Cordic is one of the longest-established dispatch suppliers in the UK, with deep roots in on-premise systems. The real comparison here is not feature against feature — it is a server in your office against a system in the cloud.
See the comparison Our pricingStraight answer. If you have a specific reason to keep your dispatch data on your own hardware — a council contract requirement, an established IT setup, a policy position — Cordic's on-premise heritage is a real advantage and cloud is not automatically better. If you do not have that requirement, you are maintaining a server for no return.
Cordic has been supplying UK taxi and private hire operators for decades, and is used by both local authorities and large established fleets. It integrates well with UK telephony and payment providers and its team understands UK licensing and compliance requirements as well as anyone in the market. Deployments have historically been on-premise, with cloud options available.
| Taxi Dispatch (us) | Cordic | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Cloud SaaS, published pricing | On-premise and cloud options, quote-based |
| Indicative cost | £30/month for the first 5 drivers, £2 per additional driver | Quote-based; on-premise deployments carry hardware and licence costs |
| Setup fee | £0 — setup, tariff build and data import included | Installation and hardware cost where on-premise |
| Contract term | Monthly rolling, no minimum term | Typically annual licence plus support |
| Commission per job | None — you keep 100% of every fare | Varies; network work usually carries commission |
| Best suited to | Independent operators who want low fixed cost and no lock-in | Established operators and councils who want a system on their own hardware |
This is the decision. Everything else follows from it.
| Consideration | On-premise server | Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| Upfront cost | Server hardware, installation, licence | None |
| If the hardware fails | Your problem, your engineer, your downtime | Handled at the platform level |
| Working from home | Needs VPN or remote access setup | Works by default from any connection |
| Backups | Your responsibility to run and to test | Offsite and automatic |
| Upgrades | Scheduled, sometimes chargeable, sometimes disruptive | Continuous, included |
| Data control | Complete — the box is yours | Contractual, via your processor agreement |
| Hardware refresh | Every few years, at your cost | Not applicable |
| Works if your internet drops | Office keeps dispatching locally | Needs a connection — use a 4G failover |
That last point deserves fairness: an on-premise system keeps working when your broadband fails. It is a real benefit and we are not going to pretend otherwise. In practice most operators solve it with a cheap 4G failover router, which costs a fraction of what a server and its refresh cycle cost.
If you are running Cordic on-premise and your renewal is coming up, the number that matters is not the annual licence. It is the licence plus support plus the amortised cost of the hardware you will have to replace, plus whatever your time is worth when the server has a problem at 6pm on a Saturday.
Add those up honestly and compare the total to a cloud subscription. For some operators on-premise still wins. For most independents, it has not for several years.
Moving from on-premise to cloud is more involved than a cloud-to-cloud move because the data lives on your machine rather than in an export screen. Plan for a database export rather than a CSV download, and give yourself a week of parallel running. We have done this migration before and will handle the mapping. The sequence is on our comparison page.
Stay with Cordic if on-premise is a requirement rather than a habit, or if you hold contracts that specify it.
Look at Taxi Dispatch if your server is now just something that has to be maintained, you want controllers able to work from home, and you would rather pay £30 a month than replace hardware every few years.
Straight answers, no sales script. Still stuck? Ask us directly — we answer the same working day.
There is no single best system, only the best fit for your fleet size. Autocab and iCabbi are strong for large fleets that want network integration and have the budget for it. Cordic suits established operators comfortable with on-premise. Taxi Dispatch is built for independent operators under about fifty vehicles who want low fixed cost and no lock-in.
On total monthly cost for a small fleet, Taxi Dispatch is among the lowest in the UK market at £30 per month for five drivers with no setup fee and no per-job commission. Free tiers exist elsewhere but usually cap features, charge per SMS or take a percentage, so compare the total bill rather than the headline.
The three reasons we hear most are cost creeping up at renewal, being locked into a multi-year contract, and support that takes days to answer when the board goes down on a Friday night. Feature gaps are a distant fourth — most systems do the core job adequately.
The risk is real but manageable, and it is mostly about timing. Switch mid-week rather than before a bank holiday, run both systems in parallel for a week, and move your account customers first. Data import from any major UK system is straightforward; the harder part is retraining controllers, which takes about three days.
Yes. Your phone number belongs to your telephony provider, not your dispatch supplier, so it moves with you. Your customer and booking data is yours under GDPR and your current supplier must provide it on request. We handle the import free of charge.
Check the notice period, the auto-renewal clause, the price escalation clause and the data export terms. Multi-year auto-renewing contracts with 90-day notice periods are common in this market, and operators frequently discover the window has closed. Diarise your notice date the day you sign.
Question we haven't answered? Ask it on WhatsApp. A real person replies — usually within the hour on a working day — and good questions get added to this page.
Ask on WhatsAppRunning Cordic on your own server? Ask us what moving to cloud actually involves.
Ask on WhatsApp