Looking for a Sortly alternative: what to check before you move

Why people start looking

Most people do not go looking for a new inventory app because they found a better one. They go looking because something changed in the one they had. In public reviews the most common trigger is a plan change: the price moved, or the plan they were on stopped being offered, after their items were already in the system. That is the worst possible moment to be shopping, because by then you have photos, barcodes and a year of edits sitting inside a product that belongs to someone else.

The second trigger is plain growth. A free tier that fits a hundred items stops fitting at four hundred. The third is one specific gap that turns into a daily annoyance: editing forty products one at a time, or wanting to know who changed a number and when.

What it costs, side by side

Price is the first thing most people compare, and it only means something next to the limits that come with it. Here are both apps' yearly plans as each company prices them, before tax: Sortly's first year, which carries a new-customer offer, and the price every year after that. Every Invenva plan has one price for everyone it includes, with no per-person fee, and it is the same every year.

Sortly's figures are its yearly plans on sortly.com/pricing, checked on October 21, 2026, in US dollars before tax: 50% off the first year for new customers, then 20% off its monthly list prices of $49, $149 and $299, which gives the yearly price from the second year on. Invenva's prices are its web prices before tax; the App Store shows a local price with tax included. Sortly is a trademark of its owner; Invenva is not affiliated with Sortly.

Do you still need Sortly's folders?

Sortly is built around pictures and folders. You see your stock as a wall of photographs nested into rooms, shelves and boxes.

Ask what you actually used. If you spent your time scanning a barcode, typing a number and moving on, the folder tree was scenery: a list you search, with folders built from your categories, does the same work without rooms and boxes to set up first.

Five things worth checking on any replacement

A replacement that looks fine in a trial can still be wrong in month three. These five are what trip people up, and every one of them is a question you can ask before you move anything.

• What the price does as your item count grows. Ask for the figure at a thousand items, not the figure today.
• Whether the phone can do everything, or only show you things. Plenty of tools are a full desktop product plus a viewer, and the shelf is where the work actually happens.
• Whether two people can work at once, and whether you can limit what each of them is allowed to change.
• What happens when the internet drops. A stockroom at the back of a building is exactly where a connection dies.
• Whether the team costs extra. A price per seat turns every new hire into a bigger bill, so ask what five people cost, not one.

Moving your items across

Export before you cancel anything. Get a spreadsheet of your items while the account still works, and keep a copy somewhere that is not the app.

Then expect most things to travel and two not to. Names, quantities, barcodes, prices, categories and custom fields move fine through a spreadsheet. Photos usually do not: most exports hand you links rather than files, and the links stop working when the account does. If your photos matter, download them separately, or accept that you will rephotograph the products you care about.

History almost never travels, and that is less painful than it sounds. The cleanest way to start anywhere new is a stock count on day one. Walk the shelves, enter what is really there, and let the new records begin from a number you trust instead of one you inherited.

Doing it in Invenva

Invenva is a stock app for a shop, a stockroom or a small warehouse, on iPhone, Android and in any browser, with one account across all three. Several of the things people ask for after leaving a visual inventory tool are the ones it was built around.

You can edit many products at once: select them and change a price, a category, a location or a low stock alert in a single step. Every change to a quantity is written as its own record with the person and the time, so who moved what is a question with an answer. Stock counts are a proper flow, with a reason on each line that does not match, and every count is kept as a record you can open months later.

The iPhone and Android apps work offline on purpose. Enter stock in a basement, at a loading dock or on a plane, and it syncs when the signal returns. The team comes with every paid plan rather than being charged per seat, and an editor can be allowed to receive stock while being blocked from changing prices or deleting products.

A product carries a photo, and you work in a list you search or in folders built from your categories and tags, where each folder opens on the tags inside it. There are no rooms or boxes to build first, and a product can sit in more than one folder.

The quickest way to find out whether it fits is to open the demo. It is a sample inventory with stock, history and reports in it, and it needs no account.