BarTender vs. Fishbowl Inventory

Bartender may well be suited for larger companies who have people with Bartender experience, but it is an unnecessarily complex suite of apps that takes some getting used to. Smaller IT shops looking for something more user-friendly, slightly less expensive, and more streamlined should look for alternatives. Some applications are built specifically to use Bartender template files, and in those cases, you may not have an alternative.

Incentivized

Fishbowl is well suited for warehouse operations because you can control, monitor, report or view the progress of materials all the way from purchasing and receiving to the shipment and tracking of products. It integrates with major carriers and with QuickBooks so it does offer a suite that can support the entire operation. It allows for workflow monitoring, so particular groups or products can be tracked.

Incentivized

• Can create macros to test ranges of serial numbers
• can be linked to electrical test stations in assembly of electronic modules

Incentivized

• Inventory control - provides easy/accurate reports. Also, cycle counts can be done at any time. The warehouse team was easily trained.
• Sales Orders - Fishbowl allowed us to have the sales orders accessible to everyone and linked the customers' purchase order to the orders and work orders (within the system). It no longer needs to be manually linked.
• Custom reports - for a small fee we had reports customized specifically for our company.
• Link to Quickbooks - invoices generated directly after closure of sales order.

Incentivized

• Resource Intensive - Can use a lot of resources
• Pricey - But you get what you pay for
• Licensing can be quite difficult to understand

Incentivized

• MRP
• BOM creation
• Unified interface

Incentivized

Easy to renew and update the license

Incentivized

I often have to try to troubleshoot printing issues for other team members, but I have never reached out to a BarTender support network. I’ve always just tinkered within the app to figure it out.

Incentivized

Originally the support for Fishbowl was very poor. It was hard to get anyone to help. In the last 12 - 14 months, it has greatly improved and if it continues this way I would certainly rate it higher.

Incentivized

We do use Zebra label designer, a free product, in circumstances where we don’t need a complicated label, such as no serialization, no connection to a dynamic database, etc. If we were to pull those instances into BarTender, we would need more licenses, which are expensive

Incentivized

Fishbowl is more useful than QuickBooks Manufacturing if you operate complex manufacturing with multiple multi layered BOMS

Incentivized

• Increased accuracy and consistency
• Improved speed of batch printings
• Customization permitted adapted features for our unique applications saving time and efforts

Incentivized

• Positive: Decreased time spent on copy/pasting in spreadsheets.
• Positive: Easier to analyze costs and guarantee efficiency.
• Negative: Time to get it up and running is really difficult to work with.

Incentivized