Fishbowl Inventory vs. Magento Open Source

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

Magento Open Source is an excellent choice for businesses that need a highly customizable and scalable solution and (most of all) have the technical resources to support it. It's ideal for mid-to-large-sized businesses with complex product catalogs that require complete ownership and control, particularly those with complexities such as multi-country/multi-currency stores.

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

• It is very good when it comes to search engine optimization as it makes a good use of keywords and tags to improve the SEO score. It increases the chances of ranking up of the eCommerce store in the search engine rankings.
• It makes the store in a very optimized way and despite being a very advanced system it is still very lightweight when it comes to website speed. The pages have a comparatively low loading time and a good speed.
• It provides a lot more advance reporting features which are very helpful for businesses to do their planning.

Incentivized

• MRP
• BOM creation
• Unified interface

Incentivized

• Magento is not easy for a layman who is not tech-savvy to manage the website.
• Magento is one of the only modern shopping carts in which one must manually clear the cache and "reindex".
• Magneto has a lot of technical glitches - more than most of the other shopping carts we work with. Most are minor.

Incentivized

It's the dominant force in the SMB open source market. With the continued support of eBay/PayPal, Magento will continue to evolve and should be a market leader for some time.

Magento has a relly step learning curve. This means that you need to find experienced developers who can lead junior ones, otherwise the overall development process can be a disaster. However, once you are comfortable in developing on the platform, the customization capability are basically limitless and you can adapt the platform to any use case you can imagine. Also, there are many alredy developed marketplace modules that can solve, out of the box, many problems you may face.

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

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

Incentivized

In looking at a different platform to migrate to from Magento 1, we looked primarily at Big Commerce, Shopify and Shopify Plus. Our host was very negative about Magento 2, but we determined after a couple years it was due to the fact it had even more complexity (and very different) than Magento 1. Shopify Plus was attractive, but the cost factor for two sites led us back to Magento 2.

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

• Better Total Cost of Ownership than bespoke e-commerce solutions due to being open source and the wide range of free/commercial extensions available to extend the platform.
• Often more extensive to set up and maintain than other open source alternatives, such as WooCommerce.