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.

Misleading pricing, they advertise their core plan at around $299 a month. Which is what we signed up for for our trial. We found out that most of their features were not practical, but we found just hardly enough to justify even that price for at least a limited time. However once the trial ends, they lock you out of some of the most important data and force you to add basic features as add-ons until your price supersedes over $1,000 a month. And by ad-ons, I mean bin locations, and lot numbers, both of which require 2 separate add ons. Now we're unable to download this information and the only support you have is an AI chat-bot that seems to not even understand which MRP it's even on. Most to every other MRP here is significantly cheaper and provides the same features. We were just shopping around and were deciding on Katana. Not anymore. I can just have someone build our own app, or just use google sheets... Both of which are far more reasonable to use despite the slight inconvenience.

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.