Truck Packer vs Vectorworks for Truck Packs: The Same Load Plan for $28 vs $170 a Month, and Why Many Shops Run Both

Vectorworks Spotlight costs $170 a month (or $1,530 a year) and it's where you design the show. You can draw a truck pack in it too, but Truck Packer costs $28 a month and does that job directly: give it a list of boxes and a truck, trailer or container, and it builds the 3D load plan and shows the crew where everything goes. A lot of shops will end up running both, and that's fine.

I'm a working FOH engineer, and I built Truck Packer to be the easiest load planner to use, because the pack always ended up as a drawing someone made by hand at 2 am. Plenty of bigger production companies draw their truck packs in Vectorworks today. Here's how the two actually compare when the question is the load, not the rig.

Vectorworks Spotlight costs $170 a month, or $1,530 a year

Source: Vectorworks, Buy Spotlight

Vectorworks sells Spotlight two ways in the US store: $170 billed monthly, or $127.50 a month billed annually at $1,530 a year. That's per seat, and it buys you a full CAD package, not a load planner. If your designers already pay for Spotlight, the truck pack doesn't cost anything extra to draw. If the person doing the pack is a production manager, a crew chief or a warehouse lead who doesn't otherwise need CAD, that's a lot of money for one drawing per load.

Truck Packer Pro costs $28 a month, with 25% off annual billing

Source: Truck Packer, Pricing

Pro is $28 a month for one person, and annual billing saves 25%. It includes unlimited packs, the case and container library, CSV import, PDF export, AutoPack, weight visualization, shareable packs and a loadout checklist. You can pause and resume it when work is slow, which matters when the work is seasonal. Business is contact-for-pricing and adds multi-user orgs, collaborative packs, multi-truck packing, API access and SSO. Every plan starts with a 7-day free trial and no credit card.

Vectorworks is the industry standard for lighting and stage design

Source: Vectorworks, Spotlight

Vectorworks calls Spotlight "The Industry Standard for Lighting and Stage Design Software," and honestly that's fair. It has a built-in instrument and truss library, patching, GDTF and MVR export, worksheets that update with the drawing, and a free previz app in Vision. Braceworks, an add-on, runs structural analysis on truss and rigging. None of that is something Truck Packer does or wants to do. The Spotlight page doesn't mention trucks or packing at all, though, so a pack in Vectorworks is you drawing boxes in a box.

Truck Packer auto-packs a truck, trailer or container from a list, Vectorworks doesn't

Source: Truck Packer, Changelog

In Vectorworks you model each box and place it yourself. That gives you total control, and it's also why a Vectorworks truck pack is a very manual process. In Truck Packer you pull items from your library (or import a whole manufacturer's cases in one click), pick one of about 83 preset trucks, trailers, ISO containers, ULDs, pallets or rail cars, and AutoPack places everything in 3D with collision flags if anything overlaps. You can then drag things where you actually want them. To be straight about it, AutoPack doesn't have stack limits, bottom-only rules or unload priority yet, so you'll still move a few things by hand.

Neither tool calculates axle or kingpin weights for you today

Source: Truck Packer, Pricing

Truck Packer shows weight visualization and a per-container weight total, so you can see where the heavy items sit and what the truck weighs. Axle and kingpin weights aren't shipped yet. We're working on them, but if you need a legal axle number today, you'll still do that math yourself. Braceworks handles rigging loads, but nothing on the Spotlight or Braceworks pages covers vehicle axle loads either. Call this one even, and plan accordingly.

A Truck Packer pack opens on a crew phone with no account

Source: Truck Packer, Changelog

This is where the two really split. A shared Truck Packer pack opens in Crew View on any phone with no login, the share button gives you a QR code per truck, and the loadout checklist lets the crew tick items off as they go in. Vectorworks has a real answer here too: the free Vectorworks Nomad app lets guests view shared files without an account and mark up PDFs. The difference is that Nomad shows a drawing, and Truck Packer shows a load plan the crew works through on the dock.

Truck Packer imports CSV, XLSX and Stagera, Vectorworks talks to design tools

Source: Truck Packer, Changelog

Truck Packer takes a CSV or XLSX of whatever you're loading, and the Business importer reads dimensions like 48x24x30 out of a single column, so a warehouse export goes in without retyping. For production shops, Stagera can push pull sheets straight in, and Business also adds third-party WMS integrations and a REST API. Vectorworks is stronger on the design side, with MVR and GDTF for consoles and previz and Excel-referenced worksheets. If your list lives in a warehouse or rental system, Truck Packer is closer to it, and if it lives in your plot, Vectorworks is.

Truck Packer does the same truck pack for $28 a month next to $170

Source: Vectorworks, Buy Spotlight and Truck Packer, Pricing

Keep Vectorworks for designing the show, because the rig, the plot and the paperwork belong in one file and nothing we make replaces that. For the load itself, Truck Packer does the same job for $142 a month less, runs in any browser with no install or training, and the person packing doesn't need to know CAD. You drag and drop, the crew opens it on their phones at load-out, and you can pause the plan when it's quiet. A lot of shops will keep Vectorworks for design and use Truck Packer for the trucks, and at $28 a month next to $170, that's an easy pair to justify.

Your designers can keep the plot. Log in to Truck Packer and pack it.