Open Source WMS Shortlist
Here’s the list of the best tools that I’ll cover in this article.
A well-managed and integrated open source warehouse management system is the key to delivering exceptional and distinctive customer service. Whether you’re a worldwide retailer, a franchise, or an independent business owner, it’s crucial to find a balance between product demand and your supply system. Today’s consumers have a high level of expectations, and your warehouse system needs to function and meet them. As a matter of fact, in 2021, retail ecommerce revenue estimated at roughly $768 billion. Forecasts predict this will increase to exceed $1.3 trillion. An effective warehouse management platform can quickly and effortlessly allow any business to be aware of various retail scenarios and function with the necessary capabilities to meet today’s and the future’s demands.
A warehouse management system (WMS) allows a company to manage its daily supplies and deliveries to optimize warehouse operations. Typically, WMS involves services related to inbound and outbound operations, inventory management, demand forecasting, inventory tracking, and other vital warehousing needs. A cloud-based WMS provides an organization with real-time data to help you monitor the status of your inventory while also minimizing your labor costs. With these benefits combined, you can improve your customer service.
Comparison Criteria
What do I look for when I select the best open source warehouse management systems? Here’s a summary of my evaluation criteria:
- User Interface (UI): I look for a platform that allows you to manage your facility easily by providing clean navigation. It should also let you quickly find historical, aged, and active tasks.
- Usability: I look for systems that provide a wide variety of functions to match specific business requirements. It should work efficiently, no matter the size of your facility.
- Integrations: I look for warehouse management systems that integrate with the business management systems that you’re already using. This can help to fit the needs of your growing business.
- Value for $: I look for systems that help your workforce pick and receive items with fewer errors in a smaller amount of time. As a result, this can improve profits by selling to your customers faster and more accurately.
Open Source WMS Key Features
A significant part of an efficient and profitable business is its warehousing. This aspect allows your organization to manage inventory while controlling and maintaining products before shipping them. Here’s a list of WMS key features that can solve various business challenges but provide you with a systematic workflow to follow:
- Receiving: This feature helps your business minimize errors by monitoring discrepancies between the customer’s order and the products received.
- Inventory Management: A WMS platform can track your inventory data by using radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and barcode readers to update the dashboard data automatically and ensure those with the right permissions can access it.
- Picking and Packing: These platforms enable businesses to sort and print picking lists easily by order date, bin location, or SKU.
- Order Management: This feature helps businesses effectively manage orders by regulating product flow throughout your warehouse.
- Analytics: Combining warehouse operations and business intelligence can significantly benefit businesses with real-time tracking to manage inventory.
- Labor Management: Proper labor management can help keep employees on target and identify if any of your processes are unnecessarily using too many precious resources.
- Financial Management: WMS provides features to help monitor sales patterns, business performance, goods, and customers to help businesses make data-driven decisions regarding future advancements and actions.
- Risk Management: This is a critical component of an effective business development strategy that involves operational data analysis and projections creation while monitoring potential hazards or existing disruptions.
- Storage: A WMS platform can help with location control, especially when a business works with various goods, by tracking the location of every SKU.
- Returns: This is an unpleasant process that a WMS platform can help automate by creating the return, recording the reason for the return, updating the stock data, generating reports, and issuing refunds.
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Overviews Of The 10 Best Open Source Warehouse Management Systems
Here’s a brief description of each open source WMS to showcase each tool’s best use case, some noteworthy features, and screenshots to give a snapshot of the user interface.
Kartopia
B2B, B2C, and marketplace platform with multichannel capabilities
Kartopia is a modular ecommerce platform that helps businesses of all sizes grow faster through digital transformation. They built Kartopia to grow and accommodate your growing business while also allowing you to create a unique and rewarding customer experience. The platform’s comprehensive suite of capabilities addresses your store’s product, cart, and order management fulfillment.
The Kartopia platform enables your business to provide an excellent customer experience by using B2B and B2C features, such as support for multiple currencies, languages, and themes. Kartopia also provides features to help provide the best-in-class content management system and multichannel capabilities, such as customer service, mobile, and web. With all these features, the platform also integrates required fraud protection services and SSL, so your customer and business data stay safe.
Kartopia allows for easy extensible integration with third-party applications for payment and shipping gateways.
Kartopia offers custom pricing upon request.
OroCommerce
Open source B2B ecommerce software and CRM platform
OroCommerce is an open source B2B ecommerce software and CRM platform used for warehousing, sales enablement, and wholesale. OroCommerce is built on Symfony, a leading high-performance open source PHP framework. They boast a developer community of 20,000+ and a user-powered tools library.
Key features include a centralized customer database, pipeline and forecast management, granular segmentation options, performance dashboards, and reporting features. OroCommerce bills themselves as a B2B specialty but, being open source and hugely flexible, the platform can be tailored for anything from B2C, multi-brand, goods, services, or even a bookings marketplace.
OroCommerce offers pricing upon request and comes with a free demo.
Spree Commerce
Create, customize, and manage flexible and scalable online stores
Spree commerce’s features can help businesses of any size create an online shopping experience for customers. It’s an excellent choice if you’re starting or already running an online store or a multi-vendor marketplace. The platform is also great for launching a content-fuelled commerce project or when creating a backend for an ecommerce application.
Spree Commerce’s open source architecture allows users to configure and customize their online stores with a high level of flexibility. The software offers various features, such as an analytics dashboard, inventory management systems, and the ability to manage multiple storefronts from one platform. Spree Commerce also offers an official Slack channel where you can make the most of its active community, which comprises web developers, software houses, Spree contributors, and fellow Spree users.
Spree Commerce integrates with various third-party applications in multiple categories. These integrations include Stripe, Braintree, Optimizely, and Google Analytics.
Spree Commerce offers custom pricing upon request.
Solidus
Create unique and customizable ecommerce stores on a community-centered platform
Solidus is a free, open source ecommerce platform for fast-growing online organizations, digitally-native brands, and practical developers. The software takes care of the complexity of growth when you scale from a small business to an enterprise organization. The Solidus platform allows businesses to free themselves from limitations and gives them the freedom to change as they grow. You can start small and grow by discovering what makes this change happen.
They built solidus on community knowledge from other brands that revolutionized ecommerce. Solidus lets users choose different modules to format their stores’ functionality and add only the needed features. The platform is fully customizable and uses the Ruby on Rails framework. You can use the platform by combining the front and back end of your website or use its headless architecture maintained by a developer community.
Solidus integrates with many popular third-party applications to save development time, such as PayPal, ShipStation, Google Analytics, and TaxJar. If you’re comfortable working with Ruby on Rails, you can develop a local extension that works with your systems.
Solidus offers customized pricing upon request.
Magento Open Source
Build a unique online store from scratch with basic ecommerce capabilities
The Magento Open Source Platform is for many types of businesses, including small or medium businesses and even freelancers. Those with intermediate and professional web development experience can use the platform to fulfill their store requirements. Smaller businesses can use the Magento platform to get enterprise-level software with a smaller budget.
When using Magento Open Source, you can create a flexible website that can scale with you as your store grows. You can add almost any type of feature to your sites, such as catalog management, product browsing, site management, and SEO. Magento Open Source also helps businesses curate and design individual product lists to cater to their customer’s requirements.
Magento Open Source’s marketplace provides thousands of free and premium extensions to extend and enhance your stores, such as Mailchimp, Stripe, and Facebook Business Extension.
Magento Open Source offers custom pricing upon request.
Odoo
Interconnected business applications to replace multiple systems
Odoo offers a fully integrated solution to help businesses operate efficiently from one platform. The software is an open source, customizable platform that covers needs such as sales, project management, accounting, and inventory management. The Odoo platform’s intuitive database can meet the requirements of any business regardless of its size.
They interconnected the modules within the Odoo platform to provide an integrated system between all of its apps. With these modules, you can automate many processes that you would otherwise need manual inputs throughout several applications. The communication between Odoo’s apps is seamless across various business departments. This allows your teams to avoid problems such as having extra inventory in your warehouse or connecting accounting to your sales.
Odoo integrates with various third-party software, such as Authorize.net, PayPal, Joomla, and FedEx Ship Manager.
Odoo costs from $31/user/month for all their apps, as well as a 15-day free trial.
Reaction Commerce
API-first commerce stake for stores focusing on growth
They built Reaction Commerce to scale alongside ecommerce businesses and can process tens of thousands of orders each day. Reaction Commerce’s open source platform’s solutions fit your business, and you can host everything on your servers or in the cloud. The platform’s admin dashboard gives you all the data you need to keep all your inventory, product, and customer data updated. You can accept and refund payments, process store orders, and deliver items to customers.
Reaction Commerce’s API-first platform allows for maximum freedom and flexibility for ambitious brands and businesses. You can use Reaction Commerce to implement the services that fit your business and its future alongside your existing tech stack or by replacing it. The software is incredibly fast and promises a guaranteed 100% uptime.
Reaction Commerce can integrate into your current systems by using its API documentation.
Reaction Commerce provides customized pricing upon request.
Drupal Commerce
Open source ecommerce platform using the Drupal framework
Drupal Commerce helps small and medium ecommerce stores build websites and applications. The open source platform combines commerce, community, and content to create an engaging and positive experience for your customers. When using Drupal Commerce, it’s not necessary to change your website to align with the software. Instead, you can customize the platform according to your requirements.
Drupal Commerce is an open source platform that provides your store with a significant amount of capabilities and perks. Because they built the platform on the Drupal framework, it can accommodate the constantly changing demands of your website as you start to scale. It also provides easy-to-use administration system capabilities. This means you don’t need to rely on any IT personnel to make any changes or experiment with new concepts or ideas.
Drupal Commerce provides users with access to over 100 integrations, such as PayPal, Authorize.net, and Stripe. The platform also offers its own modules to users, or you can use the API to integrate Drupal Commerce into your existing systems.
Drupal Commerce is free to use for all users.
Broadleaf Commerce
Simplify the complexities of multichannel ecommerce management
Broadleaf Commerce is a fully customizable and extensible platform that provides tailored and highly scalable ecommerce systems. The open source development of the platform provides full flexibility on any on-premise or cloud server. The platform offers assisted online shopping, which allows you to guide customers to find the right products for them. You can identify items your customers prefer with the account management tool. When you combine these two features, you can provide an incredibly personalized shipping experience.
Broadleaf Commerce can help your business no matter whether you manage multiple sites, sub-sites, a stand-alone site, or a vendor marketplace. Through a single platform, you can manage multichannel capabilities. It’s an ideal choice for businesses running multiple franchises, brands, marketplace vendor models, or merchant storefronts.
Broadleaf Commerce integrates with third-party applications, such as Microsoft 365, Stripe, and Rackspace.
Broadleaf Commerce offers customized pricing upon request.
OpenFreeway
Enterprise-level selling methods for any sized business
OpenFreeway is great if your ecommerce store is selling products because the built-in SEO tools can help you attract more visitors from search engines and increase your sales. You can also use the platform to sell event tickets, subscriptions, and services. OpenFreeway’s modular architecture allows you to change and extend the platform’s functionality without significantly changing the main code.
OpenFreeway’s features provide you with the functionality that is typically found in enterprise ecommerce systems. These features include CRM functionality, such as order status and history, order tracking from accounts, and customizable order emails. The platform also allows users to fully manage orders, from processing orders through a complete point-of-sale system to auditing customer communication records.
OpenFreeway integrates with PayPal, 2Checkout, Authorize.net, and VirtualPay.
OpenFreeway offers customized pricing upon request.
The 10 Best Open Source Warehouse Management Systems Summary
| Tool | Free Option | Price | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Kartopia B2B, B2C, and marketplace platform with multichannel capabilities | Not available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
| 2 | OroCommerce Open source B2B ecommerce software and CRM platform | Free demo | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
| 3 | Spree Commerce Create, customize, and manage flexible and scalable online stores | Not available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
| 4 | Solidus Create unique and customizable ecommerce stores on a community-centered platform | Not available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
| 5 | Magento Open Source Build a unique online store from scratch with basic ecommerce capabilities | Free demo available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
| 6 | Odoo Interconnected business applications to replace multiple systems | 15-day free trial | From $31/user/month | Visit Website |
| 7 | Reaction Commerce API-first commerce stake for stores focusing on growth | Not available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
| 8 | Drupal Commerce Open source ecommerce platform using the Drupal framework | Not available | Free To Use | Visit Website |
| 9 | Broadleaf Commerce Simplify the complexities of multichannel ecommerce management | Not available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
| 10 | OpenFreeway Enterprise-level selling methods for any sized business | Not available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
Other Options
Here are a few more open source ecommerce tools that didn’t make the top list. Some can be used for warehouse management but others are just great open source tools to have in your e-sellers tech stack.
- Linnworks
Best for centralizing multiple sales channels and managing inventory
- OpenCart
Create professional online stores with a store management platform as soon as it’s installed
- Joomla
Free open source content management system that enables users to build websites and applications
- Pimcore
Enterprise open source platform for managing digital data and customer experience on any device
- nopCommerce
Powerful B2B and B2C ecommerce solutions based on Microsoft technologies
- Auro CRM
Open source CRM to help teams work together and provide a consistent customer experience throughout their entire lifecycle
- Odoo
Family of applications that give businesses the ability to track and automate everything
- Square Online
Accept and manage online and in-store orders from mobile devices and social media
- WooCommerce for WordPress
Customizable, open source WordPress ecommerce plugin
- ScandiPWA
Convenient and efficient software to make a Magento store into a Progressive Web App (PWA)
- Zen Cart
Add powerful ecommerce management to a website or blog
- VirtueMart
Free solution to create and manage a virtual store using the Joomla framework
- Ymple Ecommerce
Create unique mobile and web shopping experience
- Sylius
Open source ecommerce platform that evolves your tech stack and adjusts to your needs
- OsCommerce
Self-hosted, open source ecommerce solution to help create customizable and extendable online stores
What do you think about this list?
While it’s possible to manage your inventory on a simple spreadsheet, it’s more efficient to implement some software to help when you start receiving more orders. This is a valuable tool to help manage inventory and ship orders with minimum effort. Also, using an open source warehouse management system reduces the possibility of human errors.
This list of warehouse management systems can help your business enhance inventory visibility while reducing operating expenses. These platforms can help improve your business’s success fast. If you have any experience using any of the platforms on our list, feel free to talk about your experience below.
Other than this list of open source warehouse management systems, you can use other tools to manage your business effectively. You can read about these tools and more helpful information by subscribing to The Ecomm Manager newsletter.