4 Best Free Inventory Management Software for Your Business

If you’re a warehouse or an operations manager, you must understand how difficult managing inventory is. While you need to record the units, item number, and location of each inventory item, you also need to ensure that there is enough stock to fulfill customer orders. Managing all of this manually isn’t easy and is prone to errors. For instance, if your inventory records don’t reflect accurate stock volumes, you risk stock outages.

Inventory management software monitors inventory, helping organizations streamline inventory creation and organize order fulfillment operations. These systems help businesses optimize their inventories and improve supply chain efficiency. However, if you are concerned whether investing in an inventory management solution is right for you, you could start by using a free inventory management system first. This will allow you to assess the usefulness of the software before you purchase a full-fledged product.

This article looks at the four best free inventory software options for small businesses, sorted alphabetically.

Rentle offers an inventory management tool that helps you stay on top of your inventory, orders, and documents. The software tracks your equipment individually or in bundles and keeps your inventory data updated. It creates a record of product usage history to provide you with valuable insights into overall business performance. You can also evaluate the best-performing product as well as the most profitable customer segment to update your strategies.

Rentle provides you with a ready-to-go online store that you can use as it is or integrate with your existing website. It is a fully responsive and customizable platform to suit your brand language.

Rentle works on any device from smartphone to desktop, adding flexibility to your business. The inventory software offers support via email and query messages.

Square for Retail is a cloud-based retail management and POS system that helps businesses manage online and offline retail operations. Key features include website builder, inventory management, purchase order management, checkout and payment management, and reporting.

Square for Retail comes with an inventory counting tool that helps you scan and search items to keep your stock level updated. Its smart stock forecast feature provides insights into which product is selling fast and will run out soon. You can also get recommendations on future re-stocking. It also includes low stock alerts that notify users when the inventory levels drop below the critical order volume.

Using Square for Retail, inventory managers can generate barcode labels, track stocks across locations in real time, and maintain vendor information.

Square for Retail offers support via email, FAQs, phone, and knowledge base. This inventory software has a mobile app for iOS and Android devices.

UpKeep is an asset operations management system including inventory management, property management, facility management, and preventive maintenance tools. With an agile inventory management app, UpKeep helps you stay updated with stocks, control costs, and ensure sufficient supply to meet customer demand.

UpKeep automatically updates product counts to help you avoid overloading. It also sends timely notifications for the products running low. You can create custom barcodes for your inventory, ensuring consistent documentation. The inventory tracking software uses business intelligence and data visualization to provide valuable insights on costs over time, consumption patterns, and work order cost trends to reduce expensive costs.

UpKeep offers support via email, FAQs, chat, phone, and 24/7 live rep. It has a mobile app available for iOS and Android devices.

Zoho Inventory is a cloud-based inventory management solution that features inventory control, warehouse management, multichannel selling, and order management. It helps you monitor your stocks in real time, assign unique serial numbers, track expiration dates, and fetch product information from a single dashboard.

Zoho Inventory creates reports on inventory aging, vendor payments, valuation, and sales details to get valuable insights on business performance. Its free plan supports up to two users and allows you to manage online and offline inventory orders, and track shipments and warehouse activity. The free plan also supports integration with eCommerce platforms, allowing you to manage purchases made via eCommerce platforms.

Zoho offers different options for customer support, including a self-service knowledge base, FAQs, forums, email, chat, and phone support. It has a mobile app for both iOS and Android devices.

How to choose the right free inventory management software for your small business?

The following considerations can help you identify the best free inventory management tool for your business:

• Inventory size: Small businesses tend to have a smaller inventory than larger businesses. Therefore, a basic inventory management tool would be enough for a small business owner. But, a large enterprise needs advanced inventory management software with multi-location stock tracking, data visualization, and other premium features.
• Sales channels: If you sell through more than one channel, you will need a system that supports multiple sales channel management.
• Mobile compatibility: You should invest in a tool compatible with mobile devices. It will help you stay on top of your stocks and create orders from anywhere, at any time.
• Scalability: Your inventory expands with your business growth. Therefore, you will need a scalable tool for your growing inventory.
• Cost of upgrade: Free versions of inventory management tools may not include all the features you need. Hence, consider the plan upgrade cost to ensure you stay in sync with your budget.

Common questions to ask while selecting free inventory management software

Here are some key questions to ask software providers before making a final purchase:

How did we choose these products? We didn’t—you did.

To find your ideal software match, you need information you can trust—so you can save time, stay on budget, and focus more energy on growing your business. It’s why we vet and verify all our user reviews and recommend only the tools endorsed by people like you.

In other words, our product recommendations are never bought or sold, or based on the opinion of a single individual—they’re chosen by your peers, reflecting the views and experiences of our independent base of software reviewers.

At Capterra, we objectively select and rank products based on a methodology developed by our research team. Some vendors pay us when they receive web traffic, but this has no influence on our methodology.

To be considered for this list, products have to:

1. Have at least 20 unique product reviews published on Capterra within the past two years, with an average rating of 3.0 or higher as of Feb. 2022. We selected the four products with the highest ratings to feature in this article.
2. Offer a free, stand-alone version of the software (not a trial version of the software where you must purchase a product after a limited amount of time).
3. Meet our inventory management software market definition: “Inventory management software monitors inventory, helping organizations streamline inventory creation and organize order fulfillment operations. These systems help businesses optimize their inventories and improve supply chain efficiency. Advanced inventory management systems provide real-time inventory control and auditing functionalities.”

Note: The content in this piece that provides opinions and points of view expressed by users does not represent the views of Capterra.

The “Best functionality” tool is identified using the highest user ratings for functionality that a vendor received based on publicly available reviews.

The “Most affordable” tool is identified based on the lowest pricing a vendor offered on their website in terms of cost to upgrade on Feb. 7, 2022.

Product research for this article was contributed by Himanshi Arora.