BarTender vs. Fishbowl Inventory

Very well suited for multiple barcodes and type of barcodes on one label. Can be adapted to ones particular needs, quite customizable.

A bit difficult to get used to, it takes some time and is not as user friendly as other applications.

Incentivized

The purchasing function is very good - tracking and linking parts to sales orders, shortage reports, and part summaries.

Incentivized

• The ability to design labels quickly with templates or from scratch
• The ability to use a database to print a large quantity of labels with various data inputs is critical for our requirements.
• The ability to serialize is really convenient.

Incentivized

• Inventory Management.
• Ingredient and Recipe Management.
• Cost Control and Variation.

Incentivized

• Licensing: argggh! Their draconian licensing model can stop you in your tracks if you’re not careful. It’s per printer, not seat, so errant print jobs can exceed your licenses. Be careful!
• Interaction with the cloud: we recently moved to Box and have yet to figure out a way to utilize Print Station with our cloud database. If there’s a way to do it, it’s not well documented.
• Support: if you’re not paying for premium support, expect an email response within 24 hours. Telephone support is good, but we’ve sometimes had to leave a message and wait...

Incentivized

• Reporting: Many of the reports that are provided for free with Fishbowl are useless in the context of everyday manufacturing and production planning. Some reports provide inaccurate information. In order to use get useful and correct reports, outside developers must be paid (a new or modified report may cost anywhere from $150 to $2000)
• Customer service can be hit or miss. In our experience, a knowledgeable person is rarely available, but for the most part customer service has no idea how real manufacturing works to provide reasonable answers to fix Fishbowl shortfalls.

Incentivized

Easy to renew and update the license

Incentivized

I often have to try to troubleshoot printing issues for other team members, but I have never reached out to a BarTender support network. I’ve always just tinkered within the app to figure it out.

Incentivized

Originally the support for Fishbowl was very poor. It was hard to get anyone to help. In the last 12 - 14 months, it has greatly improved and if it continues this way I would certainly rate it higher.

Incentivized

We're currently evaluating Nicelable and are in the process of replacing Bartender with Nicelable. Cost is similar for our needs level and Nicelable has a modern UI and is much more user-friendly. We are having to rework our automation routines but we're seeing a higher upside with lower IT involvement that we think will give us an acceptable ROI.

Incentivized

Fishbowl could be tailored to accommodate our needs and to integrate with other providers to offer the seamless work flow. Others that I investigated were much more expensive or couldn't do the tasks we were requiring. The final analysis was that Fishbowl offered a cost effective way for us to manage our business

Incentivized

• Ability to Design and Create Customer Specific Labels
• Able to link to different file repositories
• Ability to design labels for different media types

Incentivized

• Intuitive functionality
• unified dashboards
• better integration

Incentivized