Brightpearl’s retail operations platform is designed to handle peak trading, integrates with the full retail tech ecosystem, and is omni-channel native. Additionally, the vendor says their solution is the system of record for key trading data, provides real-time trading insights and is automated so users can stay in control and manage by exception. According to the vendor key differentiators include: Software and Service. Service is an integral part of Brightpearl's offer. The…
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Katana Cloud Inventory
Score 7.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Katana's Cloud Inventory Platform creates a centralized view of company inventory to maintain optimal stock levels across all of its locations and track products available for sale. Users can manage incoming orders from all sales channels and issue purchase orders directly from Katana to ensure restocking at the right time and in the right quantities. Katana can be integrated with e-commerce, accounting, and other business software to automate repetitive tasks and get real-time…
$179
per month
Pricing
Brightpearl by Sage
Katana Cloud Inventory
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Starter
$179
per month
Standard
$359
per month
Professional
$799
per month
Professional Plus
$799
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Brightpearl
Katana Cloud Inventory
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Required
No setup fee
Additional Details
Brightpearl is for merchants trading $1M or above, or those that expect to be in the next 12 months. Pricing is designed to suit the needs of fast-growth and larger merchants.
All plans come with monthly and annual pricing, and you can upgrade or downgrade anytime.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Brightpearl by Sage
Katana Cloud Inventory
Features
Brightpearl by Sage
Katana Cloud Inventory
Inventory Management
Comparison of Inventory Management features of Product A and Product B
Brightpearl is very well suited for small-medium companies that are growing quickly and need a way to improve their operational systems and functionality to handle increasing volume of orders. Particularly if you use multiple SKUs, sales channels, and/or warehouses, the features offered by Brightpearl are excellently well suited to handle these types of needs. I don't believe Brightpearl would be very applicable for very small companies with a small number of SKUs, as many of the features offered would be unnecessary and underutilized.
Katana Cloud Inventory is great for shipping and receiving busiiness. Where things are very cut and dry as far as what comes in and what goes out, this program is excellent at keeping track of these things. We do a lot of custom build items and it is not the greatest for these. A lot of time it is difficult to both enter these items and keep track of these items.
Brightpearl tracks order changes and communications very well. It documents all activity in a feed that anyone can see, including status changes, notes made, emails sent, etc.
Brightpearl makes it incredibly easy to find orders fitting certain criteria through the use of statuses that you can customize. For example, as a multichannel seller, we can easily create statuses for each channel that we sell from, where our orders will (oftentimes automatically) land in. We also deal often with things like back ordered items; we can also create statuses for certain brands, so that when we expect a shipment in from that company, our back order specialist can easily sort through her orders that are waiting on that shipment.
Brightpearl makes it easy to take orders over the phone. Everything I need is right there on one screen; not often do I find myself needing to deviate to other tabs. The steps I take (from "new order" to finish) are straightforward and understandable, and go in steps that make sense.
We have experienced many errors and have not been satisfied with the product or support.
There were specific requirements that we had for our inventory solution. We were assured by the salesperson and sale engineer that BrightPearl would meet those requirements, but we found after the fact that it did not.
The implementation was troubled. The Brightpearl implementer did not complete the implementation, there were many errors, and the implementation closer had to re-do many things in a rush to get us online.
We've has serious issues with the Shopify integration from flat out service failure to inventory sync. Issues that we were told by sales would work a certain way but they do not.
Support for picking from specific inventory location or change default inventory location rather than FIFO model.
Auto email generated with PO's cannot be permanently altered in my opinion.
Different pack sizes of same items do not automatically fill in inventory I've found. For example, we order an item in singles, 4-packs, and 32 packs. In my experience, If we order the 32 pack, it does not show inventory for the smaller unit sizes. Each pack size has a different item number I believe.
Fields on the PO are not adjustable in my experience. You must create a template and use the template. You cannot change the PO each time unless you have a template created in my experience.
When closing out a sales order, if you invoice from Katana Cloud Inventory and send to Quickbooks, it automatically enables the invoice to receive credit cards in Quickbooks. We use another credit card service (not Quickbooks) and do not want this feature turned on. There is no way to disable it at this time.
When being billed for a PO that has been received and that bill is sent over to Quickbooks, it does not show item counts in my expereince. It only translates as a total dollar amount for each line item.
Brightpearl has proved to work out for our company and we have no need or intention to let it go. Rather we intend to build on what we've accomplished and it will no doubt help us scale our business and meet our ambitions.
Could be easier to use on smaller screens like iPads and iPhones. The layout is odd, the PC and browser passed part is [easy to] find and very nice layout, would like them to bring out an iPhone app and they would also need Android one but as a company we wouldn't use it as we only use iOS.
Brightpearl is always easily accessibly anywhere that you can find an internet source. I have checked our stock levels when we have been off site at Ham Rally's at home and on my way home or to work if needs be. That is probably one of the best features of this system.
Brightpearl performs very well and integrates very well with our Metapak packing and despatch system. IT also intergrates very well with Amazon and we have used Ebay although there have been complications with Ebay and stock levels. We use Ebay mostly for second hand items of which we only have one so have skipped using Brighpearl for these products.
Brightpearl was ALWAYS great at responding to us. Their customer service was quick and responsive. Unfortunately, the responses were often that "engineers were working on it" but nothing seemed to ever come of that. I realize that Brightpearl is a large company that a lot of businesses rely on. But when you can't hit "enter" when trying to search in the front-end POS, that type of behavior should be changed very quickly and it never was. Admittedly, small things, but those annoyances tend to ultimately affect the overall experience.
The online training was very helpful in the areas we were shown and was implemented very well via a Skype call and an presentation done via the internet. However it was not thorough enough for all of our needs in certain areas. More training in person on site would have been very helpful.
The people handling our integration didn't try to get to know our business at all to help us integrate it. They sent us a few lists to go through for chart of accounts, had us send our inventory list over, and they uploaded those. Then we went through a bunch of trainings which to me were not very helpful. I do better figuring it out on my own. I feel like we could have done most of it ourselves with just a little coaching.
I certainly wouldn't select Brightpearl now. With Cloud Commerce Pro you can list directly onto all the marketplaces/website software that it has integrations for (more integrations than Brightpearl has) plus you have Google Translate Professional integrated to help you with foreign language listings. Brightpearl cannot do any of that, so not easy to expand your sales due to the limited number of marketplaces where you can sell.
Our Quickbooks inventory was input incorrectly by a former employee and fixing it would have been more time consuming and less cost effective than to come up with an alternative solution. Katana Cloud Inventory was our alternative solution. Katana Cloud Inventory says that they are working on some of the integration problems with Quickbooks, and once they are fixed, will be a huge help!
Brightpearl's ability to increase or expand its capacity and retain its performance levels to accommodate growth were acceptable but not fantastic. The program was constantly making changes which can be useful, but was also confusing & hard to keep up with since we were never updated that changes were about to be made or had been made.
