This article may contain affiliate links. We may earn a commission when you sign up through our links — at no extra cost to you. Our recommendations are based on independent evaluation and are not influenced by commissions.
TL;DR: Sortly is worth paying for if your team identifies stock by sight and works from phones — photo-led records, QR labels, and check-in/out that a non-technical crew picks up quickly. Budget for a paid tier from day one: the free plan stops at 100 items and one user, and the standard rates run $49, $149, and $299 a month. The two things to check before committing are how much of your existing catalog survives the CSV importer, and what your bill looks like in year two.
Where this Sortly review fits: This page decides whether Sortly belongs in your workflow. If your inventory process isn’t defined yet, start with the inventory management checklist. If Sortly looks right, the Sortly setup guide covers the actual build.
What we tested, and what we only read about
This is a documentation-based evaluation with one bounded hands-on component, and the difference matters when you’re reading operational claims.
What we ran ourselves: in July 2026 we opened a new Sortly account on the 14-day Advanced trial and imported a 20-row sample catalog through Quick Import, once, without editing the file. The observations in this review about that run — column mapping, rejected rows, and the resulting folder structure — come from that single test and are shown in screenshots below. Broader statements about Advanced Import and units of measure come from Sortly’s documentation and are cited separately.
What we did not run: we did not test field connectivity, offline sync behavior, or day-to-day scanning across a working crew, and we did not evaluate the free plan or the tiers above Advanced. Where this review describes those, it is describing what Sortly documents, not what we watched happen.
All prices and plan limits were checked against Sortly’s US pricing page in July 2026[1].
Where the photo-first approach pays off
Most small business inventory decisions are visual. A technician hunting for a replacement fitting recognizes it by shape, not by a twelve-digit code. Sortly builds around that: items carry photos and live in a folder tree, rather than sitting in a SKU table with an image field bolted on.
The item screen in our trial account allowed up to 8 photos per item, capped at 30 MB total, in JPG, PNG, or HEIC. That’s generous enough to shoot a fitting from several angles or document rental furniture condition before and after a hire — the use cases where a photo does work a SKU can’t. It also means a catalog of several thousand photo-heavy items carries real storage and sync weight, which is worth thinking about before you commit a large catalog to phones on mobile data.
QR labels turn a phone into the only scanner you need
Sortly generates QR labels you print and stick on physical items, and staff scan them with a phone camera to pull up photos, quantity, and movement history[2]. It also reads existing manufacturer barcodes, so you can migrate gradually instead of re-labeling everything on day one. In our trial import, manufacturer barcodes from the CSV attached to items as linked labels without any extra step.
Two tier notes before you plan around this. Creating your own QR labels starts on Advanced. Creating barcode labels requires Ultra. Scanning codes that already exist is a different thing from printing new ones, and the plans gate them separately.
Check-in/out answers the “who had it last” question
Sortly records check-ins, check-outs, and transfers between locations or people. For a service business, that converts a missing $400 tool from an absorbed loss into a traceable custody record. Low-stock thresholds sit on the item itself — our imported items carried a Min Level value and an alert control on the Advanced trial — so a clinic manager can be told when gloves drop below a fortnight’s supply.
The honest caveat is that all of this depends on staff scanning consistently. Skipped check-outs put your data out of step with your shelves, and no software feature fixes that.
What 12 months of Sortly actually costs
Sortly runs five plans. Standard monthly rates are Free ($0), Advanced ($49), Ultra ($149), Premium ($299), and Enterprise by quote. Yearly billing carries a 50% discount for a new customer’s first year only; from year two, yearly plans carry a 20% discount instead. The two discounts don’t stack — the $24 / $74 / $149 figures on the pricing page are the first-year promotional rate.
| Plan | Standard rate | Items | Users | What the tier adds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 100 | 1 | Photos, folders, in-app scanning |
| Advanced | $49/mo | 500 | 2 | QR code label creation |
| Ultra | $149/mo | 2,000 | 5 | Barcode labels, purchase orders |
| Premium | $299/mo | 5,000 | 8 | QuickBooks Online, custom role permissions |
| Enterprise | Custom quote | 10,000+ | 12+ | API and webhooks, dedicated CSM |
Three team profiles, year one and year two
Monthly sticker prices hide the number you actually budget against. Here is the annual line item for three representative teams, at July 2026 rates. Year 2+ figures apply the standing 20% yearly discount to the standard rate.
| Team | Plan | Paid monthly | Year 1, yearly | Year 2+, yearly |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Solo operator + 1 helper, ~300 items | Advanced | $588 | $288 | ~$470 |
| 5-person field crew, ~1,500 items | Ultra | $1,788 | $888 | ~$1,430 |
| 8-person ops team, ~4,000 items | Premium | $3,588 | $1,788 | ~$2,870 |
⚠ Budget against year two, not year one. The eight-person team above pays $1,788 in its first year and roughly $2,870 in its second — a 60% increase for the same product and the same headcount. That’s not a price rise; it’s the promotional discount ending, exactly as the pricing page footnote describes[3]. Treat the standard rate as your planning number from day one.
Seats can still change the budget, but the included user count is not a hard ceiling. Sortly documents an Add Seat option on paid plans, and states that adding more users than your plan includes is billed at extra cost[9]. The public pricing page doesn’t publish the add-on seat price, so a sixth user on a five-seat Ultra plan doesn’t automatically force a move to Premium. Check the in-account Add Seat price for your tier and weigh it against the roughly $1,430-to-$2,870 jump that upgrading would cost.
Where the free plan stops working
The free plan is an extended trial, not a destination. It caps at 100 unique items and one user, which can work for a solo operator or a proof of concept but fails when a second person needs access. It also includes one custom field and one month of activity history. Reorder thresholds are unaffected because Min Level is a native field. In the Quick Import flow we tested, SKU, folder path, and warranty date each mapped to a custom field; a free account’s single custom-field allowance could not preserve all three in the same mapping.
If you’re weighing this against staying in a spreadsheet a while longer, our guide on when a spreadsheet stops being enough covers the switching triggers directly.
The trial requires a card and converts automatically
Sortly’s 14-day trial runs on paid plans, requires a credit card up front, and becomes a paid subscription at the end unless you cancel first. A reminder email arrives three days before. Pilot on the tier you’d actually buy: Advanced or above is required to test QR label creation, while purchase orders require Ultra or above. Put the cancellation date in your calendar the day you start. The subscription begins on whichever billing interval you selected when creating the trial, so a Premium trial set to monthly billing converts to $299 a month.
Where Sortly stops keeping up
Getting your existing catalog in is the first real obstacle
This is the part we tested directly, and it produced the clearest limitation in this review. We uploaded a 20-row sample catalog — plumbing and electrical van stock, with SKUs, barcodes, tags, reorder levels, and three-level folder paths — and did not edit the file at any point.
Mapping went well in the Quick Import flow we used. All twelve columns matched, and SKU, folder path, and a warranty date were preserved as custom fields rather than discarded. The folder path stayed a text string on each item, so a hierarchy written as Van 1/Plumbing/Fittings did not become navigable folders in this run. Sortly separately documents an Advanced Import template that can create folders during the import[11], so this finding applies to Quick Import rather than to every Sortly import method.
The validation step then rejected five of the twenty rows. Three failed on unit values, including roll and set. Sortly requires custom units to exist in the account before an import will accept them[11], but its units documentation also lists Roll as a built-in standard unit with the abbreviation rl[12]. Because we did not retry the rejected rows with rl or with pre-created custom units, this test establishes only that the original values were rejected — not which correction each row needed. One row failed because the quantity cell read 12 ea instead of 12. One failed because the price was written as $1,249.00 with a currency symbol and a thousands separator. These are ordinary spreadsheet conventions worth normalizing before you upload.
Fifteen items landed. Folder count: zero. And the confirmation read “Your items have been imported successfully” — with no indication that a quarter of the file had been left behind. The validation screen did flag the five rows beforehand, so nothing was hidden; the gap is that the final confirmation doesn’t repeat it. On a 500-item migration, that same proportion is 125 missing items behind a green success message.
Two smaller findings from the same run: two rows carrying an identical item name and SKU in different locations were created as two separate items rather than merged, and a SKU with a leading zero (004512) kept it. Sortly does offer an AI-assisted correction step on the validation screen, which we did not use — our figures describe an unassisted import.
What to do with this: create your custom fields before uploading, match unit values to the exact abbreviations Sortly uses, and pre-create anything that is genuinely a custom unit. Strip currency formatting, keep quantity cells purely numeric, and reconcile the final row count yourself rather than relying on the success message alone. If preserving your folder hierarchy matters, test both Quick Import and the Advanced Import template on a copy of your catalog; Advanced Import supports folders but requires Sortly’s prescribed template, column order, and formatting. If your catalog still lives in a spreadsheet, our barcode scanner and Excel inventory guide covers structuring that data cleanly in the first place.
Reporting depth, and how far back your data goes
Sortly’s plan structure limits how far back you can analyze activity and transactions. Activity history is retained for one month on Free, one year on Advanced, three years on Ultra, and without limit on Premium and Enterprise; transaction reports follow the same ladder. A five-person crew on Ultra can look back three years, but a two-person business on Advanced loses visibility beyond twelve months, which rules out most year-over-year analysis.
If your accountant needs accounting-grade inventory valuation methods, aging analysis, or demand forecasting, Sortly isn’t designed to provide them. Its Inventory Summary can show current quantity and value, but the QuickBooks Online integration on Premium and Enterprise[4] sends invoices and purchase orders to QBO — a document handoff, not two-way inventory accounting.
The feature ladder puts common needs two tiers up
Several capabilities that read as standard sit well above the entry tier. Barcode label creation and purchase orders begin at Ultra ($149/month). QuickBooks Online and customizable role permissions begin at Premium ($299/month). API access and webhooks appear on Enterprise, by quote. Price the tier that contains your must-have feature, not the one that matches your item count.
Scale and multi-location limits
Sortly represents locations — warehouses, trucks, job sites — as folders and subfolders rather than as a separate location system, so how you get that hierarchy in place is a setup decision, not an afterthought. We did not test a large multi-site deployment, and the 5,000-item Premium ceiling and 10,000+ Enterprise threshold are plan boundaries, not usability thresholds we verified. If you run many sites or a central distribution model, load a representative multi-location slice during the trial and test search, transfers, permissions, and mobile navigation at realistic scale.
Getting your data back out
CSV and Excel exports include item details, custom fields, folder and location data, and public URLs for item images — but not the image files themselves. Sortly documents a Dropbox export when you need both the structured data and the original photos, and a PDF export when you want images embedded in a readable report[10]. Run the export paths you’d actually rely on during the trial, and keep a recurring export afterward: it doubles as a backup and as your exit route.
Who should choose Sortly, and who should look elsewhere
Sortly earns its place when visual identification and mobile access are the job, and the catalog is small enough that browsing still beats querying. Choose it if:
- You run a service business, rental operation, or single-site warehouse where picking accuracy depends on recognizing the item
- Your team works from phones and you’d rather not buy scanning hardware
- Your catalog sits between 100 and 5,000 items with straightforward categorization, and the matching tier’s annual cost is acceptable at the renewal rate
- Pushing invoices and purchase orders into QuickBooks Online is enough of a finance workflow, and Premium’s price is worth it to you
Look elsewhere if:
- You run multiple warehouses with transfer routing and bin-level tracking
- Finance needs inventory valuation, aging reports, or demand forecasting — Sortly’s reporting isn’t built for it, and on Advanced your history window is a single year
- You need API integration on a small-team budget, since the API is Enterprise-only
- You need manufacturing workflows, bills of materials, or production tracking
- Your data model needs relationships and custom views more than photos — in which case compare small business database software instead
If it looks like a fit, use the 14-day trial to test a representative slice of real inventory on the tier you’d actually buy. Check three things: whether staff scan consistently, whether imported totals reconcile with the source file, and whether the available reports answer your routine questions. If you continue past the trial, schedule a 30-day review before expanding the catalog or adding users. If you’re already waiting on reports Sortly doesn’t produce, move early — migrating inventory data twice costs far more than switching once. The Sortly setup guide covers the build itself.
Alternatives worth a look before you commit
One correction first, because it still circulates: Boxstorm, a free-tier favorite in older inventory roundups, has been retired and its functionality moved to Fishbowl Inventory[5]. Any current recommendation to sign up for it is out of date.
Three live alternatives sit next to Sortly for different reasons. Zoho Inventory[6] fits order-driven businesses on a budget — its free tier caps monthly orders rather than items, and it supports sales-channel integrations including Amazon, eBay, and Shopify. Odoo[7] makes sense if you expect to need manufacturing or multi-warehouse workflows within 12–18 months; its One App Free plan can cover Inventory on its own, but adding a second app moves the account onto a paid all-apps plan rather than charging per module. Sage Intacct[8] is overkill for most Sortly evaluators but belongs on the list when the finance department is driving selection — expect a sales process and five figures a year, not a signup button.
For a full side-by-side on free-plan limits and operating constraints across the category, see our inventory management tools comparison.
Sources and notes
- Sortly Pricing Page — tier prices, unique-item and user-license limits, custom-field and activity-history limits, 14-day trial terms including the credit-card requirement. Checked July 2026. ↩
- Sortly QR Code & Barcode Scanning — scanning and label-generation documentation. ↩
- Sortly Pricing Page, discount footnote — 50% discount applies to the first year of new subscriptions only; a 20% discount applies to yearly plans thereafter. Checked July 2026. ↩
- Sortly Help Center: QuickBooks Online Integration — plan eligibility and supported QBO workflows. ↩
- Boxstorm retirement notice — Boxstorm retired; functionality moved to Fishbowl Inventory. ↩
- Zoho Inventory Pricing — free plan limits and paid tiers, US pricing. Checked July 2026. ↩
- Odoo Pricing — One App Free plan and paid all-apps pricing, US. Checked July 2026. ↩
- Sage Intacct Pricing — module-based, quote-only model; dollar ranges are partner-published estimates (e.g. Cargas 2026 pricing guide), not Sage list prices. ↩
- Sortly Help Center: Manage Team — included user seats, the Add Seat option, and extra billing when users exceed the plan’s included seats. Checked July 2026. ↩
- Sortly Help Center: How to Export Your Inventory — CSV/Excel contents including custom fields and folder data, image URLs versus image files, PDF reports, and Dropbox exports. Checked July 2026. ↩
- Sortly Help Center: Bulk Importing New Items/Folders — Quick Import versus Advanced Import templates, folder creation during import, supported units of measure, and the requirement to create custom fields and custom units before importing. Checked July 2026. ↩ import methods · ↩ unit preparation
- Sortly Help Center: Managing Units of Measure — built-in standard units and their abbreviations, including Roll (
rl), plus custom-unit creation and plan availability. Checked July 2026. ↩
Last reviewed: July 2026 by the PickrTech editorial team. Hands-on observations come from a 14-day Advanced trial account in July 2026. Prices and plan details reflect vendors’ public US pricing pages at that date; SaaS packaging changes, so the linked sources above are the canonical reference.
