Katana's Cloud Inventory Platform creates a centralized view of company inventory to maintain optimal stock levels across all of its locations and track products available for sale. Users can manage incoming orders from all sales channels and issue purchase orders directly from Katana to ensure restocking at the right time and in the right quantities. Katana can be integrated with e-commerce, accounting, and other business software to automate repetitive tasks and get real-time…
$179
per month
Lightspeed Retail
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Lightspeed Retail is a retail PoS system from Lightspeed headquartered in Quebec. Core retail POS features are expanded on higher service tiers with ecommerce option and payments gateway, an accounting system, and a customer loyalty program.
N/A
Pricing
Katana Cloud Inventory
Lightspeed Retail
Editions & Modules
Starter
$179
per month
Standard
$359
per month
Professional
$799
per month
Professional Plus
$799
per month
Basic
$79.00 ($69.00)
per month (when billed annually)
Starter
$119.00 ($99.00)
per month (when billed annually)
Standard
$139.00 ($119.00)
per month (when billed annually)
Advanced
$189.00 ($169.00)
per month (when billed annually)
Pro
$259.00 ($229.00)
per month (when billed annually)
Enterprise
Contact Sales
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Katana Cloud Inventory
Lightspeed Retail
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
All plans come with monthly and annual pricing, and you can upgrade or downgrade anytime.
—
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Katana Cloud Inventory
Lightspeed Retail
Features
Katana Cloud Inventory
Lightspeed Retail
Inventory Management
Comparison of Inventory Management features of Product A and Product B
Katana Cloud Inventory is great for shipping and receiving busiiness. Where things are very cut and dry as far as what comes in and what goes out, this program is excellent at keeping track of these things. We do a lot of custom build items and it is not the greatest for these. A lot of time it is difficult to both enter these items and keep track of these items.
It is perfect for any small business looking for inventory control, Tracking purchase history, and just an all round easy to use software for retail and beyond. I would not use it if I have only a few hundred items or was a larger company that can afford to build my own POS software.
Lightspeed Retail has great reports that are very easy to read and understand.
Lightspeed Retail is great to train new employees on because of its ease of use. There are not lots of different things that you have to learn just basics.
Auto email generated with PO's cannot be permanently altered in my opinion.
Different pack sizes of same items do not automatically fill in inventory I've found. For example, we order an item in singles, 4-packs, and 32 packs. In my experience, If we order the 32 pack, it does not show inventory for the smaller unit sizes. Each pack size has a different item number I believe.
Fields on the PO are not adjustable in my experience. You must create a template and use the template. You cannot change the PO each time unless you have a template created in my experience.
When closing out a sales order, if you invoice from Katana Cloud Inventory and send to Quickbooks, it automatically enables the invoice to receive credit cards in Quickbooks. We use another credit card service (not Quickbooks) and do not want this feature turned on. There is no way to disable it at this time.
When being billed for a PO that has been received and that bill is sent over to Quickbooks, it does not show item counts in my expereince. It only translates as a total dollar amount for each line item.
With a larger SKU assortment size, the software really starts to struggle with doing physical inventory after scanning in a few hundred items.
Several times throughout each year Lightspeed went down on us (not our internet connection but actually Lightspeed verified).
Special order system could use a lot of modern improvements (ability to schedule ahead of time, etc.)
Reports are very basic, and will likely require there Lightspeed Analytics to actually get reports useful for day to day operations.
Weak system for receiving purchase orders.
Does not handle items and cases for reordering very well. Have used multiple Point of Sale systems in the past 10 years that allow to set reorder points based on single items, but reorder the case automatically, Lightspeed has no support for this.
I gave the rating of a 9 because ninety percent of the time when I talk to their support they're very helpful. One of the only real issues I have is there are times where the queue will be 7-9 people deep. When you have an error you don't know how to fix, sometimes this is very troubling. But overall their support is usually quick and friendly.
Our Quickbooks inventory was input incorrectly by a former employee and fixing it would have been more time consuming and less cost effective than to come up with an alternative solution. Katana Cloud Inventory was our alternative solution. Katana Cloud Inventory says that they are working on some of the integration problems with Quickbooks, and once they are fixed, will be a huge help!
Lightspeed is faster, sleeker and more modern than our previous POS system. I can’t express enough how easy the online store portion of Lightspeed is - it just intuitive and sometimes, is TOO easy, I feel like I have to be forgetting something. Lightspeed is staying modern and current where our previous POS was not
