BarTender Label Printing by the Thousands
June 11, 2019
BarTender Label Printing by the Thousands
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with BarTender
We currently use BarTender Enterprise Automation version for printing bulk case labels and pallet rack labels. We also print labels for quarantined and released items in production.
- Automation: BarTender Print Station provides a great way to present label templates for mass printing to non-technical end users.
- Data input at print time: we're able to input dynamic values that constantly change, just before printing labels. This increases efficiencies and is crucial in our production department. It's easy to do, and we can lock it down to specific templates.
- Serialization: being able to easily run batches of serialized labels, and trusting that they’re accurate, is very important. BarTender does this very well.
- Label design: Creating bee labels in BarTender Designer is intuitive and robust. With its many collaboration features, we can do a lot within our complicated environment. Many labels, many variations, and they are all easily handled by a designer.
- Licensing: argggh! Their draconian licensing model can stop you in your tracks if you’re not careful. It’s per printer, not seat, so errant print jobs can exceed your licenses. Be careful!
- Interaction with the cloud: we recently moved to Box and have yet to figure out a way to utilize Print Station with our cloud database. If there’s a way to do it, it’s not well documented.
- Support: if you’re not paying for premium support, expect an email response within 24 hours. Telephone support is good, but we’ve sometimes had to leave a message and wait...
- At $500 per additional license, we are hesitant to piecemeal one more license at a time when we don’t need it. Their licensing model is punitive, so ROI is only favorable when you strictly manage your environment.
- In the big picture, considering that we print thousands of labels weekly, BarTender is a great investment. We could never readily print this many labels manually, and it interfaces with our SQL database well, providing automation where we need it.
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