Best AutoTURN Online Alternative? PathSweeper vs AutoTURN Online Compared

PathSweeper and AutoTURN Online are the two swept path analysis tools you are most likely to meet if you want to check a turning manoeuvre in the browser rather than inside a CAD platform. Both compute vehicle swept paths on top of a site plan, both run without AutoCAD, and both are aimed at people who need a defensible envelope drawing rather than a full road-design suite.

One thing up front, in the interest of fairness: PathSweeper is our own product. This comparison is as factual as we can make it, the AutoTURN Online claims below come from Transoft's public pages (cited in the sources) and from our own tests in the product, and there is a whole section on when AutoTURN Online is the better choice. Judge accordingly.

The short version: AutoTURN Online is the web offshoot of the long-established AutoTURN desktop family, and its standout asset is a very large vehicle library. PathSweeper matches it on the engineering: the same browser workflow, the same CAD formats in and out, comparably realistic kinematics. What PathSweeper adds is a custom vehicle creator (including articulated combinations), a genuine free tier and prices roughly a third below the subscription. What it gives up is library breadth: four national libraries today against Transoft's advertised 2,800+ vehicles, a gap the creator narrows because any vehicle you have a datasheet for can be built in the browser in minutes. If you are comparing against the desktop AutoTURN products instead, that is a different discussion; see our AutoTURN alternative page.

At a glance

Both tools run the complete analysis in the browser, both import CAD drawings and imagery, and both export back to CAD. On the engineering the two are at parity. The differences that remain are structural: PathSweeper adds the custom vehicle creator, the free tier and a fraction of the price; AutoTURN Online has the much larger library, and the creator is what keeps that gap half as wide as it looks.

Feature comparison

The AutoTURN Online column combines Transoft's public pages (cited in the sources) with what we verified in the product itself in July 2026. "Not listed" means we found no mention on the public pages, which is not the same as confirmed absent; if a specific row decides your workflow, confirm it with Transoft before subscribing.

Platform

Vehicle library

Plan import

Export

Kinematically the two are also at parity: both simulate forward and reverse manoeuvres with realistic steering behaviour, and the validation section below shows how closely the results agree. Details and citations for each area follow.

Vehicle libraries

This is AutoTURN Online's strongest card. The product site advertises "Over 2800 Standard & Manufacturer-based Vehicles", and Transoft's EMEA store describes the library in more concrete terms as 500+ regional guideline vehicles plus 300+ manufacturer-based vehicles. However you slice those numbers, it is a big library backed by a vendor that has been building design-vehicle datasets for decades. If your work regularly spans many jurisdictions, that breadth is genuinely valuable.

PathSweeper's catalog is deliberately focused: four national libraries with 65 official design vehicles as of August 2026.

Against AutoTURN Online's advertised 2,800+, that is a much smaller shelf.

The honest summary: if you need an unusual design vehicle from a jurisdiction we do not cover yet, AutoTURN Online is more likely to have it on the shelf. If your work lives in the covered countries, the PathSweeper library holds up, and the gap matters less than the next section.

Custom vehicle creation

Here the two products genuinely diverge. Transoft's pricing page states plainly: "Note: AutoTURN Online does not currently support the creation of custom vehicles." If the vehicle you need is not in their library, the web product cannot model it, however large the library is.

PathSweeper includes a custom vehicle creator in the browser. You enter the dimensions from a manufacturer datasheet (wheelbase, overhangs, width, steering limits) and the vehicle is immediately available for swept path analysis. Crucially, this includes articulated combinations: semi-trailers, turntable drawbar trailers and centre-axle trailers, each with their own hitch geometry. For special transports, agricultural combinations or a client's specific fleet vehicle, this is often the difference between answering the question and not answering it. Building and saving custom vehicles is free; the pass is only needed once you use a custom vehicle in a project.

A large library and a custom creator solve different problems. The library answers "what does the guideline vehicle do here"; the creator answers "what does this exact vehicle do here". Ideally you want both, which is why the library gap above is worth weighing against this section rather than reading either in isolation.

Kinematics and validation

Both tools simulate low-speed turning behaviour, and AutoTURN's engine lineage is the de facto reference in this field. Rather than argue about whose mathematics is better, we validated PathSweeper's independently developed engine directly against it. Before release, it was checked against reference exports from AutoTURN Online for all 13 German RBSV 2020 design vehicles. On identical drive lines the computed envelopes agree with the references to a few centimetres on average, with envelope-area differences below 0.5 percent.

Beyond the baseline agreement, PathSweeper models two effects worth knowing about. First, rate-limited steering: a real driver cannot spin the wheel from lock to lock instantly, and the realistic mode limits the steering rate accordingly instead of assuming ideal tractrix behaviour. Second, articulation-angle monitoring: every combination has a mechanical maximum angle at the hitch, and PathSweeper widens the drawn arc automatically when a requested turn would exceed it, so the preview never shows a manoeuvre the vehicle could not physically drive.

AutoTURN Online likewise simulates realistic driving behaviour. We have not attempted to characterise its internal kinematic settings beyond the envelope comparison above, and we will not speculate about them here.

Import and export

PathSweeper's workflow: underlay a site plan as PDF, JPG or PNG on the free tier, calibrate the scale, draw the path. With the pass you can also upload DWG, DXF and 12d XML drawings directly (there is a standalone DWG to DXF converter as well), import a calibrated satellite image, and export the result as a layered DXF or DWG with a placeable reference point that opens cleanly in AutoCAD, Allplan and ArchiCAD. PNG, JPEG and PDF export are free, as are a batch ZIP export with one image per path and a video export of the swept manoeuvre; with the pass you can additionally generate an A3 audit plan sheet with a scale bar for print-ready submission.

AutoTURN Online covers the same ground. Transoft's product page states: "Import a drawing file (DXF or DWG) or an image (JPEG or PNG), or use Google Maps," and in the product itself 12d XML import and DWG export are available as well (as of July 2026). The one thing we could not find anywhere is a PDF underlay.

So on file formats the two tools are effectively at parity, and the difference is what you pay to use them: in PathSweeper the image and PDF underlay sit in the free tier and the CAD workflows come with the €29 pass, while in AutoTURN Online every import runs through the subscription.

Project management and teams

The day-to-day handling has grown as well. Projects live in a Drive-style workspace with folders, multi-select and a 30-day trash. The site plan under a finished drawing can be swapped afterwards, with full undo, and every path can be played back as an animation to review the manoeuvre step by step.

For teams there are two tiers above the annual plan. The Team tier (€699 per user per year) covers everything in the annual plan for each user, plus a shared organisation with roles and seat management, shared projects, a shared vehicle library and a standard data processing agreement under Art. 28 GDPR, all in the shared PathSweeper cloud. The Enterprise tier (€1,299 per user per year, plus a one-time setup quoted individually) adds a dedicated instance with its own database hosted in Germany, subprocessors exclusively in the EEA, an individually negotiable data processing agreement and usage analytics switched off. AutoTURN Online is offered as a shared web service; we found no dedicated-instance offering on Transoft's public pages. The dedicated instance is described in detail in our enterprise post.

Pricing: where the comparison stops being close

This is the deciding factor for most people, so here it is with numbers.

AutoTURN Online is subscription-only, and the figure its pricing page shows depends on your region. PathSweeper has three ways to pay: a free tier, the €29 one-time Projekt Pass per project, and an annual plan for continuous use, currently €399 per year. For a new customer it comes in under AutoTURN Online's list price in every market.

Both pricing pages localize by region, so the honest comparison is in your own currency. The table below does exactly that: the AutoTURN Online figures are what its public pricing page showed for your region as of 3 August 2026 (verify from your own location before deciding, and confirm current conditions with Transoft), and the PathSweeper figures are what you would pay in the same market.

At list price the annual plan comes in roughly a third below AutoTURN Online's 630-euro EU subscription. PathSweeper localizes its prices too, across more markets than AutoTURN Online does, and no market pays more than the German price in real terms.

Two contract details from Transoft's own pages are worth knowing: monthly subscriptions are non-refundable once purchased or renewed, and the yearly licence does not auto-renew, meaning you re-purchase it after it expires. The table below shows the store's list prices for every region.

AutoTURN Online prices by region

List prices from the official AutoTURN Online store for a 1-user licence, in every market PathSweeper serves, snapshot of 3 August 2026, excluding taxes.

Market	Billed in	Year	Month
Germany	EUR	€630	€90
United States	USD	$680	$100
United Kingdom	GBP	£520	£80
Switzerland	CHF	CHF 568	CHF 84
Australia	AUD	A$800	A$120
Canada	CAD	CA$770	CA$110
New Zealand	NZD	NZ$1,195	NZ$176
Singapore	SGD	SGD 903	SGD 133
Hong Kong SAR China	HKD	HK$5,520	HK$812
Japan	JPY	¥110,830	¥16,299
Norway	EUR	€630	€90
Sweden	SEK	SEK 6,706	SEK 986
Denmark	DKK	DKK 4,562	DKK 671
United Arab Emirates	USD	$680	$100
Saudi Arabia	USD	$680	$100
Czechia	CZK	CZK 15,073	CZK 2,217
Poland	PLN	PLN 2,682	PLN 394
India	INR	₹43,000	₹6,100
Egypt	USD	$680	$100

Norway is billed in EUR; the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are billed in USD (Transoft has no local store price in these markets).

Prices outside EUR and USD are converted by the vendor store at its own exchange rates and change over time. All amounts exclude VAT and sales tax.

The price the official store shows at your location is the one that applies; when in doubt, have Transoft confirm the current conditions before purchasing.

Download this pricing data as JSON

For occasional use the gap is wider still. The free tier includes the full canvas editor, four generic standard vehicles (explicitly generic templates, not official design vehicles), plan underlay, scale calibration, unlimited basic checks, and PNG, JPEG and PDF export plus batch ZIP export and a video export of the manoeuvre. The Projekt Pass unlocks the full vehicle catalog, the use of custom vehicles in the project (building and saving them is free), DWG/DXF/12d upload, DXF and DWG export, the A3 audit plan sheet, satellite imagery and a client-billable invoice for €29, less than a third of a single month of AutoTURN Online.

The usage-pattern argument that used to favour the incumbent is gone. Occasional checks: €29 per project against a €90 month. Continuous weekly work: an annual plan roughly a third below the €630 subscription. For a new customer there is no usage level at which AutoTURN Online's listed prices are the cheaper way to run swept path analysis in the browser.

When AutoTURN Online is the better choice

An honest comparison has to include this section, and after the rows above it has become a short one.

Choose AutoTURN Online if the vehicle library is the deciding factor and your work regularly needs guideline vehicles from jurisdictions PathSweeper does not cover yet. Their advertised 2,800+ vehicles against our four national libraries (65 official vehicles today) is not a rounding error. It is, however, only half the argument it appears to be: a missing library entry is only a hard blocker in a tool that cannot create vehicles, and PathSweeper builds any vehicle you have dimensions for, articulated combinations included. The gap really bites only when you need an uncovered jurisdiction's guideline vehicle and do not want to enter its published dimensions yourself.

Choose it if a reviewing authority or client explicitly expects AutoTURN output; delivering AutoTURN output is then the path of least resistance. Transoft reports 20,000 users across 70+ countries and more than 50,000 projects, and the name has been the reference in swept path analysis for decades. The same goes for procurement familiarity: an established supplier relationship is sometimes worth more to a purchasing department than any price difference.

And if you are actually weighing the desktop products (AutoTURN inside AutoCAD, Civil 3D or MicroStation, with deep CAD integration and corridor analysis features no web tool matches), read our AutoTURN alternative comparison instead; the trade-offs there are different.

The bottom line

Both tools do the core job in the browser: load a plan or aerial image, pick a vehicle, draw a path, get a defensible envelope; both import CAD drawings and both export DXF. AutoTURN Online brings the larger library and the established name. PathSweeper brings the custom vehicle creator (including articulated combinations), the free tier with PDF underlay, an engine validated against AutoTURN Online references, and prices roughly a third below the subscription, whether that is €29 for a single project or the annual plan for continuous work. And if the vehicle you need comes with a datasheet, even the library argument loses most of its weight.

If you want the wider market view, including the desktop and CAD-hosted tools, our swept path analysis software roundup covers the full field. And if you want to see how PathSweeper handles your own site plan, the free tier is the quickest way to find out; it costs nothing to try, and the pass or the annual plan only become relevant once a real project does.