JobBOSS pricing and cost: what JobBOSS2 costs per user, and why no one publishes a number

ECI's own JobBOSS2 pricing page carries no dollar amounts. It says the pricing "is tailored to the specific scale of your manufacturing operations and the depth of functionality required" and that packages are scalable "so that small job shops and mid-sized manufacturers alike only pay for the tools they need to grow". There is a "Get pricing for your shop" section, a contact form and a phone number, 1-800-959-3367.

Two concrete facts do appear, and they matter more than any estimate.

• The product is sold in three named packages: Silver, Gold and Platinum
• Licensing is per user, and ECI states that every package "has a minimum of one user, so you will never be required to pay for a seat you don't plan to use"

So the shape of the bill is known even if the number is not: package, multiplied by seats, plus onboarding. Everything else on the internet is somebody's estimate.

The package you need is the first thing that sets your price, and for a plant manager it usually comes down to one row.

Read the last two rows twice. On Silver and Gold you choose Scheduling or Quality Management. You do not get both. A shop that holds ISO 9001 or AS9100 and also wants a machine schedule is on Platinum by definition, which is the top package, so the quote starts from the top of the range rather than the bottom.

Gold is where accounting moves inside the ERP. That suits a shop replacing its whole back office. It is less compelling for the many US job shops that are perfectly happy in QuickBooks and are really shopping for production control. If the money problem in your shop is not bookkeeping but customers paying 20 days late, chasing overdue invoices automatically costs a fraction of an ERP seat and does not need a migration.

Because the price is built rather than listed, it is worth knowing which levers the salesperson is pulling.

• Seat count: The licence is per user. Every planner, supervisor, buyer, estimator and operator who logs in is a seat, every month, forever.
• Package: Silver, Gold or Platinum. Needing both Scheduling and Quality pushes you to Platinum on its own.
• Deployment: ECI offers multi tenant cloud, a private hosted cloud and on premise. Hosted and on premise carry different cost structures, including a server you own and maintain.
• Implementation and training: ECI describes a structured onboarding process. It is quoted separately and it scales with how much of your data has to come across and how many people need training.
• Data migration: Bringing years of job history, part numbers, routings and customers out of E2, a legacy JobBOSS install or a spreadsheet stack is usually the largest one time line.
• Term and timing: As with every quote based ERP, the number you are offered at the end of a quarter is not always the number you are offered at the start of one.

None of that is unusual for shop management ERP. It does mean the honest answer to "how much does JobBOSS cost" is a range with your own seat count in it, and that you cannot budget from a web page.

Search for JobBOSS pricing and the first page is directory and aggregator listings: Capterra, GetApp, TrustRadius, G2, ITQlick, top10erp and a handful of sites that exist to rank for the word pricing. Their numbers do not match, and it is worth understanding why before you put any of them in a budget.

The E2 point catches people out. ECI acquired Shoptech, the maker of the E2 Shop System, in late 2020 and launched JobBOSS2 in May 2021 as one cloud product replacing both E2 and the original JobBOSS. Legacy E2 shops still get support, and JobBOSS2 is the migration path, but the old price lists that keep resurfacing belong to a product that is not on sale. If an estimate does not say which package and how many seats it covers, it is not a price.

You cannot compute JobBOSS2 exactly without a quote. You can compute the shape, and the shape is what decides whether this fits your shop. Take any per seat price, call it P, and count the people who need to be in the system.

At 100 USD a seat, the middle row is 7,200 to 9,600 USD a year in licence alone, and the row below it is 18,000 to 24,000. Add implementation and data migration in year one. That is not an argument that JobBOSS2 is overpriced: those seats also carry quoting, job costing, time keeping, inventory and purchasing for the same person, which is a lot of software. It is an argument that you should price the seat list before the discovery call, not after the demo, because the seat list is what you are actually buying.

The version of this question that catches shops out is the one about operators. Collecting labor against jobs at the machine is exactly what shop management ERP is for, and it is also the line item that multiplies your seat count. Get it quoted both ways.

Take this list to the call and get the answers in writing.

• Which package includes Scheduling at our seat count, and what does moving to Platinum add per month
• What is the price per user per month, and does it change above a certain number of seats
• Are operator or shop floor data collection logins priced the same as full users
• What is the implementation fee, and what is included: configuration, data migration, training days
• How much job history comes across from our current system, and what is dropped
• Cloud, hosted or on premise: what is the price difference and what do we own in each case
• What is the term, what is the renewal uplift, and what happens to the price when we add seats mid term
• Is there a published list price at all, or is every quote individual

That last question is worth asking directly. A vendor that prices individually is not doing anything wrong, but it means your leverage is your own preparation.

JobBOSS2 and ProductionPlanning.ai are priced on opposite logic. ECI charges per user for a system that runs the whole shop. We charge one published price per plant for one job, the schedule, and everybody in the plant can log in.

Our Line plan is 149 USD per plant per month for up to 10 work centers and 500 open orders, and Plant is 429 USD with unlimited work centers, shop floor status, setup times and changeovers. Paying yearly costs ten months instead of twelve. The side by side, including where JobBOSS2 is the better pick, is on our JobBOSS alternative page.

The same per seat arithmetic shows up elsewhere in this category. MRPeasy charges per user too, worked out at 1 to 50 seats in our MRPeasy pricing breakdown. Katana does not, but bills routings and shop floor tools as add-ons, covered in Katana MRP pricing, and Fishbowl sells manufacturing separately again, in Fishbowl pricing.

ECI does not publish a price for JobBOSS2. It is sold in Silver, Gold and Platinum packages, licensed per user with a minimum of one seat, and every shop receives a custom quote. Third party estimates run from roughly 45 to 200 USD per user per month, and they disagree because they describe different packages, seat counts and years.

Yes. ECI states that each package has a minimum of one user and that you never pay for a seat you do not plan to use, which means the licence is counted in seats. Every planner, supervisor, buyer and operator who logs in adds to the monthly bill.

It depends on the package. Silver and Gold include either Scheduling or Quality Management, one of the two. Platinum includes both. So a shop that needs the machine schedule and quality records in the same system is on Platinum.

All three include shop management, quoting, orders, jobs, inventory, purchasing, time keeping, dashboards and QuickBooks integration. Gold adds Report Designer and accounting with AR, AP and GL. Platinum adds both Scheduling and Quality Control instead of making you choose.

ECI does not publish it. Onboarding is described as a structured process and is quoted separately, scaling with data migration, configuration and training days. Ask for it in writing alongside the subscription quote so you compare total first year cost rather than the monthly headline.

Effectively yes. ECI acquired Shoptech, maker of E2, in late 2020 and launched JobBOSS2 in May 2021 as the single cloud product replacing both E2 and the original JobBOSS. E2 is no longer sold to new customers, so old E2 price lists describe a product you cannot buy.

It is worth it for a shop replacing quoting, job costing, time keeping and inventory in one system, where estimated against actual job cost is the number that pays for the software. It is harder to justify when the shop already has those pieces working and the real problem is that the machines are overloaded and orders ship late.