Fishbowl Inventory Review 2024 – Pricing, Pros and Cons
Fishbowl Inventory has emerged as a popular solution for businesses seeking robust inventory management software.
This review examines Fishbowl's key features, usability, and overall performance to help you determine if it's the right fit for your inventory needs. We'll explore how this software integrates with existing systems, its pricing structure, and how it stacks up against competitors in the market.
Fishbowl's orders and work planning tools can optimize production efficiency. The continuous data collection offers real-time insights and transparency at each stage, giving managers the power to make informed decisions.
Overall, Fishbowl supports businesses of all sizes but seems most ideal for small and medium-sized companies. It will be especially useful for those that currently use or intend to use QuickBooks.
Whether you run a small business or a large organization, maintaining a strong grip on your inventory is essential to driving sales and maintaining a pleasant customer experience. Inventory management software takes away the labor and complexity of manual tracking by automating and streamlining the process.
Yet, inventory management applications are not created equal. Choosing the best suited solution for your needs is key to maximizing the value of automation.
Your decision is likely to revolve around budget, ease of use, inventory management challenges, anticipated growth (hence, scalability), customization preferences, integration needs, quality of customer support and cloud/on-premises deployment.
There are hundreds of inventory management applications you could potentially choose from. As a significant market player, there is a good chance that Fishbowl could make your shortlist. This review breaks down Fishbowl’s features and all the key factors you would want to know before determining if it is the right platform for you.
Founded in 2001 and headquartered in the United State, Fishbowl is one of the oldest inventory management software companies. Its inventory control capabilities give businesses the tools required to run their inventory management, oversee multiple warehouse locations and scale as operations grow.
By automating the process, Fishbowl reduces the overall steps followed in your distribution, wholesale and manufacturing process.
Clients can automate tedious processes and reduce costs in order to maximize profitability. It is designed to relay the sophisticated functionality of enterprise-grade ERPs such as NetSuite but at less than a fifth of the cost
Fishbowl integrates with some of the more popular business applications such as QuickBooks, Xero, Salesforce, Amazon, Adobe Commerce and Shopify.
Its features encompass everything from barcode scanning and advanced work orders, to bills of materials and material requirements planning (MRP). Fishbowl may be deployed on-premises and hosted in the cloud.
We take a closer look at Fishbowl, its features, subscription plans, ideal client as well as key pros and cons.
Fishbowl’s primary features include:
Apart from the software’s core inventory, warehousing and manufacturing management capabilities, Fishbowl has other notable solutions that help extend its functionality. These include:
Fishbowl has two pricing plans – Fishbowl Drive and Fishbowl Advanced. Fishbowl Drive is a warehouse inventory management plan only while with Fishbowl Advanced, you can either choose the warehouse only option or include the manufacturing module as well.
More specifically, the distinguishing features of each plan are as follows:
Fishbowl does not offer a free trial but it does come with a free demo. Provide your business name and a business email address to book a demo and see how the application works before you commit to subscription.
Fishbowl requires an implementation and certification package as part of your purchase. It is charged separately via a one-time cost. This entails a dedicated Fishbowl implementation specialist taking time to understand your business then developing an onboarding plan in line with your operational needs.
The implementation encompasses data migration, 6 weeks training and certification (8 weeks for the manufacturing option) and a dedicated team for go-live support.
Fishbowl’s pricing has built-in incentives that lower the cost per user when you opt into multi-month contracts (12 months or more) and/or an increasing number of users. You can also negotiate a custom quote to fit the specific needs of your business.
Fishbowl does not offer a money back guarantee. Also, you do not get a refund when you cancel or downgrade your subscription.
You can pay your subscription using a major credit or debit card.
Customer support is available via the following channels.
As at March 2024, Fishbowl’s average customer ratings across key user review platforms are as follows.
Review Platform | Average Rating | Number of Reviews |
---|---|---|
G2.com | 4 out of 5 | 222 |
Trustpilot.com | 3.2 out of 5 | 1 |
GetApp.com | 4.1 out of 5 | 847 |
Capterra.com | 4.1 out of 5 | 848 |
SaaSworthy.com | 3.8 out of 5 | 369 |
FeaturedCustomers.com | 4.8 out of 5 | 1714 |
Overall, considering the low average ratings that many of its peers (including some industry leaders) score on these platforms, Fishbowl does relatively well with a low of 3.2 and a high of 4.8.
From the get-go, Fishbowl mentions that it is the top inventory management software for QuickBooks users. In fact, one could argue that the company considers its QuickBooks integration as its greatest asset.
The Fishbowl website contains multiple instances of text and video dedicated to elaborating how well it works QuickBooks. There is even an entire section of its navigation menu dedicated to Quickbooks.
This of itself implies an advanced degree of compatibility between the two applications that has been perfected over the years. Any inventory movement captured by Fishbowl is automatically updated to QuickBooks.
Fishbowl would therefore be best suited for businesses that already use or are intending to use QuickBooks for their accounting management. And since QuickBooks is designed for the small and medium sized business, we could extrapolate that same target audience to be Fishbowl’s as well.
Fishbowl automates the manufacturing and distribution process to help companies better ride fluctuating demand and overcome supply challenges.
It adopts an inventory-centric approach that leverages automation to give growing businesses the control they require to gradually lower inventory management costs over time.
Over the course of two decades, Fishbowl has developed an exceptional degree of integration with the accounting software, and has been QuickBooks leading inventory management partner. Further, it has integrations with dozens of other widely used business applications such as Adobe Commerce, Amazon, Xero, Salesforce and Shopify.
Finding the right inventory management system may take time but the operational and financial pay-off can be more than worth it.
Pre-procurement due diligence Is essential to getting it right the first time. If you are contemplating using Fishbowl, detail your inventory management needs and then compare them to the features and capabilities covered in this review.
While Fishbowl has mostly positive reviews and high customer ratings, that doesn’t not necessarily mean it will work well for every business.
In case you are not fully convinced that it is the ideal option, contact customer service for a risk-free demo and test out the functionality in the context of your most significant inventory management challenges.