Looking for a Katana alternative?

If you're pricing up Katana, you might be over-buying.

Katana is capable software, built for manufacturers with a dedicated operations team and a shop floor to schedule. But most small-batch manufacturers who land on Katana's pricing page are looking at $299/month plus add-ons for a scheduling engine they'll never open. Stocksmith covers the jobs you actually hired software to do — real bills of materials, batch costs that stay accurate, and inventory across every channel.

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Know what to make and what to buy

What to make next this week

Product	Open orders	Can build
Lavender Body Butter 200ml	96	120
Vitamin C Serum 30ml	140	38
Charcoal Face Bar	60	300

Serum short by 102 — reorder L-ascorbic acid

Trusted by product businesses worldwide

Heads up: We make Stocksmith, so we're obviously biased. We've tried to be fair — Katana's own pricing page is linked below so you can check every figure, and there's a section on where Stocksmith genuinely isn't the right tool. If Katana fits your operation better, we'd rather you knew that now.

TL;DR — The short version

Katana and Stocksmith are aimed at different ends of the same market. The question isn't which is better software — it's whether you're buying a production-scheduling system or a costing-and-inventory system.

Stocksmith is a better fit if you…

✓ Make things in batches, in-house, from raw materials
✓ Need accurate cost per unit and COGS your accountant can use
✓ Sell across several channels from one stock pool
✓ Want a flat monthly price with traceability in the plan, not bolted on
✓ Run a small team and don't have an ops manager to configure work centres

Katana is a better fit if you…

→ Schedule a shop floor and need a visual production planner
→ Need deep multi-level BOMs with operation routing
→ Want MRP-style demand forecasting and capacity planning
→ Have a large team — Katana doesn't charge per seat, which genuinely suits big headcounts
→ Have budget for add-on modules and a paid implementation

What Katana does well

Credit where it's due — there are good reasons Katana is the name you keep hitting.

Visual production scheduling

Katana's drag-and-drop production planner is the feature people actually rave about. If you're sequencing manufacturing orders across work centres and want to see the whole floor at a glance, it does that well and it does it visually.

No per-seat pricing

Katana includes unlimited users on every plan, including the free one. For a manufacturer with a big team, that's a real structural advantage over any per-user MRP — and worth weighing properly rather than dismissing.

Deeper MRP capability

Demand forecasting, capacity planning, operation routing, a shop-floor app. These are genuine MRP features that Stocksmith doesn't have, and if your operation runs on forward planning you'll miss them.

A free tier to test with

Katana's free plan is capped at 30 SKUs and limited to Shopify for ecommerce, but it exists and it isn't time-boxed. If you want to sit inside the product for a month before deciding, that's a fair way to do it.

Where Katana gets expensive for a small operation

Not a knock on the software — a mismatch between how it's priced and how a small-batch manufacturer actually buys.

The step from free to paid is a cliff, not a step

Katana's free plan stops at 30 SKUs. The next plan up, Core, starts at $299/month. There's nothing in between, so the moment you pass 30 SKUs — which happens fast once you count materials and variants — your software bill goes from nothing to $299 in one move. That's the specific decision most people are making when they land on this page.

Traceability is an add-on, and add-ons stack

Batch and lot traceability, warehouse management, manufacturing management and the shop-floor app are separate add-on modules on top of Core, in the $149–$249/month range each on Katana's published examples. If you need traceability because you make food, cosmetics or supplements, that's not optional for you — it's a second line on the invoice.

Sales orders are billed by usage

Core is priced "from" $299 because order volume moves it. For a business with seasonal spikes, a usage-based line is the one you can't forecast — and a good month costing more than a quiet one is an awkward shape for a small operation's cash flow.

One inventory location included

Core includes a single inventory location; additional locations are billed separately. If you hold stock in a workshop and a storage unit, or you're running a second production site, that's another add-on rather than a setting.

Implementation is offered as a paid service

Katana sells a $2,000 implementation package for Free and Core (it's bundled into the top Advantage tier). It's optional — you don't have to buy it — but the fact that a $2,000 service exists tells you something honest about how much setup the product expects.

Katana pricing, plan limits and add-on figures as published on katanamrp.com/pricing, checked 28 August 2026. Katana revised its pricing model in early 2026 — verify current figures there before deciding.

Katana vs Stocksmith — side by side

Comparing Katana Core against Stocksmith Business — the tiers where both give you unlimited SKUs and traceability, which is the like-for-like a small manufacturer is usually pricing.

	Katana — Core	Stocksmith — Business
Monthly price	From $299/mo, sales orders billed by usage	$166/mo billed annually, flat
Entry tier below that	Free plan, 30 SKU cap	Four paid tiers below Business
Implementation service	$2,000 optional package	30-minute onboarding call, included
Trial	Free plan, not time-limited (30 SKUs)	14-day full trial, no card
Bills of materials & cost roll-up	✔️ With operation routing	✔️ Multi-level, cost per unit
Automatic COGS	✔️	✔️ Tax-ready, syncs to QuickBooks
Batch & lot traceability	Paid add-on module	✔️ In the plan
Inventory locations	1 included, extra billed separately	✔️ Unlimited
Multi-channel order sync	Shopify only on Free; full range on Core	✔️ Shopify, Etsy, Amazon, Faire, Woo, Square
Users	✔️ Unlimited on all plans	Unlimited on Business
Production scheduling / shop floor	✔️ Visual planner, add-on shop-floor app	Not available
Demand forecasting / capacity planning	✔️	Not available

Katana figures per katanamrp.com/pricing, checked 28 August 2026; usage-based order pricing means Core can land well above $299. Stocksmith prices from our pricing page.

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What Stocksmith does really well

Know your real cost — down to the last gram

The job most small manufacturers actually hired software to do: know what a unit costs to make, and keep knowing it when a supplier reprices. Stocksmith tracks every material, every batch and every labour hour, and rolls it up into a cost per unit automatically.

Multi-level bills of materials with nested sub-assemblies
Material cost changes flow through to every product that uses them
Tax-ready COGS reports, and a one-way sync into QuickBooks
Labour cost tracked per production run

Bill of MaterialsVitamin C Serum 30ml

Vitamin C Serum 30mlmakes 1$4.18

Serum basesub-assembly28 ml$2.10

Distilled water24 ml$0.01

L-ascorbic acid4 g$2.09

Dropper bottle, 30ml1$0.92

Printed label1$0.16

Costs roll up through every level automatically

Inventory that matches what's on the shelf

Record a batch and Stocksmith deducts the materials and adds the finished goods in one step. No manual adjustment after every run, which is the busywork that makes tracking quietly fall apart once you get busy.

Material and product stock levels that move when you produce
Reorder points that warn you before a run stalls
Unlimited inventory locations on every plan

Manufacture · 120 unitsLavender Body Butter

Shea butter, refined− 9.6 kg

Lavender essential oil− 480 ml

Amber glass jar, 200ml− 120

Lavender Body Butter 200ml+ 120

3 materials deducted · 120 units added to stock

Orders arrive. You don't have to touch them.

Stocksmith connects to the channels small manufacturers actually sell through — Shopify, Etsy, Amazon, WooCommerce, Wix, Square, PayPal, Faire. Orders import, stock adjusts, COGS updates, all from one stock pool.

Worth knowing if you're testing Katana's free plan: its ecommerce support there is limited to Shopify, so a multi-channel picture needs the $299/mo Core tier before you can even see it.

Order activity Syncing

Shopify

Order #1043 · 3 items

2 min ago

stock −3

Faire

Wholesale · 24 units

18 min ago

stock −24

Amazon

Order 114-220 · 1 item

1 hr ago

Low: Serum

One stock count across every channel

Batch & lot traceability, in the plan

Track batches, lots and expiry dates across materials and finished products, with purchase-to-sale traceability. If you ever have to recall, you can say which lot went into which batch and which orders it shipped in.

On Katana this is a separate add-on module on top of Core. On Stocksmith it's part of the plan — which matters most to exactly the businesses that can't treat traceability as optional: food, cosmetics, supplements.

Trace a lotSHEA-2406

received lot

SHEA
2406

1 supplier

used in

batches

shipped to

214

orders

Trace any material to every order in seconds

Where Stocksmith isn't the right fit

We'd rather tell you now than have you find out in week three.

Shop-floor scheduling

Stocksmith has no visual production scheduler and no shop-floor app. If sequencing work across stations is the problem you're solving, that's Katana's strongest feature and we simply don't compete on it.

Demand forecasting and MRP planning

There's no automated demand forecasting or capacity planning in Stocksmith. If your production decisions are driven by forward-looking planning rather than by what you've committed to make, Katana is built for that and we aren't.

Deep operation routing

Stocksmith handles multi-level bills of materials well. It doesn't model operations, work centres or routing between them — so a process with many discrete stages and per-station timings will feel under-served.

Regulated traceability at scale

Batch and lot tracking covers the compliance needs of most small manufacturers in food, personal care and supplements. If you need validated, audited traceability documentation across thousands of SKUs, you want a purpose-built compliance platform, not us.

Weighing more than one option? See Katana vs MRPeasy if those two are your shortlist, the MRPeasy comparison if per-seat pricing is the sticking point, or the full comparison hub.

Stocksmith connects everywhere you sell

Import orders automatically and sync stock levels across all your channels — so you never oversell or run out of stock.

View all integrations →

Looking for a Katana discount?

A coupon fixes the first year, not the fit

If you're hunting for a Katana promo code, that's usually a signal the plan is priced above where your business is right now. A discount buys you a few months, then you're making the same decision with switching costs attached. Worth checking whether you need the scheduling engine at all before you negotiate the price of one.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the best alternatives to Katana for a small manufacturer?

It depends which half of Katana you actually need. If you need production scheduling and shop-floor sequencing, the real alternatives are other MRP systems — MRPeasy is the closest, though it charges per user. If what you need is accurate batch costing, material-level inventory and multi-channel stock, then a costing-and-inventory system like Stocksmith covers it at a flat $166/mo on Business, with traceability in the plan rather than as an add-on. The common mistake is buying an MRP for a costing problem, then paying for a scheduler nobody opens.

How much does Katana actually cost per month?

Katana's free plan is $0 but capped at 30 SKUs with Shopify-only ecommerce. Its Core plan starts at $299/month, with sales orders billed by usage, one inventory location included, and extra locations billed separately. Traceability, warehouse management, manufacturing management and the shop-floor app are separate add-on modules — Katana's published examples run $149–$249/month each. A $2,000 implementation package is offered but optional. So the honest answer is $299 is a floor, not a price: a small manufacturer who needs traceability and two locations should budget well above it. Figures from katanamrp.com/pricing, checked 28 August 2026.

Does Katana charge a mandatory onboarding fee?

No — it's optional. You'll see this stated as mandatory in a lot of comparison content, including older versions of our own, and it isn't accurate. Katana offers a $2,000 implementation service for its Free and Core plans, bundled into the top Advantage tier, and you can subscribe to Core without buying it. What it does tell you is how much configuration the product anticipates. Stocksmith includes a 30-minute onboarding call on every plan at no cost, because there's less to configure.

Is Stocksmith a genuine replacement for Katana?

For most small-batch manufacturers, yes — with one clear exception. Stocksmith covers multi-level bills of materials, batch manufacturing with automatic material deduction, material-level inventory, multi-channel order sync, batch and lot traceability, and automatic COGS. That's the set of jobs most operations under about ten people are actually using an MRP for. The exception is production scheduling and demand forecasting: Stocksmith has neither, and if you need them it isn't a replacement at any price.

Can I move my data from Katana to Stocksmith?

Yes. Stocksmith supports CSV import for materials, products and inventory counts, so you can export from Katana and bring the core records across. The 14-day trial is long enough to set up your materials and a few recipes alongside your existing system before you commit to anything, and the included onboarding call exists specifically for switchers — the first setup is the hard part, not the ongoing use.

Does Stocksmith handle batch and lot traceability the way Katana does?

Stocksmith includes batch tracking, lot numbers, expiry dates and traceability reports, giving purchase-to-sale traceability across materials and finished products — and it's part of the plan rather than a paid module. On Katana, traceability is a separate add-on on top of Core. The distinction that matters: for regulated small-batch production in food, cosmetics or supplements, Stocksmith covers it. For validated compliance documentation across thousands of SKUs at high volume, neither of us is really the answer — that's a dedicated compliance platform.

See it against your own numbers

14 days free, no credit card, no sales call. Load a couple of your real bills of materials and see what your actual cost per unit comes out at — usually inside the first session.

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Katana is a trademark of Katana Technologies OÜ. Stocksmith is not affiliated with or endorsed by Katana.