While investing in your business’s future is always a good idea, there are situations where spending money on a distribution software package isn’t a feasible move for an organization. Luckily, there are plenty of high-quality, free distribution software options available for you to try out and reap benefits for your business.
Compare Top Distribution Software Leaders
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In this article, we’ll give you a quick rundown of some of the best free distribution software options available to businesses today. These solutions will provide you with an easy way to see the benefits of ERP distribution technology without having to make a massive investment.
The Best Free Distribution Software
SelectHub’s analysts painstakingly searched for the most fully-featured and usable distribution software out there that costs nothing to get started with. Let’s dive into the list!
Compare Top Distribution Software Leaders
ERPNext
A fully customizable, open-source solution, ERPNext is a powerful free distribution software option for businesses of any size in any industry. Alongside distribution and supply chain features, it can also perform core accounting functions to ensure your business’s financial status is as optimal as possible, and enables CRM functionality to increase trust in your business.
ERPNext offers a clean, easy-to-read interface.
Top Benefits
- Maintain Necessary Stocks: ERPNext can create a material request automatically when the inventory level goes below a certain level. Businesses can use this to replenish inventory at the right time, mitigating the risk of stock exhaustion.
- Improve Customer Management: ERPNext lets users maintain credit limits, view receivables, gauge total billing amount and analyze average customer revenue to manage customers better and make informed business decisions.
- Customize On the Fly: Users of ERPNext can add custom fields in the form, fetch values to customize form behavior and hide specific fields based on user roles. The software enables users to grab relevant information from vendors or clients.
- Facilitate Retail Management: ERPNext lets users register a new branch with a couple of clicks and monitor various dimensions such as expenses, stock movements, profit and loss to assess business profitability as a whole. The software can facilitate the use of local language to ensure interaction with diverse customers.
- Automate Routine Tasks: ERPNext allows users to set up assignment rules like load balancing to distribute leads among the team automatically. It reduces overheads and empowers the sales teams to meet deadlines while dedicating more time to respond to customers.
Primary Features
- Stock Management: ERPNext provides a real-time view of product availability for managing stock levels across locations and warehouses, stock transfers and more. It can record items received as batches, along with their manufacture and expiration dates. Automatically create material requests, and notify stock and purchase managers when inventory is low to prevent stockouts.
- Multi-Store Management: ERPNext can configure dimensions for each branch of a company’s retail network and analyze expenses, stock movements, profits, and losses. It supports real-time shipping rates and in-transit details of major shipping carriers.
- Item Variants: ERPNext can manage products in different colors, finishes, shapes, and lengths, and helps users organize these item categories so shipments match customer input.
- Multi-Channel Sales: ERPNext can easily be integrated with sales applications such as Shopify, WooCommerce or Amazon MWS, and can track data from several sources at once to both maximize reach and minimize confusion.
Limitations
- The free version doesn’t support product warranty, functional support, success management or large databases.
- Accounting isn’t fully localized in all parts of the world.
- Android application can have signup issues.
Platform:
Company Size Suitability: S M L
Dolibarr
Another full suite of programs at no cost is Dolibarr’s offering into the free distribution software field, powerful enough to support large organizations but usable enough for small ones to get familiar with supply chain management solutions. It offers deployments through vendors and on-site hosting so your business can choose which option works best for them.
Dolibarr allows users to consolidate large amounts of information into a single location.
Top Benefits
- Better Inventory Control: Dolibarr users can set lower product limits for supply warehouses that will automatically send notifications when supplies are running low, allowing you to reorder at the optimal time.
- Customization: Dolibarr lets users customize forms and fields to fit their needs, ensuring that they won’t be locked into a template that doesn’t fit their business.
- Constant Improvement: Regardless of what software version a business is using, Dolibarr customers are always given the opportunity to upgrade to the newest versions as they come out to ensure they’re performing at optimal levels.
- User-Friendly Interface: Users don’t need to know much coding to create and implement their own Dolibarr modules. This allows the software to be extended in ways that fit your business’s needs.
- Expansive Capabilities: Dolibarr incorporates a marketplace of external modules that others have created in order to enable maximum customizable functionality for your business, meaning you won’t have to invent a new module every time you want to expand.
Primary Features
- Purchase and Supply Management: Dolibarr lets users create, approve, receive and bill purchase orders, provision and stock warehouses based on requirement, and use information to create vendor invoices.
- Shipping Management: Create and track picking lists, shipments and delivery receipts from any order to ensure customers get their goods as quickly as possible.
- Warehouse and Stock Management: Create and manage multiple warehouses, track and value stock across several locations, and coordinate stock transfer while tracking movements.
- Sales Order Management: Generate new orders from the order sheet or reuse previous order forms to automatically populate fields. The software also automates order processing and tracking so you can follow the status of each order as it happens.
- Billing and Payments: Dolibarr makes it easy to create and send invoices while managing payment processing. You can reuse previous invoices for repeat orders and track the status of open invoices in case reminders need to be sent.
Limitations
- No native iOS application.
- Can’t directly create delivery notes.
Platform:
Company Size Suitability: S M L
Zoho Creator
The team behind Zoho Books has leveraged their experience to build their own free distribution software solution with a low-code environment for users to build their own applications with minimal experience. Customize your workflow and implement modules that best fit your business, ensuring your software is up to your organization’s standards.
Create and edit your delivery process using Zoho Creator’s low-code environment. Source
Top Benefits
- Efficiency: As with any good distribution software, Zoho Creator offers automation capabilities to ensure your supply chain moves along with minimal need for human intervention.
- Customization: Zoho Creator can import and collect data from various sources to help you keep track of purchases, as well as create customized forms for any business market or need.
- Unique Branding: Zoho Creator lets businesses import their company branding into all of their forms and websites in order to ensure any communication and purchase order updates are uniquely yours.
- Multi-Experience Deployment: By leveraging the cloud for its platform, Zoho Creator allows users to access their supply chain and distribution data from any connected computer, phone, tablet or other smart device.
- More Capabilities Through Developer APIs: Zoho Creator allows programmers to use its platform and APIs to expand in ways that best benefit your business needs, offering 250 per user per day in its free tier.
Primary Features
- Distributor Portal: Zoho Creator offers a platform for businesses and distributors to connect and communicate with each other regarding sales, invoices and other orders, allowing for concerns to be addressed easily.
- Inventory Management: Add and update inventory details, keep track of stock as it’s distributed and sold, and send notifications when stock levels get too low.
- Master Database: Set up a database for suppliers to access and easily onboard with your company procedures. You can filter these suppliers by any metric and search for specific details.
- Core Accounting: Perform accounting tasks such as automatic transaction data entry, keeping track of purchase details as they occur to graph performance and fill out reports.
- Order Processing: Issue sales quotes and assign each order a unique tracking number so you, your distributors and your customers can see the status at any given time.
Limitations
- No application sharing with key stakeholders.
- No payment processing.
- No pre-built modules for customization.
Platform:
Company Size Suitability: S M L
OfficeBooks
Geared towards small businesses with its standalone application, OfficeBooks offers a cloud-based proprietary free distribution software option for all industries looking to get started with an easy-to-use piece of software. Its free tier supports up to five users and 25 records, enabling small organizations to learn how software like this works.
Top Benefits
- Data Security: OfficeBooks ensures you don’t lose data by automatically saving it to the cloud and allowing you to access it from any connected computer.
- Granular Insights: OfficeBooks assigns unique IDs and tracking numbers to customer orders, allowing you to see their delivery status in real time.
- Better Inventory Management: Automatically reorder products when stocks reach a certain threshold, ensuring you never run out of essential inventory.
Primary Features
- Inventory Management: OfficeBooks automatically tracks and adjusts inventory levels when products are bought, created or sold, and can set minimums to trigger reordering notifications.
- Sales and Quotes: OfficeBooks helps businesses create, format and send quotes to potential customers, and can alert the sales team upon verifying that a customer has accepted an order.
- Purchase Orders: Create and send purchase orders by email. The software also supports tracing orders from creation to final fulfillment in real time.
- Payment Processing: Integrate the software with payment processor platforms to accept credit card payments and directly charge customers, as well as send robust email invoices.
- Reporting: OfficeBooks allows users to fill out pre-made reports from a series of pre-built forms, and can export reports in several common document and database formats.
Limitations
- No mobile application.
- No budgeting support.
- Limited number of users and records supported.
Platform:
Company Size Suitability: S M L
Multiorders
Another standalone proprietary solution that starts at no cost to you, Multiorders brings their own software-as-a-service approach to inventory management and distribution with a specialization in consistency across multiple selling platforms. You’ll never have to worry about a product being listed as in stock in one place and out of stock in another.
Multiorders makes it simple to track performance across every site you sell through.
Top Benefits
- Multichannel Inventory Control: Multiorders allows businesses to maintain a common inventory between multiple storefronts and third-party sellers, ensuring there aren’t any discrepancies between different sites.
- Better Insights: A centralized dashboard provides detailed insights into all current orders, as well as order histories, inventory and other key components of the distribution process.
- More Organized Processes: Robust product, inventory and delivery management tools help keep things organized on a granular level day-to-day, even if you’re dealing with an expansive portfolio.
Primary Features
- Product Management: Tag and categorize products by different attributes, as well as account for variations in similar products and create bundles of similar products that customers may often buy together.
- Inventory Management: A single dashboard tracks inventory and sets alerts when stocks in any given warehouse are running low, triggering automatic or manual reorders.
- Insights and Dashboard: Multiorders gives users a single location to view their inventory status and pending reorders, as well as a powerful reporting tool to organize and submit information for approval.
- Shipping Management: Organize orders from several connected sales channels and automatically submit them for fulfillment. The software also offers discounted shipping rates and automated order tracking.
- Order Management: Multiorders can create orders automatically or manually depending on customer needs, and support merging and tagging orders as needed.
Limitations
- No editing capabilities for manually created orders.
- Products deleted from sales channels aren’t automatically removed from the program.
- No accounting support.
Platform:
Company Size Suitability: S M L
Next Steps
As you can see, there’s no shortage of free distribution software options out there to give users a shot at optimizing their supply chain without cutting deep into their budget. Whether you’re new to distribution or just need a powerful software option that won’t break the bank, any of the products listed above are a solid place to start.
If you’re looking for even more software options, we’ve got you covered there too. Our free distribution software comparison report will let you pit solutions against each other to see how their modules stack up against each other — and your requirements — across 118 features.
What do you think are the top advantages and drawbacks of free distribution software? Let us know below!
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