Best Inventory Management Software (2023)

Inventory management software does much more than track stock amounts and locations within a warehouse or retail store. Most inventory systems deliver a streamlined business management solution that syncs inventory data with sales, fulfillment and purchasing operations in real time seamlessly.

Pricing

For pricing, we considered whether a service offers a free trial as well as the affordability of its lowest and highest price tiers. Companies that offer upfront pricing received higher ratings here than those that required potential customers to request a quote. This accounted for 10% of our weighted scoring.

Features

To select the best inventory management software picks for 2023, we first compared core features that most businesses use, such as barcodes, packing and counting slips, parts and assembly tracking, low-stock alerts and detailed stock reporting. We then explored features per price tier, time-saving automations such as purchase orders and dropshipping, and specialty inventory tools for retailers, multichannel sellers, B2B wholesalers and manufacturers.

Finally, we examined a broad range of inventory features that businesses need to scale operations efficiently. These included overall ease of use; QR code support; kitted and bundled items; parts and assembly tracking; multiwarehouse management; dropship and 3PL automations; loss and theft controls; multiple vendors per item; pick, pack and ship processes; warehouse floor management; purchase order (PO) features; sales-based order forecasting; e-commerce integrations; online marketplace integrations; retail POS features or integrations; mobile apps for scans, counts and floor management; and shipping and freight integrations. We weighted features at 50% of our total score.

Third-party reviews

We researched reviews from real users to get their opinion of each software provider. This entailed ranking both the overall score from customers (looking for those that were 3.5 and higher out of 5) and the number of reviews for these scores (looking for providers that had at least 300 reviews on each third-party website we researched) to give the fullest picture of reality and reduce bias. These accounted for 10% of the total score.

Expert analysis

Using those same third-party websites, which include Capterra, G2 and Trustpilot, our panel of experts looked at four key metrics to come to a final decision about each software provider. These metrics were ease of use, stand-out features, popularity and value for the money. Altogether, this analysis made up 30% of the total score.