Katana is manufacturing software for a floor with people on it: work orders in sequence, material requirements, live stock across locations. Core starts at $299 a month before add-ons, which is the clearest statement of who it is for. If nobody here spends the morning deciding what gets built first, most of that is planning you do not do — while a deposit taken and a balance still owed are not in it at all.
Katana · checked 8 September 2026
We make Ordamo, so we are an interested party. What we can be is checkable: written by the people who built it for their own furniture studio in Buenos Aires, every price taken from the other side’s own page with the date we read it, and their wins listed above ours.
| Katana | Ordamo | |
|---|---|---|
| Built around | A production floor: work orders, routings, capacity | Orders: deposits, balances, batch cost |
| Deposit and balance on one order | Not a concept an MRP has | Both, with dates, on the order itself |
| Who plans the build | You do, inside the software | Nobody — Ordamo records the work, it does not sequence it |
| Cost of a piece | From its manufacturing order and bill of materials | On the order line, and a received batch writes what the run really cost onto its products |
| Live stock across locations | Yes — this is what it is for | No, and it is not trying to be |
| Material requirements planning | Yes | No |
| Batch and serial traceability | Yes, as a $249/mo add-on | Batch cost, not compliance records |
| A page the customer can open | No | Yes — one link per order, updates itself |
| Entry price | $299/mo, one location | $29/mo, one plan |
| What makes the bill grow | Add-ons, extra locations, $2,000 onboarding | Nothing |
Built for orders that take weeks to deliver, start in a message and get paid in parts.
Add a customer and their order
Deposit taken, balance still owed, and the date you promised.
Send your customer their order page
One link that updates itself, instead of twenty messages.
Record what the batch cost
What a run really cost, over the pieces it produced. One button puts that on the products it made.
See what you actually made
Revenue, cost and margin per order. Money in, money out, cash on hand.
MRP earns its price by deciding what gets built, in what order, from which materials, by whom. That is a real job in a workshop with staff and a queue, and no job at all when the sequence is obvious or a contractor plans their own week — at which point the scheduling half is a screen nobody opens and most of what you pay for.
Core is $299 a month, and what a small manufacturer assumes is in it often is not: routings and production insights are Manufacturing Management at $199, batch and serial tracking is Traceability at $249, bin locations and mobile picking are Warehouse Management at $149. Each is priced sensibly for the business it was built for. Stacked, they are why the bill grows faster than the workshop.
An MRP models what a thing is made of, not how it was paid for. So the deposit taken in March, the balance owed in June and what is outstanding across every open commission live somewhere else — usually the spreadsheet the tool was bought to end.
Katana now describes itself as the operating system for multi-channel commerce with real-time inventory control. Made-to-order appears in a customer story rather than in what the product says it is for. That is not a criticism of the product, just a straight reading of who it is now built to serve.
From $299/mo
Core, with one inventory location and unlimited users. Add-ons are billed on top: Traceability $249, Manufacturing Management $199, Warehouse Management $149, plus a charge for each location past the first. Optional onboarding is a one-off $2,000. There is a free tier capped at 30 SKUs, and an Advantage plan on custom annual pricing.
$29/mo
One plan, per business, everything included. $0 today, first charge after 7 days, cancel in one click. 14-day money-back on the first month. No add-ons, no onboarding fee, nothing metered.
What is in the planWe are not the only answer, and pretending otherwise wastes your afternoon.
MRP for a small manufacturer, aimed in its own words at 10 to 200 employees. From $49 per user a month.
inFlowStock with orders attached: barcodes, purchase orders, a wholesale showroom. From $129 a month billed annually.
OdooA modular ERP for running the whole business on one system. One app free, then $8.95 per user a month.
The whole categorySix families of tool, what each one answers, and the three questions that pick between them.
Same company, same product, renamed positioning. It was sold as Katana MRP and now presents itself as a cloud inventory platform — "the operating system for multi-channel commerce", in its own words. Most people still search for Katana MRP, which is why the older name is used here.
The Core plan starts at $299 a month with one inventory location and unlimited users. Traceability adds $249, Manufacturing Management $199 and Warehouse Management $149, each billed monthly on top, and further locations are charged as you add them. Onboarding is an optional one-off $2,000. There is a free tier limited to 30 SKUs. Confirm the current position on katanamrp.com before deciding on the strength of a number here.
It can log make-to-order production, and its own site shows a customer doing exactly that. What it is built around is inventory and the production floor, so a made-to-order business gets the manufacturing half well and the commercial half — deposit, balance, what this one order earned — not at all.
No. Deposits and part-payments are not something manufacturing software models: a bill of materials describes what a thing is made of, not how it was paid for. If a deposit today and a balance in June is the shape of your business, that part will live outside Katana wherever else it goes.
No, and it would be a poor one. There is no material requirements planning, no production scheduling, no capacity model and no multi-location stock. It holds the order, the deposit, the balance, what a production run cost per piece and what the order earned. If you need the floor planned, this is the wrong tool and MRPeasy or Katana is the right one.
It depends on which half of Katana you were using. For manufacturing proper, MRPeasy publishes from $49 per user per month with a one-user minimum. For stocked goods and cost of goods, Craftybase — now Stocksmith — starts at $49. For orders with deposits against them, Ordamo is $29 a month on one plan. Cheapest is only meaningful once you know which of the three questions is yours.
Katana itself has a free tier capped at 30 SKUs, which is a fair way to try it. Beyond that, the genuinely free options are a spreadsheet or a Notion database, both of which work until deposits, balances and per-order margin are the questions you ask every week.
Ask whether anyone in your business decides, each morning, what gets built first. If someone does, you want a cheaper MRP rather than a different category — MRPeasy is the obvious one. If your workshop is a contractor who plans their own week, you do not want an MRP at all, and a tool built around orders and deposits will fit the day better at a tenth of the price.
Export open sales orders to CSV and import the file as it comes — no template, the columns are read for you. Add the batches currently in production and record the deposit already taken against each open order. Start new orders in Ordamo and let the open ones finish where they are, so there is no cutover day.
Yes, and for a business with both a production floor and a bespoke line that is the sensible arrangement. Katana plans and counts; Ordamo holds the commission and the money against it. The overlap is small enough that little gets entered twice.
Katana is inventory-and-manufacturing for a multi-channel product business, priced for one with staff. MRPeasy is manufacturing planning at a small-business price, per user. Ordamo is neither: it is the order, the deposit, the balance and the margin, for people who sell before they build and do not own the workshop.
No. It records what a production batch cost and divides that across the pieces it produced, which is the figure you then cost an order with. It does not work out what to buy or when, and if that is your bottleneck nothing on this page solves it except a real MRP.
Plans, add-on prices and the onboarding fee read from katanamrp.com on 8 September 2026, along with its own product description, and MRPeasy's published per-user pricing on the same date. Software pricing moves; confirm with the vendor before deciding on the strength of a figure here.
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Built for orders that take weeks to deliver