Keel vs MileIQ: Automatic Mileage or the Whole Ledger?

Short answer: MileIQ does one job and does it without you: it detects drives in the background and asks you to swipe each one business or personal. Keel logs mileage too, but you enter the trip yourself — and in exchange mileage sits in the same iPhone app as your invoices and receipts, with no account and no cloud. Choose MileIQ if forgetting trips is your actual problem. Choose Keel if you want one app for the whole year’s books.

These two are not really the same category, and pretending otherwise wastes your time. MileIQ is a specialist. Keel is a general ledger for a one-person business that happens to include mileage. The right question is not which is better but whether your bookkeeping problem is mostly a driving problem.

If it is, be honest about that early — the best apps for 1099 workers splits cleanly between automation-first and privacy-first tools, and mileage is where the split bites hardest. It is also worth knowing what the IRS actually requires in a mileage log before judging either app, because the standard is lower than most people assume and both clear it.

What does MileIQ actually do?

MileIQ is a dedicated mileage tracker for iPhone and Android. It runs in the background using your phone’s sensors and records drives without being started or stopped. You open the app later and swipe: right for business, left for personal.

Around that core it adds the housekeeping a real log needs — notes, tolls and parking on a trip, the ability to join two drives the app recorded separately, custom purposes beyond plain business and personal, and reports you can hand to a preparer. Drives sync to the cloud and reach a web dashboard as well as the phone, so classification need not happen on the device that recorded the trip.

MileIQ offers a free tier with a monthly cap on drives, and a subscription for unlimited tracking. The cap is low enough that anyone driving for a living will hit it in the first week or two. Numbers change, so check MileIQ’s current pricing.

Where is MileIQ genuinely better?

At automatic capture, and it is not a narrow win.

Background drive detection is the best version of this feature on the market, and the reason is behavioral rather than technical. You carry the phone; the drives appear. Forgetting to log a trip stops being a mistake that can happen to you. That matters, because manual mileage logging is a habit almost nobody sustains — people start in January with real discipline and are reconstructing March from memory by April. Every trip you fail to record is a deduction you fail to claim.

Keel has no answer to this. Keel asks you to record the trip. If you do not record it, it is not there. That is the plain trade, and if you know you will not open an app after every job, MileIQ’s automation is worth more to you than any privacy argument.

The swipe classification is well designed too. Reviewing a week of drives takes a couple of minutes because the interaction is one gesture per trip, and joining drives the app recorded as two means a badly detected trip is fixable rather than a lie in your records. Add Android support and a web dashboard, neither of which Keel has, and the specialist advantage is clear.

Where is Keel better?

On scope, and on where the record lives.

MileIQ tracks mileage. That is the beginning and the end of it. It does not invoice a client, read a receipt for a bag of materials, or tell you what you earned this quarter. If mileage is one of four things you track, MileIQ is one of four apps you are paying for.

Keel puts mileage next to the rest. The same iPhone app writes PDF invoices with custom numbering, your logo, a brand color, and a payment link as a QR code. It reads photographed receipts on-device with Apple Intelligence. It shows a Freeboard view of the business, produces reports, keeps an append-only hash-chained ledger, and exports the whole year — mileage included — as a single Accountant Pack. In January you hand over one file instead of assembling exports from several services.

Then there is location. A mileage tracker is, by construction, a record of everywhere you drove, and MileIQ keeps that record in its cloud behind an account. Keel has no account, no login, no cloud, and no bank connection; its App Store privacy label reads “Data Not Collected,” and your trips never leave the phone. Whether that matters is personal, but it is why some people will not run background tracking at all — the same instinct behind most questions about data privacy for freelancers.

Cost is shaped differently too. Keel Free is $0 with unlimited invoices, receipts, and mileage — no drive cap. Keel Pro is a one-time $249.99 Lifetime purchase rather than a subscription.

How do Keel and MileIQ compare side by side?

	MileIQ	Keel
Scope	Mileage only	Invoices, receipts, mileage, reports
Drive capture	Automatic background detection	You log the trip
Classification	Swipe business or personal	Marked when you enter it
Where data lives	Vendor cloud, synced	Your iPhone only
Account required	Yes	No
Web dashboard	Yes	No
Platforms	iOS and Android	iPhone only
Invoicing	No	PDF, custom numbering, QR payment link
Receipt capture	No	Yes, read on-device
Year-end export	Mileage reports	Accountant Pack for the whole year
Free tier	Capped monthly drives	Unlimited invoices, receipts, mileage
Paid model	Subscription	One-time $249.99 Lifetime

Check MileIQ’s current pricing before deciding. Caps and tiers move.

Will either one satisfy the IRS?

Both can, and this is where people over-worry.

A compliant log needs the date, the mileage, the destination or route, and the business purpose, recorded at or near the time of the trip. MileIQ captures date and distance automatically and gets purpose from your swipe and any note you add. Keel records the same fields because you type them, which means it is contemporaneous only if you actually enter it that day.

The difference is not the format, it is the completeness. An automated log that is ninety-five percent accurate beats a manual log that is sixty percent complete, and the second outcome is far more common than people admit when choosing a manual tool. Neither app files anything for you.

What can Keel not do?

Worth reading before you switch, because none of this is arriving next week.

Keel does not detect drives automatically — the central thing MileIQ exists for. Keel does not create estimates or quotes; that feature is in development but is not shipping today. Keel does not import from a bank feed, so nothing lands in your books on its own. Keel does not file your taxes. Keel does not manage a team or dispatch jobs. And Keel has no web interface: no desktop, no Android, no browser login.

If automatic tracking is your reason for shopping at all, that first line settles it.

Who is MileIQ right for?

The person whose vehicle is the job.

Rideshare and delivery drivers, couriers, mobile technicians running a dozen calls a day, real estate agents crossing a metro area, sales reps on a territory. At that volume manual entry does not merely feel tedious — it fails, and the failure is expensive. If you make fifteen stops a day, nobody logs fifteen trips a day for a year, and the automation pays for itself in recovered deductions long before you finish arguing about the subscription.

MileIQ is also right if mileage is genuinely all you need, because invoicing and bookkeeping are handled elsewhere. And it is the only option of the two on Android or from a browser. If you like the automatic-tracking model but want to compare specialists, the Everlance alternative rundown covers the neighboring apps.

Who is Keel right for?

The one-person business that drives some, bills more, and wants one place for both.

A tradesperson with four jobs a week. A photographer driving to shoots. A consultant with occasional client visits. Someone whose mileage is real and worth claiming but who is not living in the van — and whose bigger daily need is getting an invoice out, filing a receipt, and knowing where the year stands. For that person, a subscription to a single-purpose tracker solves a fraction of the problem.

Keel also fits if background location tracking is the sticking point rather than a shrug. Some people do not want a service holding a map of everywhere they drove, and that objection does not go away because the feature is convenient. The honest cost is stated above: nothing is captured unless you capture it. Log the trip the day you drive it, because reconstructed routes are where deductions quietly disappear.

If mileage is one part of a bigger picture for you, Keel is on the App Store: Keel — Invoice Maker & Receipts. The free tier is not a trial, so you can run a real month through it before deciding.

Frequently asked questions

Does Keel track drives automatically like MileIQ?

No, and this is the single biggest difference between them. MileIQ detects drives in the background using your phone’s sensors; Keel asks you to record each trip. There is no version of Keel that watches your location. If you know from experience that you will not log trips consistently, take that seriously rather than assuming this time will be different.

Can MileIQ send invoices?

No. MileIQ is a mileage tracker and nothing else — no invoicing, no receipt capture, no income tracking. If you need to bill clients as well as claim mileage, MileIQ is one app in a stack rather than a complete answer, which is the practical reason people end up comparing it to something broader.

Is Keel’s mileage log acceptable for taxes?

Yes, if you keep it properly. The requirement is date, mileage, destination or route, and business purpose recorded at or near the time of the trip, and Keel captures those fields. The weakness is not the format but the habit — an entry made three months later from memory is worth less under examination than one made the same day.

Which costs less?

MileIQ has a capped free tier and a subscription for unlimited drives, so its cost recurs for as long as you drive. Keel is free with unlimited mileage entries and a one-time $249.99 Lifetime upgrade. A subscription is cheaper if you need tracking for one busy season; a single purchase wins over years. Check current prices on both vendors’ pages.

Can I use both together?

You can, and it is a common arrangement: MileIQ for automatic drive capture, Keel for invoices, receipts, and the year-end export. It works, but you are paying a subscription and maintaining two records that have to be reconciled at tax time. Reasonable as a deliberate choice, less so as an accident.

What happens to my Keel mileage if my phone is lost?

You have whatever you exported. Keel keeps records encrypted on the device with no server copy, so there is no cloud account to restore a new phone from — unlike MileIQ, whose drives live in its cloud and follow you to any device. That is the direct cost of the on-device model, and it makes regular exports your responsibility.

---

This article is general information. Feature sets and pricing change — check both vendors’ current pages before deciding.