How we compare inventory management software
We list 8 inventory platforms sold into Australia, and a published rate card exists for 7 providers. Where a vendor quotes instead, we show a quote rather than an invented figure, because putting a number against a company that refuses to publish one would be a guess dressed as a fact.
The calculator is driven by team size, because that is the axis nearly every vendor here actually prices on. Ranking is arithmetic on the published rate at the number of users you enter. Commission never moves a provider, we do not sell prominence, and the cheapest row is whatever the arithmetic says it is.
Prices are what each vendor publishes to an Australian buyer. Some are quoted monthly and some are the monthly equivalent of an annual commitment, which is why the billing basis matters as much as the figure.
Do you need inventory management software, or will your accounting and online store cover it?
This is the question worth settling first, because the entry prices in this table are large next to the stock tracking you may already be paying for.
Accounting files and e-commerce platforms both count stock. What they generally do not do is move stock between places, build a finished item out of components, receipt a purchase order that arrived in two deliveries, or hold a landed cost that includes freight and duty. Those four gaps are the whole market.
The practical triggers, in the order they usually bite:
You sell the same item in more than one place. A shop counter and an online store, or an online store and a marketplace. The moment two systems each hold their own stock number, one of them is wrong, and you find out by overselling something you do not have.
You hold stock in more than one location. A garage, a storeroom and a 3PL are three locations even if they are all yours. Transfers between them are the feature you are buying.
You assemble or manufacture. If a sale should consume components rather than a finished item, you need a bill of materials, and no accounting file will do that for you.
Your lead times are long enough to need reorder points. If a container takes eight weeks, eyeballing the shelf is not a reordering strategy.
If none of those apply to you, the honest answer is that you are probably not ready for this category yet, and the money is better spent elsewhere. Nothing here is cheap enough to buy speculatively.
Manufacturing, retail or multi-channel: three shapes of inventory management software
This category looks like one market and behaves like three, and picking the wrong shape costs more than picking the wrong price.
Manufacturing means a bill of materials, production orders and scheduling. The manufacturing row on Katana reads Yes (strong), on Cin7 Core Yes (strong) and on Fishbowl Yes (strong). Note the distinction the row draws: inFlow Inventory reads Yes (assembly), and assembly is not the same thing. Assembly kits a set from parts you already hold. Production scheduling sequences work over time against capacity, and if you run a workshop that difference is your whole week.
Retail with a counter is priced differently again. Lightspeed Retail charges per register rather than per seat, so its POS integration row reads Yes (native) while its manufacturing row reads No. That is a deliberate product, not a shortcoming, and a maker who buys it will be fighting it.
Multi-channel selling is about the number of places stock has to stay in step, and the trap is that channel connections and extra warehouses are frequently gated by plan rather than included. Multi-channel sync on inFlow Inventory reads Yes (Small Biz+), and multi-warehouse reads Yes (Mid-Size+). On Zoho Inventory, multi-warehouse reads Yes (Professional+). Read those rows as prices, not as ticks.
Work out which of the three you are before you compare anything, because the shape decides which half of this table is even relevant to you.
Seats, locations and add-ons: what moves the price of inventory management software
Almost nothing here is priced per user in a straight line. The common shape is a per-business subscription with a block of user seats bundled into it, and the next seat past the block moves you up a rung rather than adding a small amount.
Cin7 Core bundles 5 (Standard), 10 (Pro), 15 (Advanced), Fishbowl 2 (Essentials), 5 (Growth), 10 (Scale), inFlow Inventory 2 (Entrepreneur), 5 (Small Biz), 10 (Mid-Size) and Unleashed 3 (Core), 5 (Pro). A warehouse hand who only ever scans a barcode still consumes a seat on most of them, which is why a five-person business is regularly quoted the ten-user rung.
Part of the table prices on a different axis entirely. Katana bundles Unlimited (Core and free plan) and charges instead per location, at $68/mo per location. Lightspeed Retail bundles Unlimited and charges Per additional register. Zoho Inventory charges $15.58/mo per extra location, while Cin7 Core and Unleashed both list extra warehouses as Included. If you are about to open a second location, that single row can reverse the order of this table for you.
Then there are the modules. Demand forecasting is the usual one: on Unleashed the forecasting row reads Yes (add-on), so the figure in the price column is not the figure you pay if forecasting is the reason you are shopping. Traceability and warehouse modules are sold the same way elsewhere in the table.
Two last things the price column cannot show you. Katana bills in US dollars, so its Australian figure moves with the exchange rate without the vendor ever changing its price. And Fishbowl lists its contract as Annual, where most of this table lists No, which changes what a bad first month costs you.
Free and cheap inventory management software, and where the caps bite
There is a genuine low-cost end here, and it is worth being precise about where it stops.
Zoho Inventory publishes Free / $43/mo (Standard), with a free seat allowance of 1 and paid seats running 1 (Free), 2 (Standard/Pro/Premium), 7 (Enterprise). Katana runs a free plan whose SKU allowance is 30 (free) / Unlimited (Core+). At the cheaper paid end, Lightspeed Retail is $129/mo (Basic) and inFlow Inventory is $180/mo (Entrepreneur), with the inFlow SKU allowance shown as Limited by plan tier.
The pattern to understand is that free and entry plans in this category are almost never crippled on features. They are capped on the four things that describe a growing business: seats, SKUs, locations and connected sales channels. That is a more awkward kind of cap, because you hit it on a good week rather than a bad one, and you hit it during trade.
So price the plan you will be on in a year, not the one you qualify for today. A free plan that covers a single operator and a small catalogue is a real on-ramp for a side business, and it is also the plan you will outgrow first if the business works. Enter your actual headcount and location count into the calculator rather than reading the entry figure, because the entry figure is the floor of a ladder and not a price.
The other end of the table is quote-only. Cin7 Omni is Quote, and for a platform sold on implementation and channel depth that is normal rather than evasive. We do not estimate on its behalf.
Setup, stocktakes and inventory management software a non-technical owner can run
Ease of use is the thing this category is asked about most often and reports on least honestly, because it is not visible in a feature row. Barcode scanning and a mobile app are effectively table stakes here, every vendor describes its own onboarding as simple, and the demo always looks fine.
What actually decides whether a non-technical owner can run one of these is the data, and it is front-loaded:
An opening stock count. You cannot start with numbers you are unsure of, because every report after go-live inherits them. That means a full physical count, with trading frozen while you do it, which for most small businesses means a Sunday rather than an afternoon.
SKU discipline. One code per item, applied consistently, including variants. This is the step that most often has to be redone, and redoing it after go-live means re-counting.
Units of measure and supplier lead times. Buying in cartons and selling in units is a setup decision, not a preference you can change casually later.
Two rows in the table do carry real signal on this. The first is support, because the question you have at 4pm on a Friday is worth more than the one you have at 10am on a Tuesday. Unleashed lists support as Business hours AU + online and Zoho Inventory as Business hours AU + online, while Lightspeed Retail lists 24/7 chat, business hours phone and Katana lists Business hours + email. Business hours in a distant timezone means an overnight wait on the day your stocktake will not reconcile.
The second is where the vendor is from, which is a rough proxy for how close its working day is to yours and how well it understands Australian and New Zealand suppliers. Cin7 Core and Unleashed both list their origin as New Zealand, inFlow Inventory Canada, Katana Estonia and Fishbowl USA.
The honest advice for a non-technical owner is to buy the smallest system that covers the four triggers in the second section, and to treat the implementation as the purchase. A capable platform you never finish setting up is worse than a simpler one you actually run.
How inventory management software has to talk to Xero, MYOB and the ATO
This is where an Australian buyer should stop reading the feature list and start reading one row.
Check the accounting integration row for the name of your own ledger. Cin7 Core lists Xero, MYOB, QuickBooks, Sage, Lightspeed Retail lists Xero, QuickBooks, MYOB and Unleashed lists Xero, QBO, MYOB. Katana lists Xero, QuickBooks, inFlow Inventory lists QuickBooks, Xero and Fishbowl lists QuickBooks (deep native), Xero. Zoho Inventory lists Zoho Books (native), which is a strong argument if you already run its ledger and a real constraint if you do not.
MYOB is the one that separates this list, and it separates it in a way that matters more here than in most countries, because MYOB carries a large share of Australian small business ledgers. If MYOB is your file, that row cuts the table down before any price does.
Depth then matters as much as presence. A shallow integration pushes sales invoices across and nothing else. A deep one also syncs purchase orders, stock valuation and cost of goods sold. With a shallow one you end up holding your stock valuation in the inventory system and your profit and loss in the ledger, and reconciling the two by hand at exactly the time of year you have least appetite for it.
Which brings you to the reason the valuation has to be right. Closing stock value is not a management number in Australia, it is a tax number: under the general trading stock rules an increase in the value of your trading stock across the year is assessable income and a decrease is a deduction, so the figure your system reports lands directly in your return. Small business entities can use the simplified trading stock rules and skip a formal stocktake where they reasonably estimate the value of their trading stock changed by $5,000 or less over the year. Above that, you are counting.
A stock system that produces a defensible valuation, dated and reconciled, is doing tax work as well as trading work. That is the part worth paying for, and it is the part a spreadsheet has never once done well.