SyteLine vs Dynamics 365 Business Central

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Our analysts compared SyteLine vs Dynamics 365 Business Central based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Manufacturing Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

SyteLine Software Tool
Dynamics 365 Business Central Software Tool

Product Basics

SyteLine, by Infor Inc., is enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. It can handle various production models, including make-to-stock, make-to-order, engineer-to-order and assemble-to-order. Core functions also include financials, inventory management, production planning, supply chain management and customer relationship management.

Recent reviews are positive about this flexibility. You can choose between on-premise, private cloud or cloud-based deployment options. Scalability is another major advantage. The system adapts as your business grows, making it a suitable solution for companies of various sizes.

Advanced features like production scheduling, shop floor control, quality management and regulatory compliance tools enhance visibility and control. SyteLine is particularly well-suited for companies with complex manufacturing processes, diverse product lines, and demanding customer requirements.

SyteLine offers a subscription-based model, starting at $200 per user per month. The final price depends on factors like the number of users, deployed modules and chosen deployment options.

To explore other popular solutions that Infor offers, visit our Infor company page.

Pros
  • Robust features
  • Scalable
  • Easy to use
  • Advanced production scheduling
  • Shop floor control
Cons
  • Customization challenges
  • Integration challenges
  • Occasional performance issues
  • Mid-range price
  • Subscription fees
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Dynamics 365 Business Central, formerly known as Dynamics NAV, is a widely used ERP platform that benefits businesses of small and medium sizes. It’s a multi-faceted ERP product that assists in the streamlining of aspects such as accounting, contact management and inventory management. This program has high integration capabilities due to its status as a Microsoft product and is currently used by more than 100,000 companies.

Personalization is a key benefit of this tool that is expressed throughout the program’s different modules. For example, you can customize dashboards and reports to ensure that your employees are obtaining useful insights quickly and easily. The program is also highly automated and can reduce human error through its connected systems.

Pros
  • User-friendly interface
  • Seamless integrations
  • Flexible customization
  • Robust financial management
  • Strong reporting capabilities
Cons
  • Limited industry-specific features
  • Potential customization complexity
  • Scalability concerns for large enterprises
  • Reliance on third-party add-ons
  • Potentially high ownership costs
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$200/User, Monthly
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Tailored to your specific needs
$70/User, Monthly
Get a free price quote
Tailored to your specific needs
Small 
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Windows
Mac
Linux
Android
Chromebook
Windows
Mac
Linux
Android
Chromebook
Cloud
On-Premise
Mobile
Cloud
On-Premise
Mobile

Product Assistance

Documentation
In Person
Live Online
Videos
Webinars
Documentation
In Person
Live Online
Videos
Webinars
Email
Phone
Chat
FAQ
Forum
Knowledge Base
24/7 Live Support
Email
Phone
Chat
FAQ
Forum
Knowledge Base
24/7 Live Support

Product Insights

  • Boost Visibility and User Experience: Design, sell, and manage unique products with order management, customer relationship management (CRM), project and resource management, markup visibility and electronic collaboration tools. 
  • Optimize the Supply Chain: Improve visibility across the supply chain and reduce costs with robust capabilities that enable better sourcing and procurement, inventory management, and shipping and receiving. 
  • Reduce Operations Complexity: Facilitate productivity, planning and production to improve quality while reducing costs with quality management capabilities, advanced planning and scheduling, repetitive manufacturing tools, asset maintenance and more. 
  • Expand Service Revenues: Manage and deliver superior service by leveraging real-time shop floor reporting, a detailed contact center to track profitable service activities, and efficient scheduling and work order management tools. 
  • Support Digital Transformation: Leverage superior integration, extensibility, collaboration, analytics and mobile capabilities to drive digital transformation and compete in Industry 4.0. 
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  • Centralized Data: Dynamics 365 Business Central leans in to the essence of ERP software — data centralization. For example, the system’s contract management program maintains a shared database of customers and prospects that can be customized and filtered. The program also removes any duplicates found in the system, which is especially helpful when you have multiple people entering prospect information or liaising with customers. Customized dashboards and visualizations are also available for insights developed across your company. 
  • Accessibility: This software is available either on-premise or as a cloud-based ERP. If you opt to go with a cloud deployment, the solution will be accessible to your employees anytime and anywhere as long as an internet connection is available. This broadly increases the scope of where your employees can complete their duties and access pertinent information. 
  • Forecasting: Dynamics 365 Business Central contains forecasting tools that include the use of historical demand to estimate future demand. This is helpful because it can improve efficiency, reduce spoilage and improve the likelihood that you will be able to fulfill orders from customers. 
  • Simple Integration: As a Microsoft product, Dynamics 365 Business Central is well poised for integration. The software can work with programs such as Word and Excel and is also available across iOS, Android and Windows devices. Microsoft offers a wide variety of software solutions that can be connected to Dynamics 365 Business Central, such as Dynamics 365 for Sales. 
  • Collaboration: Dynamics 365 Business Central provides visibility and control over multiple production sites. This allows you to collaborate with employees located in that facility to determine benchmarks such as optimal inventory level. Additionally, because of Dynamics 365 Business Central’s availability as a cloud-based solution, it is easy for employees to collaborate on and access materials whether they are in a corporate office or at a production facility. 
  • Security: With this program, you can configure user access to different components of the software. For example, if you don’t want an account representative to have visualization of the payroll, you can limit the scope of a user’s access to the application. Disaster recovery tools also assist with security measures. 
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  • Operation and Supply Chain Management: Enable better sourcing and procurement, inventory management, and shipping and receiving. Collaborate with vendors over a secure supplier portal. Regularly verify physical inventory levels to ensure accuracy.
  • Project Management: Access a single interface that provides a unified location to manage all projects and resources. Includes a defined task and resource structure, defined invoice milestones and revenue recognition, and quick cost-and-schedule-variance identification.
  • Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS): Use demand forecasting tools to predict customer needs and track materials availability to ensure sufficient raw materials are always in stock. Use APS tools with mixed mode support for engineer-to-order, configure-to-order, highly repetitive, process and service-based manufacturing.
  • Shop Floor Management: Manage production activities on the factory floor in real time. Create, track and manage work orders associated with specific production runs. Track labor with visibility of employee time spent on different production tasks.
  • Purchase Orders and Requisitions: Generate purchase orders automatically based on purchase requisitions and approved vendor information. Manage communication with suppliers and track purchase order status.
  • Service Management: Manage and deliver tailored service with real-time shop floor reporting, a detailed contact center to track profitable service activities, and efficient scheduling and work order management tools.
  • Industry 4.0 Integration: Connect with internet-of-things (IoT) devices on the factory floor to gather accurate data on machine performance, environmental conditions and other factors. Automate production processes based on real-time insights.
  • Collaboration Portals: Improve collaboration with customers, vendors and resellers with easy-to-use portals that provide quick access to data that users care about.
  • Financial Management: Coordinate production operations with financial and costing operations. Capabilities include:
    • Accounts payable and receivable can automatically input and calculate payments.
    • Tax management to ensure financial compliance through various business stages.
    • Parametric and rule-based calculations to automatically calculate pricing for individual materials.
    • Ability to link purchases, work orders and customer orders to calculate profit margins.
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  • Sales Order Management: Dynamics 365 Business Central’s sales order management module allows you to alter quantity available amounts based on posted invoices. You can also use the program to create prepayment invoices and to manage partial shipments. 
  • Analysis Reports: The analysis reports tool is based on helping decisionmakers within your company gain meaningful insights that will positively influence daily decisions. With this customizable tool, you can use factors such as customers, items and vendors to view information such as inventory turnover and customer behavior. You can also use this tool to more accurately pinpoint problems across your business that are creating bottlenecks or inefficiencies. 
  • General Ledger: Accounting and financial reporting tools are a commonly requested feature in ERP software. Dynamics 365 Business Central offers a general ledger in its base package that includes internal and external reporting tools, ability to export data in various formats, employee ledger entries, linking to external documents and reporting in your company’s preferred currency format. 
  • Requisition Management: Dynamics 365 Business Central’s Requisition Worksheet allows you to optimize your inventory based on factors such as predicted demand and material availability. You can also set minimum and maximum quantity levels to determine a reordering point in your manufacturing center. 
  • Multi-Site Functionality: With this software, you can track inventory levels across multiple distribution centers, warehouses, production plants, showrooms and more. You can also track inventory as it moves from different locations while accounting for its value during transit. 
  • Contact Management: The contact management feature allows you to input and maintain a list of your business contacts and prospects. The tool lets you know when duplicate contact information is entered, enables you to issue quotes or sales documents, allows for the categorization of people associated with a specific contact and segments people based on profiling questions. 
  • Optical Character Recognition (OCR): Dynamics 365 Business Central includes support for Kofax Invoice Capture Service (ICS) out of the box. This tool can take information from unstructured PDFs, extract it, and turn it into structured data. 
  • Currency Exchange Rates: This system allows you to update currency exchange rates as they shift. This can be done either manually or automatically. Dynamics 365 Business Central supports Yahoo and European Central Bank (ECB) currency feeds out of the box, but you can add other currencies to the tool using the currency exchange rates setup. 
read more...

Product Ranking

#61

among all
Manufacturing Software

#47

among all
Manufacturing Software

Find out who the leaders are

Analyst Rating Summary

57
53
70
62
0
50
67
28
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Platform Capabilities
Quality Management
Platform Capabilities
Inventory Management

Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

SyteLine
Dynamics 365 Business Central
+ Add Product + Add Product
Bill Of Materials (BOM) And Routing Computer-aided Design And Computer-aided Manufacturing (CAD And CAM) Management Engineering Change Control Inventory Management Manufacturing Execution System (MES) Mobile Capabilities Platform Capabilities Product Configuration Production Planning Production Scheduling Quality Management Recipe And Formula Management Reports And Dashboards Shop Floor Control Warehouse Management Work In Process (WIP) Work Order Management 70 0 67 69 62 67 95 52 67 75 87 47 73 20 59 33 33 62 50 28 91 52 40 97 30 72 67 19 37 73 44 67 17 22 0 25 50 75 100
69%
0%
31%
63%
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37%
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100%
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100%
67%
0%
33%
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0%
100%
71%
0%
29%
93%
0%
7%
64%
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36%
36%
9%
55%
67%
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33%
40%
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60%
86%
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14%
86%
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14%
50%
0%
50%
8%
0%
92%
67%
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33%
73%
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27%
75%
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25%
56%
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44%
90%
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10%
10%
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90%
46%
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54%
38%
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62%
73%
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27%
73%
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27%
20%
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80%
40%
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60%
59%
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41%
65%
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35%
33%
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67%
17%
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83%
33%
0%
67%
22%
0%
78%

Analyst Ratings for Technical Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

39%
0%
61%
56%
0%
44%

User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 197 reviews
Good User Sentiment 366 reviews
81%
of users recommend this product

SyteLine has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 81% when considering 197 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

75%
of users recommend this product

Dynamics 365 Business Central has a 'good' User Satisfaction Rating of 75% when considering 366 user reviews from 4 recognized software review sites.

2.1 (2)
n/a
3.9 (54)
3.6 (142)
n/a
3.7 (85)
3.9 (66)
n/a
4.5 (53)
4.3 (9)
3.8 (22)
3.9 (130)

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

User Interface: With almost a 60% satisfaction rate amongst reviewers, SyteLine boasts a user-friendly interface and experience.
Functionality: According to 90% of reviewers, SyteLine provides robust functionality that can be managed and tailored to most business processes. Additionally, they provide industry-specific solutions so that users have the best fit for their business in terms of functionality.
Customization: Just over half of the reviewers who mentioned customization painted the process in a positive light. However, reviewers cautioned that extensive customization can lead to issues during system upgrades, but customizations are typically necessary to get the system to work with your business processes.
Robust Functionality: SyteLine offers a comprehensive suite of features covering core business processes like financials, inventory management, production planning, supply chain management and customer relationship management.
Scalability and Flexibility: SyteLine's adaptable architecture allows it to grow and evolve alongside your business, accommodating changing needs and expansion plans.
User-Friendly Interface: SyteLine's intuitive interface and design minimize training time and maximize user adoption, ensuring efficient and productive workflows.
Operational Efficiency: Streamlined processes, automated tasks, and integrated modules help eliminate manual data entry and duplication, optimizing resource allocation and boosting overall efficiency.
Enhanced Visibility and Control: Comprehensive dashboards and reporting tools provide real-time insights into key performance indicators, enabling informed decision-making and proactive problem-solving.
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Easy to Learn: Precisely 53% of users say the system has a simple implementation process and helpful training materials.
Extensive Features: Features include BOM management, finance management, document management, reporting, search filters, accounting and other modules, according to 79% of users.
Intuitive Interface: Familiar layout and guided workflows simplify data entry and task completion for non-technical users.
Automated Processes: Reduce manual tasks and errors with automated workflows for finance, inventory, sales, and customer service.
Actionable Insights: Gain real-time visibility into business performance through comprehensive dashboards and reporting tools.
Powerful Integrations: Connect seamlessly with Microsoft 365, Power BI, and other popular business applications for a unified data ecosystem.
Cloud-based Scalability: Adapt to growth with a flexible cloud infrastructure that supports diverse user needs and data volumes.
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Support: Complaints relating to bad training documentation and unresolved issues yielded negative feedback in about 70% of reviews that mentioned SyteLine support.
BI and Reporting: Of the users who mentioned BI and reporting capabilities in their reviews, 66% expressed that SyteLine doesn’t offer sufficient out-of-box reports. They also mentioned that reports can be difficult to configure without IT support.
Navigation: Though the system is generally user-friendly, 63% of reviewers said that navigation can feel disjointed and non-intuitive, sometimes requiring multiple clicks to complete a simple transaction.
Customization Challenges: While SyteLine offers a comprehensive set of features, some users report difficulties in customizing the software to meet their specific needs and workflows. This can be particularly challenging for businesses with unique processes or requirements.
Integration Challenges: Integrating SyteLine with other business applications can be complex and require significant technical expertise. This can lead to delays and additional costs during implementation.
Occasional Performance Issues: Some users have experienced occasional performance issues, such as slow response times and system crashes. These issues can disrupt workflows and impact productivity.
Mid-Range Price: SyteLine falls within the mid-range price bracket for ERP solutions, which may be too expensive for small businesses or those with limited budgets. Additionally, the subscription-based pricing model can be a significant ongoing expense for some businesses.
Limited Reporting Capabilities: While SyteLine provides standard reports, some users report that the built-in reporting capabilities are limited and lack customization options. This can make it challenging to generate specific reports needed for analysis and decision-making.
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User Interface: Of the users who discussed the interface, 46% said it was not intuitive and the layout is old-fashioned.
Glitchy Performance: Approximately 67% of users said the program's overall performance is slow and glitchy.
Industry Gaps: While strong for core ERP functions, may require additional add-ons or integrations for complex industry-specific needs like manufacturing or healthcare.
Customization Curve: While offering customization options, extensive modifications might require developer expertise, increasing costs and implementation time.
Large Enterprise Scalability: While cloud-based and scalable, very large enterprises with intricate operations might encounter limitations or require additional configuration.
Add-on Dependence: Fulfilling specific needs may rely on third-party add-ons, introducing potential compatibility and support challenges.
Cost Considerations: While offering subscription plans, total cost of ownership can be influenced by user licenses, customization needs, and add-on integrations.
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User reviews of Infor SyteLine paint a mixed picture, highlighting strengths and weaknesses.On the plus side, many users praise its robust functionality and scalability. Users particularly note that it can manage core business functions like finance, inventory, production, and customer management well and adjust to changing needs. This could be a major plus for businesses with ambitious plans.New to ERP systems? Many reviews suggest SyteLine's interface is intuitive and easy to learn, minimizing training time and getting teams up and running quickly. Streamlined workflows and automated tasks are also highlighted as efficiency boosters, improving resource allocation.Additionally, real-time insights and comprehensive reporting are popular among many users. Reviews expressed real-time insights on job shop visibility, equipment and stocks, allowing them to address potential issues before they snowball.Now, let’s consider some potential challenges. Some users express frustration with customization and integration challenges, finding it difficult to tailor the software to their specific requirements and connect it with other apps. This issue could be a deal-breaker if your business has unique workflows or relies heavily on specific integrations.There are occasional mentions of slow response times and system crashes. This problem can be disruptive and impact productivity, so consider your tolerance for such occurrences.Compared to similar products, SyteLine has a steeper learning curve but ultimately offers a more powerful and feature-rich experience. While reviewers note that it's user-friendly overall, they also report that the initial setup can be more complex than with options like Sage X3 or Epicor ERP.The mid-range price point can also deter small businesses with limited budgets. Others may find the subscription model less attractive than perpetual licensing options available in other solutions.Here’s our verdict: SyteLine is a powerful and versatile ERP system that’s well-suited for mid-sized businesses with complex processes and a desire for robust functionality. However, its customization and integration challenges, occasional performance issues and mid-range price are worth considering. Carefully weigh the pros and cons against your specific needs and budget before committing.

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Users appreciated Dynamics 365 Business Central's user-friendly interface and automation capabilities, highlighting its ease of use even for non-technical personnel. The streamlined workflows and intuitive layout simplified data entry and task completion, especially compared to competitor solutions with steeper learning curves. The automated processes proved beneficial in eliminating manual work and errors, boosting efficiency in areas like finance, inventory, and customer service. However, some users pointed to limitations in industry-specific features compared to more specialized competitors like SAP Business One or Acumatica. While Business Central excels in core ERP functions, complex needs in manufacturing or healthcare might require additional add-ons or integrations, increasing complexity and potentially cost. Customization, while available, also presented a potential hurdle. While offering flexibility, extensive modifications could necessitate developer expertise, raising implementation time and costs compared to competitors with more drag-and-drop customization options. Business Central's cloud-based scalability was praised, accommodating growth and diverse user needs effectively. This stood out compared to some on-premise competitors with less flexibility. However, very large enterprises with intricate operations might encounter limitations or require additional configuration compared to solutions like Oracle NetSuite designed for such complexity. Overall, user reviews suggest Dynamics 365 Business Central shines for its user-friendliness, automation, and cloud-based scalability. However, limitations in industry-specific features and potential customization complexity compared to some competitors are important considerations, especially for niche businesses or large enterprises.

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