fermt compared with Katana, MRPeasy and Craftybase

The short version

The capability rows describe what each product is built and documented around, not a claim about what it cannot be made to do — roadmaps move and we cannot verify an absence. The price rows are the vendors' own published figures. Craftybase was renamed Stocksmith in 2026: same team, same software, and several published comparisons still list them as two competing products.

Katana

The better buy if most of your sales are online and production is packing rather than transforming.

Katana is the most polished product here and its Shopify integration is the best in this group — if a webshop is your main channel, that can settle it on its own. Users are unlimited, there is a real free tier at 30 SKUs, and multi-level BOMs handle sub-assemblies well.

Where it fits a food producer is where production looks like assembly: a roaster packing beans to order, a spice blender, a producer buying in bulk and portioning it. A manufacturing order makes its one connected product from a bill of materials, which is exactly right for that and an awkward shape for a press that yields juice and pomace, a cut that yields spirit and feints, or a mash that loses a third of its weight on the way through.

Pricing is the other thing to look at squarely. Core opens at $299 a month with one inventory location; more locations and more sales order volume are billed by usage, so the bill grows with you in a way a flat fee does not. Onboarding is a $2,000 option. And the food-specific records — HACCP on the step, organic balance, excise — are not what it is for; producers who need them keep them in documents alongside.

Pick Katana if you sell mostly direct online and your process is one step.

MRPeasy

The better buy if machine time is your constraint and you run several work centres.

MRPeasy is honest, well-documented MRP with published pricing and no contract. For routings, work centres and capacity planning it is stronger than fermt, and a producer with real scheduling pressure — a bakery running ovens and lines against a delivery window, a co-packer juggling jobs — is the case it was built for.

That is worth naming precisely, because plenty of drinks producers assume they have a scheduling problem and do not. A distillery's constraint is time in cask; a brewery's is a tank being occupied for three weeks. Neither is what a work-centre scheduler optimises, and buying MRP to solve them tends to end with the plan kept somewhere else anyway.

It is priced per user, which is the other half of the decision. Starter at $49 a head is cheap for one person and $245 a month for five; the Unlimited tier needs at least two users at $149 each. Training is $150 an hour. As with Katana, food compliance is not its subject.

Pick MRPeasy if scheduling machines is the daily problem and the team is small.

Craftybase, now Stocksmith

The better buy if your recipes are stable, production is one step, and costing is the question.

Stocksmith — Craftybase renamed, same team and software — is organised around cost of goods rather than production workflow. For a producer who wants to know what a unit truly costs when a supplier raises a price, it does that as well as anything here, batch and lot numbers are included from the Indie plan, and at $20 a month for a single channel it is by some way the cheapest way in.

Its shape assumes a recipe that behaves the same way every time. That holds for a lot of food production and not for the rest: when yield moves batch to batch, when one run produces two saleable things that have to share the cost, or when material passes through three stages before it is a product, the costing has to be reconstructed rather than read off. It is an inventory and costing tool, so HACCP, organic records and duty reporting live outside it — a reasonable arrangement right up until an inspection.

Pick Stocksmith if costing is the question and your compliance burden is light.

Odoo and ERPNext

The better buy if you want the ledger in the same system and someone who enjoys configuring it.

Both are real ERPs with manufacturing, inventory and quality modules you can adopt one at a time, and ERPNext is open source with batch tracking built in. Licence cost is low or nil. If you want purchasing, accounting and payroll beside production, nothing else in this comparison competes.

You pay in configuration instead. The traceability, the HACCP records and the regulatory reports a food producer needs have to be built and then kept working as the rules change, and that is a project rather than a signup. Genuinely worth it when someone in the business likes that work. Expensive when nobody does, because the half-finished version is what you take into an audit.

Pick Odoo or ERPNext if you want one system end to end and have the appetite for it.

Where fermt is the better answer

When the material changes on the way through, and the records are inspected. A run can produce more than one thing, each with its own batch; a flow chains mash to ferment to distil to fill with the lineage intact at every stage; and the compliance — HACCP on the step the operator is working, the EU organic balance, alcohol duty and EMCS, the wine e-label, EPR packaging weights — is a view over those same production records rather than a second job. One flat price per organisation, every module included, no per-seat charge, which matters most at the 1–10 person scale everyone else serves by accident. And it all exports to Excel whenever you want, with no exit fee and no notice period.

Questions about choosing