Compare / Fishbowl Inc.
Rutba vs Fishbowl
An older, QuickBooks-adjacent MRP and inventory platform, sold per site and available on-premise - the closest thing to a QuickBooks manufacturing edition.
Checked 3 September 2026Fishbowl - pricing and editions ↗
What Fishbowl is
Inventory management and manufacturing for QuickBooks and Xero users, sold per site (rather than per user) and available in cloud or on-premise editions. Bills of materials, work orders, multi-warehouse stock, purchasing and barcode/mobile scanning are the core; Fishbowl Advanced adds asset tracking.
Who it genuinely suits
- QuickBooks Desktop users who never left, and want manufacturing next to it
- Companies with regulated or air-gapped requirements that prefer on-premise
- Multi-warehouse operations willing to pay per site rather than per user
Where they win
What Fishbowl does better than us.
Every comparison page on this site has this section and none of them is empty. If it were, you would be right to discount the rest of the page.
Per-site pricing suits some estates
A ten-person team on one site pays for one site, not ten seats. That is a genuinely better shape for some shops, and per-user pricing has no answer to it.
On-premise is a real product
They ship, install and support an on-premise edition, and their oldest customers are on it. Ours is your own instance on your own hardware if you want it, and Fishbowl has done this longer.
Barcode and mobile scanning as a first-class feature
The bench and warehouse scanning experience is the mature part of the product. Ours is being built and it is honest to say so.
Deep QuickBooks integration
Fishbowl was built for QuickBooks users and it shows - the sync is deeper than a generic connector, especially with Desktop.
Where we win
What Rutba does that this does not.
Argued from how the products are built rather than from a feature list, because feature lists are the part of a comparison that goes stale first.
There is no ERP to leave - we are the ERP
Fishbowl exists because QuickBooks is not an ERP. If you are already living with that split, Fishbowl is a good fix for it. If you are choosing today, Rutba is one system where Fishbowl is two.
A shop-floor terminal, and it is offline-first
A paired tablet with a device credential and an offline queue is a different thing from a Windows client with a barcode gun. The barcode gun stays useful - nothing about ours prevents scanning - but the operator flow does not depend on the network.
The MRP run has a picture
A regenerative run with pegging and a work-order timeline, so a planner sees what will happen and can act on it. Fishbowl schedules; the visual dispatch tooling is thinner.
And the one that is not a feature
Fishbowl Inc. will not build what you ask for. We will.
That is not a criticism of them — a vendor at their scale has to weigh your request against every other customer it touches, and schedule it behind a roadmap set a year out. Your request is a rounding error in their planning, honestly so. We are small, and the people building the product are the people you talk to: what helps everyone goes into the product at no extra charge, what is specific to you is quoted as the work it is, and when the answer is no you get the reason.
Side by side
The same six questions the hub asks of everyone.
| Question | Rutba | Fishbowl |
|---|---|---|
| Runs the businessCRM, stock, orders, production and the ledger, from one vendor | Included | Partly |
| Runs the dayMail, files, documents, chat and meetings, included rather than licensed separately | Included | Not covered |
| One set of recordsDo the modules share the records, or integrate copies of them | Included | Partly |
| Buy it yourselfCan you subscribe and start without a partner or a sales cycle | Included | Included |
| Parts sold separatelyCan you take one piece without committing to the platform | Included | Included |
| Run it yourselfIs there a path to your own hardware | Partly | Included |
On price: We do not reproduce Fishbowl Inc.’s prices here. A list price is published and fair to quote, and it is stale within a quarter — which would make this page quietly wrong in a way you could not see. Read today’s number from them, and ours is on our pricing page in full, tier by tier.
Moving
What leaving Fishbowl actually involves.
The question that decides this is not whether you should move but whether you can. This is the honest version, including the parts that do not come across.
- 1
Bills, items and vendors export cleanly from Fishbowl.
- 2
If the QuickBooks Desktop file is the source of truth for accounting, plan a real books migration or keep it.
- 3
On-premise customers should trial our own-instance path first; the shape is similar and the operations differ.
No customer has done this yet. The steps above describe the mechanism — what exports, what imports, what has to be rebuilt — rather than a migration we have run. When one has been run, this section will say whose it was.
Our actual recommendation
If you are a QuickBooks Desktop shop and staying that way, Fishbowl exists to fit that gap and does it well. Consider us when the plan is one system rather than two, when per-user pricing at your headcount is honestly cheaper than the per-site fee, or when the floor is tablets rather than terminals.
If you did move
The products this comparison is about.
With their real availability labels, which apply inside a comparison exactly as they do everywhere else on this site.
Rutba Manufacturing
Available nowManufacturing & MRP software
Versioned bills of materials with work centres on every routing step, a regenerative MRP run that nets against real inventory and pegs plan to demand, and a shop-floor terminal that reports work in progress from the bench where it happens.
- Versioned bills of materials with effectivity, where-used and a change record
- Work centres with capacity, calendars, and a labour basis for costing
- A regenerative MRP run — nets on-hand and reserved, respects lead times, plans by lot policy
Includes: Manufacturing · Planning · Shop Floor · Quality · Maintenance
From $32 per user / month
Rutba Inventory
Available nowInventory management & warehouse (WMS) software
Stock levels, multi-location transfers, stocktakes, and valuation — the single source of truth every other part of the business reserves and deducts against.
- Live stock across unlimited locations and bins
- Transfers with in-transit visibility
- Scheduled and rolling stocktakes with variance reporting
Includes: Stock · Warehouse Control
From $22 per user / month
Rutba Books
Available nowAccounting & bookkeeping software
Invoicing, bills, banking and reconciliation on one side; the ledger, tax, budgets and the financial reports on the other — fed automatically by every sale, pay run and stock movement happening elsewhere in the business.
- Two apps on one ledger - the daily bookkeeping surface and the accountant’s workbench, neither hiding anything from the other
- Sales invoices, bills, receipts, supplier payments and credit notes, with per-line tax
- Bank statements read in whatever your bank emits - CAMT.053, MT940, OFX/QFX or CSV - and matched, with reconciliation that must reach zero
Includes: Books · Accounts
From $14 per user / month
Head to head
Fishbowl against the others.
You are comparing Fishbowl to something, and it may well not be us. These are written to the same standard as this page — sourced, dated, and naming where each product wins.
Fishbowl vs Katana
Katana vs Fishbowl
The cloud-native, Shopify-first MRP against the QuickBooks-adjacent one that will run on your own hardware. This decision is really about what your books look like.
Fishbowl vs MRPeasy
MRPeasy vs Fishbowl
The cheap cloud MRP against the older on-premise one - a comparison usually decided by whether the accountant is on QuickBooks Desktop.
Weighing this against Fishbowl?
Tell us what you run and how you use it. We will be specific about what would improve, what would get worse, and whether the move is worth it at all.