Inventory Planning Tools for DTC Brands in 2026: An Operator's Honest Guide

A disclosure before anything else, because it is the whole reason this page exists. We implement these tools inside brands for a living. We take no affiliate fees, no paid placements, and no referral commissions from anyone on this page, and one or two of these vendors will not enjoy it. Most guides ranking inventory software are written by affiliate sites paid by the tools they recommend.

This one is written by the people who negotiate the contracts and live with the software afterwards.

Second thing before the list. The tool is the easy 20% of inventory planning. Software makes a good planning function faster and a missing one more confidently wrong. If you have no forecast, no reorder logic and no buying calendar, a planning tool will automate your guesswork at $200 a month. We will come back to that at the end, because it is the part every vendor demo skips.

Timing note: if you are reading this because Shopify is retiring Stocky on 31 August, you are in good company. Thousands of brands are tool shopping this quarter for the first time in years, which is exactly when it pays to know what these things actually cost.

When the spreadsheet stops being enough

Honest answer: later than the vendors say, earlier than most founders admit. A well-built spreadsheet with weeks of cover, reorder points and a buying calendar will genuinely carry a single-channel brand to around 50 SKUs and low seven figures. The break signals are specific: a second sales channel, SKU count into the hundreds, more than one stock location, or the moment updating the sheet becomes a weekly half-day someone quietly stops doing. If none of those are true yet, keep the sheet and spend the subscription on stock. If two are true, read on.

Tier one: Shopify-native planning tools

Built for the job this page is about: forecasting demand, telling you what to reorder and when, and turning that into purchase orders. Priced for brands roughly $1M to $20M.

Prediko is Shopify's officially recommended Stocky replacement and currently the strongest entry point in the tier. Published tiers run $49 to $349 a month depending on your revenue, with every feature on every plan: unlimited SKUs, users and purchase orders, AI forecasting, raw materials and BOM support, multi-location transfers. The revenue-based model is the thing to understand before you sign: your price rises as you grow, automatically, which is precisely the kind of clause worth negotiating a ceiling on (more below).

Inventory Planner by Sage is the category veteran and the deepest forecasting engine in the tier: open-to-buy, assembly handling, replenishment logic that merchandisers rather than founders tend to appreciate. The Essentials plan is $119.99 a month on the Shopify App Store; above that, pricing goes quote-only and is based on your revenue and catalogue size, with mid-tier quotes commonly landing in the low hundreds to $600 a month and enterprise arrangements well past $1,000. Two things buyers consistently discover late: quotes usually assume a 12-month contract, and the revenue-based formula means renewal prices climb with your growth. Both are negotiable. Almost nobody negotiates them.

Also on the shortlist: Cogsy (operations-and-planning platform with strong Amazon and wholesale coverage) and Fabrikatör (Shopify planning with a strong European client base). Both price on application against catalogue and revenue; both are credible, and both should be quoted against the two above, because in this tier the quote you get is a function of the alternatives you name.

One caution that applies to the whole tier: these are young companies in a crowded market, and consolidation is real. One popular planning app in this space was reported shut down earlier this year with customers scrambling to migrate. Prefer vendors with visible traction and export your data quarterly regardless of who you pick.

Tier two: mid-market inventory management systems

The step up is a different product category. These systems become your operational source of truth: multi-channel stock sync, wholesale and B2B, warehouse workflows, manufacturing. You buy one when the business genuinely spans channels, not because the Shopify tools feel small.

Cin7 Core publishes three tiers at $349, $599 and $999 a month, separated by users, order volume caps and integration counts, with Cin7 Omni above that on custom pricing for EDI and 3PL-heavy operations. It is the channel-breadth leader and the integrations run deep. It is also the tier's cautionary tale on total cost: add-ons are quote-only, order caps bite mid-year, reviewers on G2 and Capterra document post-signup price increases from 30% to as much as 400%, and cancellation must land within a 10-day window of renewal or you are invoiced for the next period. None of that makes it the wrong tool. All of it makes the contract the real product.

Unleashed runs roughly $410 a month for three users, $785 for eight, and $1,188 at the top tier, with extra users at $79 to $109 and modules like the B2B store at $129. Slightly dearer at entry than Cin7 and consistently reviewed as the transparent one: what the tier says is what you get. For a lean team that values predictable invoices over maximal features, that trade is often correct.

Katana starts around $99 to $299 depending on plan and is the pick when you make or assemble product: BOMs, production scheduling and shop-floor tracking are native rather than bolted on, there is a free 30-SKU plan, and it bills monthly with no implementation fee. The watch-out is modular pricing: base plus manufacturing plus planning plus warehousing stacks toward $900 a month, at which point you are shopping the whole tier again.

Budget honourable mentions: Zoho Inventory ($39 to $249, dramatically cheapest at equivalent usage, strongest if you live in the Zoho ecosystem) and inFlow (around $149 to $219, strong purchasing workflows). Worth noting: in this entire tier, only a handful of vendors including Zoho, Katana and inFlow offer true monthly billing; nearly everyone else wants the annual contract, which is your leverage, not theirs.

Tier three: ERP, and why you probably don't need it yet

NetSuite and Brightpearl run the operations of thousand-SKU, multi-entity, omnichannel businesses, and they are excellent at it. They are also a different magnitude of commitment: NetSuite licensing is typically quoted from around $1,000 a month plus per-user fees before modules, implementations commonly run $25,000 to $100,000 and up, and the honest timeline from signature to trustworthy data is measured in quarters. The right time is when you have multiple legal entities, genuine multi-channel complexity, and a finance function demanding one system of record. The common mistake is buying one at $8M revenue because a consultant who implements them said it was time. If you are asking whether you need an ERP, you do not need an ERP.

What these tools cost side by side

A useful budget sanity check from the category: total planning software spend for a mid-market brand typically lands around 0.5% to 1.5% of COGS. Meaningfully above that and you are overbought; at zero with 500 SKUs, underbought.

What brands actually pay: the negotiation layer

Here is the section no affiliate site can write, because it costs them their commissions. List price in this category is an opening position, and the quote-based tools especially expect to be negotiated.

What we see across the brands we work inside: 10 to 15 percent below list is routinely achievable at signature or renewal on quote-priced tools, simply by asking with a competitor's quote in hand. Revenue-based pricing formulas can be capped: a tier freeze, holding your current band for 12 to 24 months regardless of growth, is one of the most valuable clauses available and one of the least requested. Renewal uplifts arrive as automatic emails and are refused successfully all the time; the vendor's cost of losing you exceeds the uplift every single time. Annual prepayment is worth 10 to 20 percent to most of these vendors, but only trade it for something: the discount and the tier freeze, not the discount alone. And on the mid-market systems, negotiate the add-on schedule before signature, because the published tier is the visible half of the invoice; the publicly documented post-signup increases in this tier are what happens to brands that only negotiated the sticker.

None of this is aggressive. It is ten minutes of asking, once a year, for money that compounds. If your renewal is inside 90 days, that is the single fastest saving available to you this quarter.

Which tool for which brand

Under 50 SKUs, one channel: a disciplined spreadsheet, honestly. Save the money.

$1M to $20M on Shopify, up to a few hundred SKUs: Prediko or Inventory Planner, quoted against each other, with Cogsy and Fabrikatör as pricing leverage. This is where most readers of this page belong, and where the Stocky retirement is sending everyone.

Multi-channel with wholesale, B2B or manufacturing: the mid-market tier. Katana if you make things, Cin7 if you span the most channels and negotiate hard, Unleashed if you value invoice predictability.

Multi-entity, omnichannel, finance-led: ERP territory, entered slowly and implemented by someone who has done it before.

The part the demo skips

Every tool on this page forecasts from your sales history. Not one of them knows that your best seller stocked out for three weeks last quarter, so its history reads as demand falling. None of them knows the supplier's real lead time drifted from 45 days to 70, that Chinese New Year removes a month from your calendar, or that the marketing plan doubles November. Software calculates; someone still has to plan.

This is why the same tool produces transformation in one brand and expensive noise in another. The difference is never the software. It is whether a planning function exists around it: an owned forecast, reorder logic someone maintains, a buying calendar, and a person accountable when the answer is wrong. We build exactly that inside brands, tool included, as part of inventory and demand planning engagements, and the honest sequencing is planning function first, tool second, because a supply chain and operations audit regularly finds six figures of stockout and overstock cost sitting right next to a perfectly good, perfectly ignored planning tool. The audit is fixed fee and credits in full against your first month if we go on to fix what it finds. If the finding is that you just need Prediko and a spreadsheet retirement party, we will tell you that too.

Common questions

What is the best inventory planning tool for a Shopify brand?

For most brands between $1M and $20M, the shortlist is Prediko and Inventory Planner, quoted against each other. Prediko wins on entry price and simplicity; Inventory Planner wins on forecasting depth. Both beat whatever spreadsheet is currently doing the job at 300 SKUs.

What should inventory planning software cost?

Entry tools run $49 to $350 a month, mid-market systems $350 to $1,200, ERPs four figures monthly plus implementation. The working benchmark is 0.5% to 1.5% of COGS across your planning stack.

What replaces Stocky when Shopify retires it?

Shopify's own recommendation is Prediko, and for most Stocky users it is the correct default. Brands with heavier forecasting needs should quote Inventory Planner alongside before committing, and every migrating brand should negotiate as a new customer, because right now you are exactly the buyer these vendors are competing for.

Do I need a tool or a consultant?

Wrong question, usually. The tool automates a planning function; it cannot create one. If you have no forecast and no reorder logic, buy the missing function first, with the tool as part of the build. If the function exists and is drowning in spreadsheet admin, buy the tool. Our guide to what an inventory management consultant actually does covers the split honestly.

Is now a bad time to sign a 12-month software contract?

No, but it is a great time to sign a negotiated one. The Stocky migration wave means every vendor in tier one is hungry this quarter. Ask for the tier freeze.

Last updated: 14 July 2026. Pricing verified against vendor pages and published sources on that date; this market moves, so we refresh this page quarterly. If a figure looks stale, the vendor's pricing page wins.