Fusion Operations pricing, what Prodsmart by Autodesk costs per admin seat and per shop floor worker

Autodesk's product pages describe what Fusion Operations does and invite you to talk to sales. Its help center, which is public, explains how the licenses work, and that is what shapes the bill.

• Two license types. An "Autodesk Fusion Operations admin" seat gives access to the management interface. A shop floor license lets one worker record production at a station
• Admin users do not use up a shop floor license. Each admin seat can also act as one worker, but that worker cannot be reassigned to someone else
• Shop floor licenses cap the active workers. If you have more active workers than licenses when a trial ends, the extra workers are switched off automatically
• Extra licenses come as a new subscription. Buying more later does not add to the existing subscription; it creates a separate one with its own number
• Purchase goes through Autodesk. The help center sends buyers to the sales team or their account manager, and resellers such as IMAGINiT and Graitec sell it too

What none of this gives you is a number for the budget. For that you need the listings, and they do not agree.

Because Autodesk publishes nothing, every figure in circulation comes from a directory or a benchmarking site. Treat all of them as third party estimates.

The numbers look contradictory until you notice they price different things. The 2,000 USD a year figure works out to about 167 USD a month for one user and reads like an admin seat. The kiosk figures describe the cheaper licenses for operators who only record work. A plant needs both, which is why the total for a real plant is neither 2,000 USD nor 22 USD a head.

Before you ask for a quote, count people into two groups. The split decides most of the price.

• Admin seats: the plant manager, the planner, a production supervisor, anyone who creates orders, edits products and bills of materials, or reads reports
• Shop floor licenses: every operator who starts and stops work, records quantities, scrap or downtime from a tablet or a phone at the station
• Neither: the sales team and customer service, if they only need a delivery date. Ask Autodesk whether a read only view is included, because in a per worker model this is where cost creeps in

A plant on two shifts usually has two to four admin users and ten to forty workers on the floor. Every new hire on the floor is another license, which is the real cost of per worker pricing over time.

Here is the arithmetic for a plant with 2 planners and 13 operators across two shifts, using the published third party figures. It is a sketch, not a quote.

For a plant that wants paperless tracking, scrap and downtime at every station and lot traceability for audits, that can be money well spent. A device at the machine replaces the clipboard, and the data is what an MES is for.

For a plant whose complaint is "we never know which order will be late", it is a lot to pay for one problem. Our Line plan costs 1,490 USD a year paid yearly and Plant costs 4,290 USD, with unlimited users and no implementation fee. That is 4,470 or 12,870 USD over the same three years. The side by side comparison is on our Prodsmart alternative page.

Write these down before the call. They are the questions that change the number.

• What does an admin seat cost, and what does a shop floor license cost, separately
• Is there a read only view for sales and customer service, or does each viewer need a license
• What happens to the price when we add a shift and ten workers mid term
• Is the price locked for the term, and what is the renewal increase cap
• What does implementation include, who delivers it, and is it Autodesk or the reseller
• Which modules are in the plan you are quoting: scheduling, traceability, quality, maintenance, inventory
• Is there a discount for adding Fusion Operations to an existing Autodesk Fusion subscription
• How do we export our orders and history if we leave

If you will show the schedule on a TV over the floor rather than on a tablet at every station, say so on the call. A shared screen changes how many shop floor licenses you really need, and you can run the schedule on the screens you already own instead of buying a device per machine.

These are different products. Fusion Operations records what happened on the floor. We plan what the floor can finish before each due date. If you are comparing systems with inventory and purchasing built in, our MRPeasy pricing and Katana MRP pricing breakdowns use the same method, and the best production scheduling software ranking puts the tools and their published prices on one table.

Autodesk does not publish a price. Capterra and SelectHub list 2,000 USD per user per year for the Basic plan. On top of admin seats, each worker who logs production needs a shop floor license, which VendorBenchmark estimates at 22 to 35 USD a month. A 15 person plant lands around 7,400 to 9,500 USD a year before implementation.

Yes. Prodsmart was renamed Fusion Operations after Autodesk bought it in 2018, and it is sold under the Fusion Operations name today. Older Prodsmart price quotes on review sites may be out of date, so ask Autodesk or a reseller for current figures before you budget.

Yes, in two ways. Admin seats cover people in the management interface, and a shop floor license covers each active worker at a station. Adding a shift adds licenses. ProductionPlanning.ai includes unlimited users on every plan and charges per plant instead.

Yes. Capterra lists a free trial, and Autodesk's help center describes what happens when it ends: if more workers are active than the licenses you bought, the extra workers are disabled. Our demo runs on a sample week of orders in the browser, and paid plans start at 149 USD per plant a month.

It can be, if the plant wants paperless tracking and traceability and has the budget for a device at each station. If the plant tracks well enough and mainly ships late, 15,000 USD or more in year one is a lot to spend on a scheduling problem, and a dedicated scheduler at 1,490 to 4,290 USD a year solves it faster.