Compare / Katana Cloud Inventory
Rutba vs Katana
The MRP-for-makers category leader by momentum: cloud, self-serve, and integrated with Shopify and QuickBooks by design rather than by connector.
Checked 3 September 2026Katana - pricing and product ↗
What Katana is
A cloud manufacturing and inventory platform aimed at small D2C brands and job shops: bill of materials, make orders, live inventory across sales channels, and shop-floor cards for operators. Sold per user in tiered plans, integrated with Shopify, WooCommerce, QuickBooks Online, Xero and about eighty other tools by first-party connector.
Who it genuinely suits
- D2C brands whose store is Shopify and whose books are QuickBooks or Xero
- Small assembly and craft operations that need MRP but not a suite
- Companies whose "ERP" is a spreadsheet and Shopify, and who want to graduate without buying NetSuite
Where they win
What Katana 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.
Shopify-native, in a way we are not
Two-way sync with Shopify (and WooCommerce) for products, orders, stock and fulfilment, in real time. Rutba Commerce is our own storefront; a Shopify-first brand is not our first customer today, and it should not be their first move to replace their storefront to get MRP.
An integration catalogue we do not compete with
Around eighty first-party connectors, and a public API used to build the rest. Our catalogue is one number: the products in Rutba.
The vocabulary of small-batch manufacturing
Contract manufacturing, ingredient tracking, subassemblies, batch tracking, kit assembly and BOM variants are what the product is written around. Ours share the shape, and Katana has been iterating on that vocabulary longer.
Momentum, and reviews
A large public review corpus, an active community, and a template library. New customers arrive with expectations set by other Katana users; ours arrive with expectations set by their spreadsheets.
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.
The ledger, the CRM, the payroll and the workspace are already here
Katana talks to QuickBooks; we are Rutba Books. Katana talks to Xero; we are Rutba Books. Katana talks to a payroll provider so the piece-rate hours pay a wage; we are Rutba People, and a piece rate posts through workforce to the pay run. That is the difference the pitch above rests on: fewer seams to reconcile because there are fewer things to reconcile in the first place.
The shop-floor terminal is a first-class app
The operator does not open Katana on a laptop and hunt for their job. A paired tablet clocks them on by PIN, hands them the dispatch list for the bench, and drains its offline queue when the network returns.
A bill version is pinned at release, not "current"
The floor works to the bill the order was released against, so an engineering change does not silently rewrite what is being built while it is being built. Small, and it decides genealogy.
Runnable on your own instance
A Rutba licence gives you the whole thing on your own instance. Katana is cloud, full stop.
And the one that is not a feature
Katana Cloud Inventory 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 | Katana |
|---|---|---|
| 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 | Not covered |
On price: We do not reproduce Katana Cloud Inventory’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 Katana 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
Bring bills across as CSVs; Katana exports cleanly. Rebuild routings, because ours carry a work centre on every step and theirs do not.
- 2
Stock levels and open sales orders import as CSVs.
- 3
Shopify integration is not a switch for us. If your store is Shopify and stays Shopify, this is the wrong direction - Katana is the answer.
- 4
Payroll seams are the real gain. Bring People with you or the reason to switch weakens.
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 the store is Shopify and the books are QuickBooks or Xero and the plan is to keep it that way, Katana is the honest answer and will stay that. Consider us when the plan is one system, when the piece-rate wage needs to reach a payslip without an export, or when the shop-floor terminal actually needs to be a terminal on the floor rather than a browser tab.
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
Rutba People
Available nowHR, payroll & employee management software
Employee records, the org structure, attendance and leave, a shared time clock, and payroll that runs on all of it — plus a self-service portal so staff answer their own questions instead of asking HR.
- Employee records, employment history, contracts, teams and matrix reporting lines
- Attendance and leave with approval chains
- A shared time clock that gives attendance an actual source
Includes: HR · Employee Self-Service · Payroll · Time Clock · Workforce · Recruit · Talent
From $8 per employee / month
Head to head
Katana against the others.
You are comparing Katana 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.
Katana vs MRPeasy
Katana vs MRPeasy
The category leader by momentum against the value option that has been doing the same job for a decade. Both are focused MRPs; the decision is what you want next to the MRP.
Katana vs Fishbowl
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.
Weighing this against Katana?
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.