; Samsara, Verizon Connect, Mailchimp and Dumpsters.com are plan rows. Basestation publishes sync data to accounting systems, names QuickBooks in a blog post, and does not publish the direction.

Where the table does not settle it

Dispatch boards, driver apps, container tracking, online ordering and invoicing exist on both products and, by their own descriptions, work. A checkbox does not say whether the implementation is good on a Tuesday with two trucks down. We do not compare app store ratings here: at least one of the two has no store listing we could verify, and a missing listing says nothing about the product. The only reliable test is a week of your real orders on each.

Two things we deliberately do not claim about either vendor: how their interfaces feel, because that is opinion, and whether a capability we did not find exists internally, because absence from a website is not absence from a product. Neither vendor is in any sense abandoned: both publish current pages and sell actively as of the dates in the sources below.

Where Dumpster Controls fits

Dumpster Controls costs $0 per month for any fleet size, with no order, user, truck or feature limit; the company earns only when a customer pays by card, 2.99% + $3.99 per transaction on the free plan or 2.99% + $0.30 on the optional $169 per month Unlimited plan, and cash or check orders carry no fee. That is the whole pricing page. Against Basestation at Not computable, price not published a year and Docket at Not computable, price not published, the software line of the budget goes to zero, and the card line depends on how your customers pay, so compare that line too.

Everything else about it can be checked before you sign up, which is the standard this page holds the other two vendors to. Signup is self-serve: name, email and password, no card and no demo, documented in the public manual, and the whole app runs in English, Spanish or Portuguese, chosen per user. Canadian companies run in Canadian dollars on their own Canadian Stripe account, with a fee of 0.5% + C$2.00 per card transaction on top of Stripe's rate, per the Canada guide. There is a public REST API with an OpenAPI specification at /developers and signed webhooks, capped on the free plan at 10 minutes of API time and 200 leads per day. The landfill database covers 2,916 facilities with tipping fees and is published as open data. And the Dumpster Net Hub lets hauling companies pass whole jobs to each other with no listing fee and no percentage cut.

For a company running its own roll-off or junk removal trucks, that is why Dumpster Controls is the pick over both: the software line goes to zero and nothing sits behind a higher tier. Tresha, the built-in assistant, creates orders and completes deliveries, pickups and landfill runs by chat or voice, behind a confirmation card, on the free plan. A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server at mcp.dumpstercontrols.io/mcp connects the account to Claude on the web, desktop and phone, open to every company, with a ChatGPT app in preparation, as documented at /developers/mcp; none of the other dumpster platforms we track publishes an MCP server (checked 2026-09-28). Support is the same on every plan, with no paid tier: tickets from inside the app at any hour, answered within 24 hours, a public manual of 326 articles, and Tresha around the clock. It is built for roll-off, junk removal and scrap metal, the business this page is written for.

The individual pages carry more depth on each vendor: the Basestation alternative page and the Docket alternative page, plus the price index of every vendor that publishes a price.

Basestation vs Docket: FAQ

Sources

Every URL cited on this page, with the date we read it. Competitor pages open in a new tab. Nothing here comes from a review aggregator or a directory entry; where a vendor's own site contradicts itself, we quote both versions.

1. Basestation pricing: https://www.thebasestation.com/pricing (checked 2026-09-24)
2. Basestation sales model: https://www.thebasestation.com/demo (checked 2026-09-24)
3. Basestation headquarters: https://www.thebasestation.com/ (checked 2026-09-24)
4. Basestation product age: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/basestation-inc (checked 2026-09-24)
5. Basestation, dispatch and routing: https://www.thebasestation.com/features/routing (checked 2026-09-24)
6. Basestation, driver app: https://www.thebasestation.com/features/driver (checked 2026-09-24)
7. Basestation, online booking: https://www.thebasestation.com/features/crm (checked 2026-09-24)
8. Basestation, invoicing and payments: https://www.thebasestation.com/features/billing (checked 2026-09-24)
9. Basestation, quickbooks: https://www.thebasestation.com/features (checked 2026-09-24)
10. Basestation, public api: URL tried 3 of 4: https://www.thebasestation.com/company (checked 2026-09-24)
11. Basestation, ai: URL tried 4 of 5: https://www.thebasestation.com/features/reporting (checked 2026-09-24)
12. Basestation, ai: URL tried 5 of 5: https://www.thebasestation.com/rolloff (checked 2026-09-24)
13. Basestation self-reported figures: https://www.capterra.com/p/246148/Basestation/ (checked 2026-09-24)
14. Basestation self-reported figures: https://www.thebasestation.com/customer-stories (checked 2026-09-24)
15. Basestation self-reported figures: https://www.thebasestation.com/post/basestation-recognized-by-capterra-and-software-advice-in-2026 (checked 2026-09-24)
16. Docket pricing: https://www.yourdocket.com/pricing/ (checked 2026-08-23)
17. Docket headquarters: https://www.yourdocket.com/about-us/ (checked 2026-08-23)
18. Docket product age: https://www.prweb.com/releases/servicecore_expands_roll_off_capabilities_with_acquisition_of_docket/prweb19312005.htm (checked 2026-08-23)
19. Docket, dispatch and routing: https://www.yourdocket.com/dumpster-rental-software/ (checked 2026-08-23)
20. Docket, driver app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/docket-work-simplified/id1463097846 (checked 2026-08-23)
21. Docket, online booking: https://www.yourdocket.com/features/online-ordering/ (checked 2026-08-23)
22. Docket, quickbooks: https://support.yourdocket.com/hc/en-us/articles/29340817444365-Integrating-Quickbooks-Online-with-Docket (checked 2026-08-23)
23. Docket, public api: URL tried 1 of 3: https://www.yourdocket.com/api (checked 2026-08-24)
24. Docket, public api: URL tried 2 of 3: https://www.yourdocket.com/developers (checked 2026-08-24)
25. Docket, public api: URL tried 3 of 3: https://developers.yourdocket.com/ (checked 2026-08-24)
26. Docket, ai: https://www.yourdocket.com/ironrouteai-route-optimization-dumpster-haulers/ (checked 2026-08-23)
27. Docket on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.docket_mobile&hl=en_US&gl=US (checked 2026-08-23)
28. Docket integrations: https://www.yourdocket.com/website-online-booking/ (checked 2026-08-23)
29. Docket integrations: https://www.yourdocket.com/docket-boost/ (checked 2026-08-23)
30. Docket self-reported figures: https://www.yourdocket.com/ (checked 2026-08-23)
31. Dumpster Controls pricing: https://dumpstercontrols.io/pricing (checked 2026-09-24)
32. Dumpster Controls sales model: https://dumpstercontrols.io/help/getting-started/create-your-account (checked 2026-09-24)
33. Dumpster Controls headquarters: https://dumpstercontrols.io/about (checked 2026-09-24)
34. Dumpster Controls, dispatch and routing: https://dumpstercontrols.io/help/dispatch (checked 2026-09-24)
35. Dumpster Controls, driver app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dumpster-controls/id6476944277 (checked 2026-09-23)
36. Dumpster Controls, online booking: https://dumpstercontrols.io/help/online-booking (checked 2026-09-24)
37. Dumpster Controls, quickbooks: https://dumpstercontrols.io/help/quickbooks (checked 2026-09-24)
38. Dumpster Controls, public api: https://dumpstercontrols.io/developers (checked 2026-09-24)
39. Dumpster Controls, ai: https://dumpstercontrols.io/help/tresha (checked 2026-09-24)
40. Dumpster Controls, marketplace: https://dumpstercontrols.io/help/hub (checked 2026-09-24)
41. Dumpster Controls, canada: https://dumpstercontrols.io/help/canada (checked 2026-09-24)
42. Dumpster Controls on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.dumpstercontrols.app.twa (checked 2026-09-24)
43. Dumpster Controls integrations: https://dumpstercontrols.io/help/api (checked 2026-09-24)
44. Dumpster Controls self-reported figures: https://dumpstercontrols.io/llms.txt (checked 2026-09-24)

Topicsbasestation vs docket docket vs basestation basestation software basestation pricing docket dumpster software