Carspel vs. Fuelio vs. Drivvo vs. MileIQ: Which Should You Actually Use?
We built Carspel, so it's fair to say we're not a neutral party here — but we'd rather you pick the right tool for your situation than pick Carspel for the wrong reasons. This is a straightforward breakdown of what Carspel, Fuelio, Drivvo, and MileIQ each actually do well, where they overlap, and where they don't compete with each other at all because they're solving different problems.
If you want the short version: Fuelio and Drivvo are fuel and maintenance loggers for gas vehicles. MileIQ is an automatic mileage tracker for tax and business purposes. Carspel is a household garage log covering fuel, EV charging, service history, and resale across multiple vehicles and powertrains. Below is the longer version, with the specifics.
Fuelio
Built for: logging fuel fill-ups and basic maintenance on a gas or diesel vehicle, with detailed fuel economy statistics over time.
Fuelio is mature, well-reviewed, and does its core job — fuel economy tracking — very well. It supports multiple vehicles and has a loyal following, especially on Android. It's a manual-entry tool: you type in the numbers at the pump, and it does the math.
Where it stops: there's no real EV or plug-in hybrid workflow, no household sharing (it's built around one user managing their own vehicles), and exports are CSV without much in the way of a formatted, buyer-ready report. If your garage is entirely gas-powered, single-driver, and you mainly want fuel economy stats, Fuelio is a perfectly reasonable, low-cost choice.
Switching from Fuelio? Carspel can import your fuel and maintenance history via CSV (Tools → Import data in the app), so you don't lose your existing records if you decide the household and EV features are worth moving for.
Drivvo
Built for: similar ground to Fuelio — fuel and maintenance logging with a clean interface, generally good for tracking a few vehicles in one account.
Drivvo's multi-vehicle support is a genuine strength if you're tracking two or three gas cars under one login. Reminders and maintenance scheduling are solid.
Where it stops: like Fuelio, it's built around the gas fill-up as the core unit, so EV charging sessions don't have a natural home in the data model. There's no multi-person household sharing in the sense of several people independently logging into a shared garage, and no log-transfer mechanism for handing history to a buyer.
MileIQ
Built for: automatic mileage tracking for tax deductions or employer reimbursement. It runs in the background, detects drives via GPS, and lets you swipe to classify each trip as business or personal.
This is genuinely the best use case for MileIQ, and it's worth being direct about: if your primary need is "I need defensible mileage records for the CRA or IRS without manually starting and stopping a tracker," MileIQ (or a comparable automatic mileage app) is a better fit than Carspel. Automatic detection is a different engineering problem than fuel and service logging, and it's not something Carspel does.
Where it stops: MileIQ doesn't log fuel costs, charging sessions, or maintenance at all — mileage is the entire product. It also doesn't do anything with vehicle history for resale purposes, because that's simply not what it's for.
Carspel
Built for: a household garage where vehicles might be gas, diesel, plug-in hybrid, or electric — sometimes all in the same driveway — and where more than one person drives. It logs fuel fill-ups and EV charging sessions on the same timeline, tracks service history with photo attachments, pulls NHTSA recall data by VIN, and rolls everything into PDF or CSV reports. Family and Ultimate plans support up to five household members sharing unlimited vehicles, and let you transfer a vehicle's entire logged history to a buyer when you sell, in one tap.
Where it stops: no automatic GPS mileage detection — trips are logged manually with business/personal tags, which makes Carspel a complement to a dedicated mileage app rather than a replacement for one if automatic detection is your main requirement. It's also a newer product than the other three, so it doesn't yet have years of user reviews or an iOS app (a mobile-friendly web version at app.carspel.ca covers iPhone in the meantime).
Side-by-side, for the specific things people actually ask about
- Tracks gas fill-ups? All four — though MileIQ only insofar as it logs the trip, not the fuel cost.
- Tracks EV charging sessions natively? Carspel only, among these four.
- Handles a plug-in hybrid switching between gas and electric? Carspel only.
- Multiple household members sharing one account? Carspel only (Family/Ultimate tiers).
- Automatic background mileage detection? MileIQ only.
- Service and maintenance history with photos? Carspel and Drivvo; Fuelio has basic maintenance scheduling.
- Transfers history to a buyer when you sell? Carspel only.
- Multi-vehicle support under one login? All except MileIQ, which is mileage-per-driver rather than vehicle-centric.
The honest recommendation
If you have one gas car and just want clean fuel economy logging, Fuelio or Drivvo will do the job and cost less. If your main need is mileage for taxes or reimbursement, get MileIQ or a comparable automatic tracker — Carspel isn't trying to compete there. If your household has any mix of gas, hybrid, plug-in hybrid, or electric vehicles, more than one driver, or you actually want your maintenance and energy history to mean something when you eventually sell, that's the situation Carspel was built for — and where, as far as we've found, there isn't really another single app doing the same job.