Fishbowl pricing: what Fishbowl software costs a manufacturer, from Inventory plans to Advanced Manufacturing

These are the figures on Fishbowl's own pricing page as this was written. The three Inventory plans share one cloud platform: Essentials covers real time inventory, barcode scanning and reorder points; Growth adds fulfillment, automated reordering, ecommerce and tax automation; Scale adds demand forecasting, lot tracking, audit trails and compliance documents. All of them sync both ways with QuickBooks Online, Desktop and Enterprise.

The line that matters for a manufacturer is the one Fishbowl prints under the Inventory plans: they do not include manufacturing. If you build anything from a bill of materials, the real starting price is 675 USD a month, not 229.

Fishbowl Advanced is sold on a different basis from the Inventory plans. The page shows a "starts at" price, 595 USD a month for Warehouse and 675 USD for Manufacturing, and says the final number is priced by users and deployment and confirmed by quote. Fishbowl does not publish what each additional user adds, or what changes between a cloud and an on premise deployment.

That means you cannot budget Fishbowl Advanced from the website. What you can say for certain is the floor: 675 USD a month is 8,100 USD a year before a single extra user and before implementation. Get a written quote at your current headcount and at the headcount you expect in two years, because on a per user model growth shows up on the software bill.

Fishbowl states that it requires an implementation package with every purchase. The package includes an implementation specialist, data migration (not including transaction history), a 6 to 8 week training certification and dedicated go live support. Its price is not on the pricing page.

Two costs follow from that, and only one of them is on the invoice. The first is the package fee itself, which varies with the size and complexity of the deployment. The second is time: two months of training sessions for the people who will run the system, usually the same planner and ops manager who are already overloaded. Budget both. Ask Fishbowl for the implementation quote in writing at the same time as the subscription quote, so you compare total first year cost, not the monthly headline.

The Inventory plans are fixed, so they can be added up exactly, including an effective price per user. Advanced Manufacturing cannot, so the row below shows the published floor.

Add the implementation package to year one in every row. For a manufacturer, a realistic first year is therefore 8,100 USD in subscription at the very minimum, plus implementation, plus whatever each user beyond the starting quote adds.

Is that expensive? For a QuickBooks shop that needs inventory, purchasing, costing and manufacturing records in one system, with a long established US vendor behind it, it is a fair price for a lot of software. It is harder to justify when the thing you actually needed was a schedule for your machines.

Search for Fishbowl pricing and you will find perpetual license figures: a large one time payment per user, plus an annual maintenance fee. Those come from Fishbowl's older on premise licensing, when Fishbowl was bought once and installed on a server in the office. Many review and directory sites still repeat those numbers.

Fishbowl's current pricing page leads with subscriptions: the three cloud Inventory plans and the two Advanced products. If your budget or an old quote was built on a perpetual license, ask Fishbowl whether that option still exists for your deployment before you compare it with anything else. A perpetual license with maintenance and a subscription can end up close over five years, but they are not the same number in year one, and mixing them makes every comparison wrong.

The reason most US manufacturers look at Fishbowl is QuickBooks. Fishbowl syncs inventory, sales and purchasing both ways with QuickBooks Online, Desktop and Enterprise, so the stock value in your books follows what happens on the floor. For a business that has run on QuickBooks for years and does not want to replace its accounting system, that is real value, and a large part of what the subscription buys.

It also means Fishbowl sits in the middle of your finance workflow. The cleaner the data going into QuickBooks, the less reconciling at month end. If your bookkeeper is still keying bank activity in by hand, it is worth fixing that too: you can convert bank statements into QuickBooks files instead of typing them. None of that schedules a machine, though, which is where the comparison below comes in.

Fishbowl and ProductionPlanning.ai are priced on opposite logic. Fishbowl charges by users. We charge one price per plant, and everyone in the plant can log in.

We are not an inventory or accounting system, so this is only a fair comparison if the schedule is what you are buying. If it is, our Plant plan at 429 USD a month covers unlimited work centers, shop floor status, setup times and changeovers, and the price does not move when you add operators. The side by side, including where Fishbowl is the better pick, is on our Fishbowl alternative page.

The same per user arithmetic applies to other systems in this category. MRPeasy charges per seat too; see what that means at 1 to 50 users in our MRPeasy pricing breakdown. Katana does not, but it adds routings and shop floor tools as paid add-ons, covered in Katana MRP pricing.

Fishbowl Inventory costs 229, 429 or 729 USD a month billed annually for 2, 5 or 10 users. Fishbowl Advanced Warehouse starts at 595 USD a month and Advanced Manufacturing at 675 USD, both priced by users and deployment. A required implementation package is quoted on top of every plan.

Fishbowl Advanced Manufacturing starts at 675 USD a month, which is at least 8,100 USD a year. The final price depends on user count and deployment and is confirmed by quote, and the required implementation package is extra. None of the cheaper Inventory plans includes manufacturing.

Yes. Essentials includes 2 users, Growth 5 and Scale 10, and moving past those limits means moving up a plan. Fishbowl Advanced is priced by users for teams of 2 to 200 or more. Per user pricing is the main reason the bill grows with the size of the team.

Not on the current pricing page, which lists monthly subscriptions billed annually. Fishbowl historically sold perpetual on premise licenses with annual maintenance, and those figures still circulate on review sites. Ask Fishbowl directly whether a perpetual option exists for your deployment.

Fishbowl does not publish it. Implementation is required with every purchase and includes a specialist, data migration without history, a 6 to 8 week training certification and go live support. The fee depends on the size and complexity of your setup, so get it quoted with the subscription.

It is worth it if you are on QuickBooks and need inventory, purchasing, costing and work orders in one system. If your stock is under control and the real problem is late orders and overloaded machines, a dedicated scheduler costs less and goes live faster.