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Good news: they are! We optimized this page for readability too, so you can find the inventory management system you need in no time. We check through the pricing and plans available for these inventory management options and confirmed they are up-to-date.
We checked through the info on the page to bring everything up to date and ensure that each program is still available for free. We also added some new links for related pieces to look at—other free software that may be important for small business owners.
Managing inventory is tough, and it can be expensive. The trick is finding a platform that is free and delivers the features you need to manage your business. It gets a higher ranking because its overall features are the best for small businesses all around. When it comes to free platforms, though, inFlow On-Premise has a slight edge. Pretty much all of our favorite free inventory software for small businesses include some kind of limitation, but they differ in the kinds of limitations they impose.
Some free inventory management software restricts the number of warehouses and sales channels you can manage, while others put caps on the number of orders or customers you can add. As you can see, inFlow, Zoho, and RightControl limit the number of warehouses or sales channels you can manage on their platforms. In addition, Zoho limits the number of orders your business can process cutting you off after 20 sales orders per month , while inFlow limits you to just customers and orders combined over the whole life of your subscription.
On the plus side, only inFlow places a limit on your number of inventory items though RightControl does limit you to just 10 product lines. For starters, Zoho is a cloud-based platform, meaning you can access it from your computer or a mobile app.
It also includes kitting capabilities for bundles of products that can be sold together and alerts that can be triggered anytime your stock drops below an acceptable level. Unlike a lot of other options on our list, Zoho also offers shipping management tools, so you can easily schedule and track shipments, print packing slips, and generate shipping labels.
Plus, the software includes tons of integrations for ecommerce platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce. The downsides: Zoho imposes one of the strictest limits on sales and purchase orders only 20 per month. It also limits you to just 12 shipments per month, and the real-time tracking can be a bit buggy compared to smoother paid services. In addition to tracking your inventory levels, this app can help you track completed and pending payments, generate purchase orders, process invoices, and more.
It can also track costs for each item, helping you produce a more accurate cost of goods sold COGS calculation as part of your accounting. You can even scan items using one of the best free inventory apps on the market. And once you hit products or customers, the system stops allowing you to add more without upgrading to the inFlow Cloud service.
You can still purchase the software, but there will not be any more new features or bug fixes. For regularly updated inventory software, inFlow Cloud is available for purchase. As the only enterprise resource planning ERP inventory software on our list, Odoo goes beyond simple inventory tracking and reorder point reminders.
Odoo includes tons of high-end functionality, including customer relationship management CRM , point-of-sale, human resource, project management, and business management features. It even includes a customer portal where your clients can log in and view the status of their orders. You can also manage multiple warehouses, complete material resource planning MRP , and route products directly from your supplier to your customer for faster order fulfillment.
And we love that Odoo lets you sell on multiple sales channels and integrate them all into your system. The downsides: Oddly enough, Odoo offers virtually no integrations, even with major shipping and ecommerce providers. To make matters worse, businesses may outgrow the free version very quickly, at which point it may be more cost-efficient to consider a different ERP service. Odoo 14 came out in October and is free to download for Windows. RightControl is a good choice for ecommerce businesses because it offers excellent warehouse management features—even if it does limit you to just one warehouse.
With RightControl, you can not only use a barcode scanner to track inventory and allocate stock but also generate new barcodes and assign them to individual items. That makes it easy for ecommerce businesses to add new products to their catalogue and keep tabs on each item in their inventory.
RightControl software also allows you to create picking lists, so you can fulfill customer orders faster and more accurately. The downsides: Unfortunately, RightControl does have some limitations. PartKeepr is a free, open-source inventory software. That means other users can add functionality to the program as needed. The result? PartKeepr keeps getting better and adding more features over time—all while remaining completely free. So manufacturers that need to keep tabs on materials, components, and finished products have the flexibility to do it.
PartKeepr also offers multiple-warehouse management, and it allows you to group items from your production runs together in batches. That saves you time if you find a defect within a specific run of items. The downsides: PartKeepr is a local software, meaning it lives on your computer instead of the cloud.
That makes it difficult to use if you need multiple users in multiple locations to have access to your inventory numbers. The final thing to remember is that PartKeepr is an open-source software.
You can customize your inventory source system—and the software—so that it works best for your business, but you need coding experience for work. While financial management, HCM and document management are all beneficial, small manufacturers will find the most use in a number of manufacturing-specific features.
FreeData ERP provides tools to manage work allocation and production scheduling. The warehouse management module handles inventory tracking, as well as warehouse reporting. Free standard email support is also available. Unlike other free manufacturing software, FreeData ERP is robust enough to handle the needs of many small business manufacturers. The company also sells FreeData ERP with source code and re-branding and reselling rights, for those who have in-house developers that can build off of the free code.
Advanced Enterprise produced by Xpress Software is a free manufacturing ERP software that helps small manufacturers manage production orders and invoicing. This no-cost solution maintains order statuses, tracks ship dates, manages changes and maintains list price for manufactured goods. While Advanced Enterprise provides a grossly simplified suite of manufacturing tools, an SMB manufacturer with simple needs may find this ERP solution useful.
This free manufacturing system is not for companies with complicated supply chain and inventory needs. While the core Advanced Enterprise software is free, there are various affordable add-ons that companies can purchase to beef up the free offering.
These add-ons include tools to provide advanced bills of material, workflow management and financial management. This software provides various functions including product configurator, advanced BOM, sales solutions and product lifecycle management tools for complex products. Technical support, however, is not included in the free version.
There is a cloud-based version called inFlow Cloud available that is more comprehensive but lacks a free offering.
Odoo is an open-source system for businesses of all sizes. It provides support for warehouse management and offers a variety of modules and apps to fit the unique requirements of your business.
It is available both as a SaaS or self-hosted solution and is compatible with all platforms. Stockpile provides small to medium-sized businesses with free inventory management software support. This system uses a tiered access model to manage users and administer locations, manufacturers, preferences and physical areas. It contains reporting features that give the users valuable information on inventory turnover and other business-critical considerations. It is available with a SaaS deployment and is compatible with all platforms.
Stockpile gives users multiple avenues of visibility into their inventory. Delivrd is a cloud-based free inventory management solution that compliments businesses of all sizes.
It is available for all platforms and its free version includes support for a single user and location, a product catalog of up to 10 items, stock level alerts, transaction histories, email support and stock reception.
It leverages barcode scanning to boost logistics processes and improve inventory accuracy. This system mainly serves retail and e-commerce industries. With the knowledge of the top contenders in the free inventory management software arena fresh in your mind, what next? Well, before you quickly jump to a conclusion and decide on your favorite cheap solution, take some time, think it over and ask yourself some probing questions.
While jumping onto a free solution without spending too long thinking about it may not seem like a costly mistake, you would be wrong. Even though you may not be spending money on the actual system itself, the damage you could do to your operation certainly is not free.
Consider a few of these questions before making the leap:. Just because something comes with advanced features does not mean that will be a fit. If you only need a few employees to keep your business running smoothly, adopting a solution meant for teams of 60 people or more will only slow things down. Is this something you can afford to do right now, or is everything so up in the air that a complicated new edition would serve only to create further confusion?
Choosing the wrong system can be catastrophic, so it stands to reason that there is a fair amount of anxiety around the final choice. Talk to vendors, ask questions and look for demos until you and your teams are comfortable with how the system of choice works before settling down. As you can see, just because a solution is free does not mean it lacks in features or benefits. Free products may not be a winning choice for globe scaling enterprises, but they could be the first step toward organization and profitability for smaller operations.
Still curious? Take a look at our SelectHub analyst curated comparison report of the top inventory management performers.
How have free inventory management solutions helped or hurt your business? Let us know with a comment below! Analyst-Picked Related Content Pricing Guide: Discover the true cost of inventory management software Comparison Report: An Interactive analyst report with comparison ratings, reviews and pricing.
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