PaRoute was developed and released open-source with the vision to create a community standard for benchmarking route predictions. One-step retrosynthesis is chiefly benchmarked using patent data, and we envisage that PaRoutes will become the analog for multi-step methods. We believe that the lack of comparative studies of route predictions hampers the development and is detrimental to the transparency and reproducibility of published research. Furthermore, we hope that PaRoutes can evolve with community contributions; for instance, we envisage that other quality metrics will be included in the framework when such methods are developed. By benchmarking our search algorithms we can as a community truly understand the limits of the current state-of-the-art of computer-aided retrosynthesis planning and pave the way for novel developments that have the potential to impact molecular design campaigns.