A stock spreadsheet is honest right up to the point where you cannot lay hands on stock you know is somewhere. That moment usually arrives as a picking mistake, a pallet nobody can place, or a customer asking for an item your sheet swears is in the building. Warehouse management software gets bought to answer three things a count never can: where a unit sits right now, which order should be picked next, and how it leaves the building without a second trip. Plain inventory software counts units and value. A warehouse system adds bins, scanning, pick-and-pack, carrier labels and cycle counts.
What follows compares seven tools a small operation can realistically run in 2026. Every price was copied from the vendor's own pricing page in September 2026, and every limit quoted is the limit the vendor publishes — not an estimate.
Two jobs that get sold under one label
Buyers overpay because the two categories overlap in the marketing, so it helps to separate them before looking at any price list.
Inventory management is about quantity and value: how many units, what they cost, when to reorder, what is already committed to open orders. Zoho Inventory, Sortly, and the inventory module inside QuickBooks or Xero live here.
Warehouse management is about physical movement: receiving against a purchase order, put-away to a bin, pick lists, packing, carrier labels, returns, cycle counts. Fishbowl, Cin7 and Finale Inventory live here.
Almost every small business needs the first before the second — and the entry tiers of the tools below cover both in a single product, which is why buying twice is rarely necessary.
A rule that holds up in practice: if the stock sits in one room and one person ships it, an inventory app with a barcode scanner is enough. Once stock lives on racks, in more than one place, or passes through more than one pair of hands, you have warehouse workflows whether or not you call them that — even with two or three pickers.
Seven signs the spreadsheet has run out
- You cannot answer "where is it?" without walking the aisles or calling someone on the floor.
- Picking errors have become routine: wrong item, wrong quantity, wrong batch. Each one costs a reship plus a refund or a discount.
- You are past 500 active SKUs. Manual counting slows down sharply after a few hundred lines, and near-expiry or serialised stock makes it worse.
- Stock leaves from two places — a shop, a warehouse, a garage, a 3PL partner — and no single screen shows the total.
- The month-end close drags because stock figures and sales figures will not agree.
- Reordering is gut feel, so dead stock piles up in one corner while best-sellers run out in another.
- A recall or an audit would hurt, because you cannot trace which batch reached which customer, or who signed for what.
Two of those at once is the usual trigger to stop paying in mistakes and start paying for a tool.
What actually sets your bill
Feature lists are cheap to compare. The bill is decided by six things that sit further down the pricing page.
Annual lock-in. Fishbowl's listed prices are billed annually, and Sortly's lower effective rate assumes paying 12 months up front. Budget the yearly figure, not the headline month.
Per-user, per-order and per-location limits. Zoho Inventory is the clearest case: add-ons run $7.50 per month for extra users, $7.50 for another 500 orders and $10 per month per extra location, with advanced autoscans sold in packs of 50 scans for $8. A growing team pays well above the entry price.
Module add-ons. Katana's optional modules run $149–$249 per month, and Fishbowl's demand forecasting sits outside the base plan.
Scope traps. Manufacturing is not part of Fishbowl's inventory plans, and Cin7's published figures leave taxes out. Read what each tier includes before comparing vendors side by side.
Onboarding. The higher Cin7 tiers and the quote-only vendors in this market — Finale Inventory publishes Essentials from $499 per month and Growth from $799 per month — normally come with a guided rollout. Fine, as long as it lands in the first-year budget.
Hardware. Phone cameras scan for nothing but slow down at volume. A Bluetooth scanner, labels and a label printer are a one-off cost that repays itself the first time a mis-ship is avoided.
The seven tools, and where each one fits
Zoho Inventory has the most generous free tier here: a Free plan with 50 orders per month, 1 user and 2 locations, including composite items, dropshipment and backordering. Paid plans are billed annually per organisation — Standard $29 per month for 500 orders, 2 users and 2 locations, Professional $79 for 3,000 orders and 4 locations, Premium $129 for 7,500 orders and 6 locations, Enterprise $249 for 15,000 orders, 7 users and 10 locations. Best for a seller running several channels who wants barcode-driven shipping without an implementation project.
Sortly is the fastest of the seven to stand up on a phone: photograph the racks, print QR labels, scan. A Free $0 tier sits below Advanced at $49 per month — $288 per year if billed yearly, which works out at $24 per month effective — with higher tiers at $149 and $299 per month, billed yearly at $888 and $1,788. It is inventory-first rather than shipping-first, so workshops, clinics, trades and asset-heavy businesses get more from it than high-volume ecommerce pickers.
Fishbowl is built for businesses that stock, move and sell finished goods, and it is the strongest barcode-driven option here with accounting sync. Prices are annual: Essentials $229 per month for 2 users with QuickBooks Online and Xero sync, real-time SKU tracking, reorder points and mobile scanning; Growth $429 per month for 5 users with pick, receive and ship, automated reordering, multichannel selling and unlimited warehouses; Scale $729 per month. Note the boundary: manufacturing — bills of materials, work orders, MRP — is a separate product, quoted at $675 per month in the Advanced Manufacturing line.
Cin7 belongs on the shortlist once orders arrive from several channels and stock is split between your own warehouse and a 3PL. Three published tiers sit at $349, $599 and $1,199 per month in USD excluding taxes, and the vendor states that pricing starts at $349 per month. That is a real step up from the entry tools, so it earns its place only when multichannel volume, EDI or 3PL workflows are already daily reality.
Katana tracks materials into finished goods in real time, which is what assembly, kitting or light manufacturing needs. There is a free plan, and the Core plan starts at $299 per month, with optional modules at $149, $199 and $249 per month for deeper inventory and planning. A workshop with recipes or bills of materials fits it better than a pure distribution warehouse.
Odoo runs the opposite play: start with one app, add modules as you grow. One App Free costs $0 and covers a single app with unlimited users, which makes it the cheapest way to test serious inventory, purchase and manufacturing logic. Editions that unlock every app start at roughly $8.95 per user per month and reach about $13.60–$17 per user per month depending on edition and billing term, with monthly costing more than annual. Best for a business that expects accounting, manufacturing and HR on the same system within two or three years.
ERPNext is open source and free to self-host, which suits anyone who wants stock data on their own server. Managed cloud plans start at $5 per month for a single site on shared servers, $20 per month for a virtual machine that can host several sites, and $125 per month upwards for dedicated instances. The real currency here is setup time: a self-hosted ERP is a project, not an afternoon.
Choosing by size
- One room, one person, under 200 SKUs: stay on the spreadsheet, or take a free tier — Zoho Inventory Free at 50 orders per month, Sortly Free, Odoo One App Free — to get barcodes working before you pay anything.
- Small shop or workshop, a few hundred SKUs: Sortly Advanced at $49 per month, or Zoho Inventory Standard at $29 per month if you ship orders and want accounting sync.
- Product business with racks, pickers and an accountant to satisfy: Fishbowl Essentials at $229 per month for barcode-driven control with QuickBooks or Xero sync.
- Multichannel ecommerce or 3PL fulfilment: Cin7 at $349 per month upwards, with Zoho Inventory Professional as the cheaper middle step.
- You assemble or manufacture: Katana from $299 per month, or Odoo and ERPNext if you want manufacturing, accounting and HR inside one system.
Two requirements that hit Vietnam harder
If you sell in Vietnam, two rules sit on top of everything above.
The first is invoicing. E-invoices have been mandatory since 1 July 2026 under Decree 254/2026/ND-CP, household businesses included, so whichever warehouse tool you choose has to hand clean sales data to your invoicing or accounting system instead of living in isolation.
The second is data. The Personal Data Protection Law 91/2025/QH15 took effect on 1 January 2026, which matters the moment your warehouse system stores names, phone numbers and delivery addresses of customers and staff.
In practice, the cloud tools above — Zoho Inventory, Odoo, Katana, Cin7 — all work from Vietnam, and Odoo and ERPNext can be self-hosted on a local server when data location is a hard requirement. For Vietnamese-language invoices, local POS and inventory suites are the usual companions.
FAQ
What is warehouse management software?
It is the system controlling the physical flow of stock: receiving against purchase orders, put-away to bins, barcode scanning, pick lists, packing, carrier labels, cycle counts and returns. Plain inventory software mainly tracks how many units you own and what they are worth.
Does a small business need it on day one?
Usually not. The triggers are more than one storage location, more than about 500 active SKUs, more than one picker, routine picking errors, or stock sitting with a 3PL. Any two of those and a free or entry tier tends to pay for itself within a few months.
Which option is cheapest?
The free tiers carry most of the load: Zoho Inventory Free at 50 orders, 1 user and 2 locations, Sortly Free, Odoo One App Free with unlimited users, and self-hosted ERPNext at nothing to run. Among paid plans, Zoho Inventory Standard at $29 per month per organisation is the lowest entry price here, followed by Sortly Advanced at $49 per month.
WMS versus inventory management — the difference?
Inventory management tracks quantity and value. Warehouse management tracks movement and location: which bin, which batch, which picker, which carrier label. Most small businesses buy the first and add the second later, and several tools in this list deliver both in one subscription.
Can a phone work as the barcode scanner?
Yes. Zoho Inventory, Sortly, Fishbowl, Cin7, Katana and Odoo all scan through a phone camera, which is enough to start. Add a Bluetooth scanner and a label printer as volume grows, because camera scanning slows down once you are picking dozens of orders a day.
This article is a rewritten version of the original guide at tanit365.com, where the full price table, vendor-by-vendor notes and the Vietnam e-invoice section are kept up to date.
Top comments (0)