Katana Cloud Inventory

Our Experience with Katana MRP – Why We Left After 6 Years

We were early adopters of Katana MRP, using it as our primary manufacturing resource planning system for over six years. In the beginning, Katana delivered exactly what we needed - solid functionality, reasonable pricing, and an easy-to-use interface that worked well for a small manufacturer like us with modest sales order volume. Initially, the pricing was fair and manageable. But once Katana began taking on outside investment and aggressively scaling, things started to change.

Over time, they revamped their pricing model multiple times. At first it was tied to relatively simple metrics like number of users, but later it shifted to limits based on sales order line items, then to sales orders and gross merchandise value (GMV). What sounded sophisticated in their marketing quickly became a huge headache for us: as a small shop selling mostly items around $10 each, our high order count, not our actual revenue, automatically bumped us into higher pricing tiers. So we ended up paying almost the same as companies doing $50 million+ in annual sales, despite using a fraction of the features and resources.

We’ve also experienced price changes mid-subscription period without meaningful notice, and being forced into annual negotiations simply to keep our plan. Year after year, it became clear that the company didn’t care about smaller customers anymore: their strategy seems squarely aimed at upmarket customers with big order volume and deep pockets - which pits small manufacturers like us at a disadvantage.

Frankly, the model feels punitive, not proportional. If your business sells a lot of small-ticket orders, you get punished with pricing far beyond the value you actually consume - and that’s simply not sustainable for a real small manufacturer.

In the end, after dealing with repeated increasing costs and painfully going around in circles with account reps who didn't take the time to understand our business, we pulled the plug and took the time and effort to migrate to a different MRP that met all our requirements. It is faster, easier to use, and roughly ¼ of the cost of Katana’s current pricing. That switch has been night and day for our team - not only financially but also operationally. On the plus side, Katana made it easy for us to export our data and we performed the data migration and cut-over to the new system entirely in-house.

Bottom line: Katana may still work for some companies, especially larger, growing SMBs with high-priced items and few orders, but for small manufacturers with many sales orders and modest item prices, their current pricing strategy simply doesn’t make sense anymore.

very powerful app, that covered all of our needs and more. We had a great onboard experience. You'll be assigned an onboard specialist who is widely available to support you and answer questions. Taylor Hagel was our onboard specialist and he knew the software inside and out and communicated very well.

The integration is very simple and easy to set up! I wish we could carry tags from Shopify to Katana as well as delay the synch, so it is not automatic. However, we were able to find work around and the app works great overall.

Onboarind takes a while, but there is a lot to take in with the software. Once up and running its great. Brendan was very helpful and responsive. A very powerful tool when used correctly.

My experience using Katana for the last month has been incredible. The way it is set up makes it easy to understand and learn quickly. If you have a small-mid sized product based business, this will probably be a great ERP solution for you. Also, my onboarding coach Eugene was great at walking me through my many questions, and different scenarios that Katana could work for our company. Ask for him if you decide to get Katana, you won't be disappointed.

We've been using Katana for a couple months, and it has made tracking inventory much easier. There is room for improvement, especially to the interface with Quickbooks, but overall we're satisfied with the product and continuing to become more proficient.

Customer service has been great, particularly our onboarding coach, Brendan, who was a delight to work with. He's extremely knowledgeable about every facet of the product and explains things clearly. He was always responsive, patient, and ready with answers, often going beyond expectations. We cannot thank him enough.

Katana has been fantastic since we began using it 4 months ago. My sales rep worked with me to get pricing that matched our budget and use needs for our very seasonal business. My onboarding rep was always accessible. It was very easy to set up meetings with him and he was very responsive via email and personalized step-by-step videos for managing support in between.
The platform is intuitive and saves automatically so it is easy to move from one task to the next. Favorite features include the forecasting, material tracing, and material planning. We had used Cin7 previously and that seems prehistoric in comparison to Katana's functionality.
Strongly recommend Katana for both the platform itself as well as the support provided to ensure success.

We’re a new user to Katana and have recently integrated it with Shopify. All indications suggest that this integration is a fantastic solution, eliminating the need for manual data entry and enhancing the accuracy of orders. As we gain more experience with the intricacies of the integrations, we’ll share more insights and feedback. For now, it’s an excellent start.

We have been using this system for about 2 months and we are very satisfied. We have tried many inventory systems and finally found what we were looking for. I would especially like to thank Fred for all his help.

It took us several months to onboard Katana. The system is glitchy. When things dont work as expected, we are always told our issue "will be taken to the developers" or they are "working on that". There are all these manual work-arounds that, rather than decreasing our workload by leveraging AI, required us to do extra work just to have basic functions and accurate data. After a couple months of onboarding and a couple months using it, we are switching to a different platform that's more intuitive and allows more customization. I agree with the comments with the tripling price - we were initially told we could get all the services we needed at $99/mo, but by the time we finished onboarding, it was up to $400/mo. The platform we are using now is around that price and I wish we had gone with them from the get-go.