TrueCar vs LeadLocate: Dealer Software Comparison

One brings you buyers who already have a number in their head. The other brings you buyers in your own zone and the system to work them. Different bets.

These get compared because both put shoppers in front of a store, but the mechanism is not remotely the same, and the mechanism is what determines your gross.

TrueCar's proposition to consumers is price certainty. A shopper researches, sees pricing information, and is introduced to a participating dealer with an expectation already formed about what the vehicle should cost. That is genuinely useful to a certain buyer, and it produces shoppers who are further down the funnel than a general browser.

LeadLocate's proposition to dealers is supply and process. You define a territory, campaigns and landing pages generate inquiries inside it, and those inquiries come to you exclusively along with the CRM to work them. The shopper arrives without a third party having set a price expectation on your behalf, which cuts both ways: more room to hold gross, more work to build value.

Neither is right in the abstract. A high volume store running thin on new units and paid on turn is playing a completely different game than an independent used store living on front end gross. Know which one you are before you evaluate either.

TrueCar operates a consumer facing car buying experience oriented around pricing transparency, and a participating dealer network that receives introductions to those shoppers. It has also been known for powering affinity and membership car buying programs, where an organization offers its members a vehicle buying benefit and participating dealers honor the program terms.

Historically the dealer economics have been structured around paying for outcomes rather than for impressions, which is a meaningfully different model from a flat monthly advertising subscription. Program structure, fee models, certification requirements and which affinity partnerships are active all change over time and can differ by market. Verify all of it with your TrueCar representative rather than trusting any comparison page, this one included.

The strengths are worth stating plainly. Shoppers who arrive through a buying program are often close to a decision. Program membership carries trust you did not have to build. And a model that ties cost to results is easier to defend in a management meeting than a subscription that produced nothing last month. Those are real advantages and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

We built the entire stack ourselves and ship changes to it continuously, which is why the module list is longer than most dealers expect from a lead vendor.

The supply side is territory based. You pick a zone around your store and every inquiry generated inside it is delivered to you and not resold. Two families exist: inbound buyer leads from in market shoppers, and opt in seller leads from local owners who submitted a vehicle offer request asking to be contacted about selling. Leads are a mix of VIN specific and open shoppers, nothing is filtered or scored, and every submission in the zone is delivered as entered. Where something is genuinely wrong, it goes through post delivery replacement review.

The working side is a complete CRM. Lead distribution with rules and history, SMS and MMS threading, RCS with automatic SMS fallback, click to call with a VoIP softphone, call recording with transcription, voicemail drop, email inbox and composer, bulk email, automations, follow up processes, drip campaigns with an editor, appointments, reminders, and a phone validator and email validator built in house. DealTracker handles desking for loan and lease with a 50-state tax matrix, semimonthly payment frequency, trade credit caps and three lease tax methods, and it pushes numbers to a customer facing deal page the shopper can open on their phone.

Around that sit lead pages, personal salesperson websites, a free live chat widget, My Inventory Link for feed ingest and per salesperson inventory sites, AutoMail for IVR and call routing, and SecureWebX for online credit applications, apply links, document collection and compliance records. No lender portal submission and no eContracting, to be clear about the boundary.

Programs, fees and features change on both sides. Get anything that will drive your decision in writing from each vendor before you sign.

Here is the part that decides this for most stores, and it rarely appears in either vendor's material.

A buyer who arrives with a number already in their head is easier to close and harder to hold gross on. A buyer who arrives without one takes more skill and more time, and leaves more room. Neither is free. The first trades margin for velocity, the second trades velocity for margin.

So the comparison is not cost per lead. It is total gross per hundred dollars of channel spend, and you have to include back end. Run it for both channels over ninety days at minimum: units produced, average front, average back, total spend. Then look at what your team had to do to get there, because a channel that closes at a high rate with low gross may still be the right buy for a store that is paid on volume, and completely wrong for the store next door.

One more variable that gets ignored. A price transparency channel affects how your other customers negotiate, because the same pricing information is available to everyone walking in. That is a market condition rather than something either vendor controls, and any store still building its desk process around information asymmetry is going to have a hard decade regardless of which vendor it buys from.

We would rather be honest about fit than win a customer who leaves in four months.

• You are volume driven, paid on turn and manufacturer objectives, and units matter more to your P and L than front end gross.
• An outcome based cost model is easier for you to defend internally than a monthly subscription, and your controller will thank you for it.
• Affinity and membership program traffic is meaningful in your market and you want access to buyers who arrive through it.
• Your CRM and your follow up process are already working, so what you need is more shoppers rather than a better system.
• You have the desk discipline to work a price led customer profitably, including a back end process that does not depend on front end gross.

If those describe you, adding a CRM later is still worthwhile, but cancelling a producing channel to pay for one would be a mistake.

The argument for us gets strong when several of these are true at once.

• Holding gross matters and you would rather build value from scratch than negotiate down from a number someone else published.
• You want the lead source and the CRM from one vendor, on one bill, with one place to look when something breaks.
• Exclusivity is the point. Fewer leads nobody else is calling beats more leads three stores are working at the same time.
• Acquisition is your bottleneck. Opt in seller leads from local owners are a supply line most stores do not have, described on the seller leads page.
• You are independent, buy here pay here, a broker or a single salesperson, and program certification requirements are a barrier rather than a benefit. Subprime shoppers are covered on subprime auto leads.
• You have no DMS connection and no inventory feed. Neither is required to operate.
• You want to see, in one report, what every source actually produced, rather than reconciling three dashboards by hand.

Ask this of both of us, and of anyone else you evaluate. When the program ends, what do you keep.

With any introduction based channel, what you keep is the customers you actually sold and whatever your own CRM recorded along the way. If your team worked those shoppers by personal cell phone, which is more common than any manager wants to admit, you keep very little. The conversation history, the objections, the reason someone did not buy in March and might in September, all of it walks out with the employee.

That is the strongest quiet argument for having the working system under your control rather than borrowed. Communication inside the platform means the record exists, the reporting is real rather than self reported, and the customer database is an asset you can still use next year. Encrypted customer profiles, role based permissions and a login log mean you can also answer the uncomfortable question about who had access to what and when.

Get export terms in writing from every vendor before you sign, including us. What can you take, in what format, and does communication history come with it. Your leverage on that question is never higher than the moment before signature.

You do not have to choose in the abstract. Run them side by side for a quarter with the measurement built the same way on both sides.

Keep whatever is producing. Add a defined zone around your store and route every source, including your existing ones, into one CRM so response time, touch count and outcome are recorded identically. Then compare on three numbers: total gross per hundred dollars of spend, average time to first response by source, and follow up depth before the trail goes cold. That third number is almost always lower than management believes, and it explains more variance in results than any vendor choice does.

Ninety days is the minimum honest window. A month of a used car market is weather, not climate. And we cannot guarantee what the test will show, because that depends on your inventory, your pricing and the people answering your phones. What we can do is make the test cheap: month to month pricing from $199 for CRM Only and from $799 for lead programs, published on the pricing page, with Skip A Month at $199 if you need to pause. If you would rather see it running before committing anything, start with the demo or just contact us and ask.

Does LeadLocate publish pricing to consumers the way a buying network does?

No. We do not set or publish a price expectation on your behalf. Leads arrive as inquiries and the number is yours to build. My Inventory Link can advertise your actual vehicles from your feed if you want your pricing shown.

Do we pay per sale or per month?

Per month, and the figures are public. CRM Only starts at $199, inbound buyer leads at $799, Marketplace Acquisitions at $999 and the Buyers and Sellers Hybrid Plan at $1,599. Month to month, no long term contract, US only.

Are LeadLocate leads exclusive to our store?

Yes. Leads generated in the zone you choose are delivered to you and not resold. Nothing is filtered or scored, every submitted lead is delivered as entered, and genuine problems go through post delivery replacement review.

Is there a certification program or approval process to join?

No certification program. You choose a territory and start. There is no requirement to hold a specific franchise, run a particular DMS, or supply an inventory feed, which is why brokers and individual salespeople use the platform.

Can we run TrueCar and LeadLocate at the same time?

Yes. Many stores keep a producing channel and add the CRM and a lead zone alongside it, routing every source into one system so results can be compared on the same basis after ninety days.

Which one produces more gross per unit?

It depends on your desk, your inventory and your market, and we cannot guarantee an outcome either way. The honest test is total gross per hundred dollars of channel spend measured over at least ninety days with attribution built the same way for both.

We will map a zone around your store and route your existing sources into the same CRM so gross per dollar of spend is measured identically. Month to month, no long term contract.