Katana, MRPeasy and Cin7: Which System Does Your Business Need?
Search for Katana MRP, MRPeasy, or Cin7 and you will find all three pitched as solutions to the same problem. They are not.
Each is built for a different job, and choosing on features alone is how manufacturers end up with a system that never quite fits their operation. If you have not yet worked through what MRP actually does, our plain-English guide to MRP systems covers that first. This guide assumes you know the basics and answers the question that matters: which category fits your business, and why that decision carries more weight than any single feature comparison.
Considering MRPeasy, Katana or Cin7? We implement them.
Why these three are not the same type of system
Manufacturing MRP vs inventory-first platforms
A true manufacturing MRP system starts from a bill of materials and a production schedule. It plans what to make, what components that requires, and when each one needs to arrive.
An inventory-first platform starts from stock. It tracks what you have, where it sits, and how it moves across sales channels. Both matter to a manufacturer, but they are not the same discipline, and a platform built for one does not automatically do the other well.
Picture a manufacturer assembling a finished product from twenty components across three suppliers. A production MRP system works out exactly when each component must arrive to hit the build schedule. An inventory-first platform tells you what stock you are holding, but it will not calculate that build schedule for you. Buy the wrong category and you either pay for planning depth you never use, or miss the planning depth you actually need.
At a glance
| Platform | Category | Best fit | Where it falls short |
|---|---|---|---|
|
MRPeasy |
Manufacturing MRP |
Structured production planning, multi-level bills of materials |
Lighter on multi-channel sales and inventory nuance |
|
Katana |
Manufacturing + inventory |
Moderate complexity, sales orders connected to the shop floor |
Less scheduling depth than MRPeasy for complex production |
|
Cin7 |
Inventory and order management |
Multi-channel selling, light manufacturing |
Not built for deep production scheduling |
MRPeasy: built for structured manufacturing production
MRPeasy is built for manufacturers who need detailed production scheduling and bill of materials management. It gives you Gantt-chart visibility over production runs, tracks work in progress at a granular level, and handles multi-level bills of materials without workarounds.
This depth suits manufacturers whose main challenge is production planning itself: coordinating multiple work centres, tracking component-level costs, and scheduling jobs against real capacity. If your production process is complex enough that a spreadsheet can no longer hold it, MRPeasy is built for exactly that complexity.
In practice, this usually means several stages of production and a bill of materials that goes more than one level deep. It also means needing true job costs as work progresses, not just after invoicing. MRPeasy connects to finance and sales platforms too, so production data does not sit isolated from the rest of the business.
Katana: manufacturing with strong inventory management
Katana also handles manufacturing, but its strength sits in real-time inventory and sales-order visibility alongside production. It gives growing manufacturers a live view of stock, work in progress, and production costs in one place, with sales orders connected directly to the shop floor.
This balance suits manufacturers of moderate production complexity who need inventory and sales visibility to be just as strong as production scheduling. Where MRPeasy leans toward production depth, Katana leans toward the connection between what you are making and what you are selling.
Manufacturers who sell direct to customers or through a small number of channels tend to land here. A sale needs to trigger production visibility immediately, rather than after a manual update. We often see this with manufacturers moving off a legacy on-premise system, where production and finance have never talked to each other in real time.
Cin7: inventory and multi-channel order management
Cin7 is not a production-planning MRP system. It is inventory and order management built for product-based businesses selling across multiple channels: retail, wholesale, and e-commerce, with light manufacturing as a secondary function. Cin7 Core suits small and growing businesses, while Cin7 Omni handles larger, more complex multi-channel operations.
If your business assembles or lightly manufactures products, but the harder problem is managing stock and orders across several channels, Cin7 solves a different problem than the other two. It solves that problem well.
Cin7 connects directly to platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce, and Amazon, alongside warehouse and fulfilment functions like pick-and-pack workflows and barcode scanning. For a business built around selling in several places at once, that combination matters more than deep production scheduling ever will.
Weighing up cloud MRP platforms?
Which type of system does your business need?
If production planning is your main challenge
If jobs stall because components were not ordered in time, or bills of materials live across scattered spreadsheets, the problem sits in production planning. The same is true if you cannot see true production cost until a job is finished. MRPeasy and Katana both address this directly.
The choice between the two usually comes down to a single question. How much scheduling depth do you need, weighed against how much you value real-time sales and inventory visibility?
If stock and sales channels are your main challenge
If your harder problem is keeping stock accurate across a warehouse, a retail channel, and an online store, that is an inventory problem, not a production scheduling one. Cin7 is built for exactly that. Push a production-first MRP system into that role and you usually end up paying for scheduling depth you do not need.
If you need both production planning and multi-channel sales
This happens, usually in businesses that manufacture and also sell direct through several channels. Take a manufacturer building custom furniture who sells finished pieces through a showroom, a wholesale trade account, and an online store. The production side is moderately complex: several work stages, but not dozens of components across multiple suppliers. The multi-channel stock problem, by contrast, is constant and unforgiving.
We have found the right call in cases like this is to let the primary problem drive the platform choice. Here that is the multi-channel inventory challenge, supported by simpler tools on the lighter production side, rather than forcing a full production-MRP system to also run the shopfront.
Decide which need is primary. Then make sure whatever you choose integrates cleanly with a second tool for the other one. Forcing one platform to do both jobs at native depth rarely works well, and it is a more common situation than the marketing for any single platform tends to admit.
Getting the category decision right before the platform decision
Most of the cost in a poor software choice is not the licence fee. It is the months spent configuring, training, and migrating data into a system that was never going to fit the problem. Get the category right, MRP-first, inventory-first, or a genuine hybrid need, and the platform choice becomes straightforward.
This is where an outside view earns its place. When we work through this decision with a manufacturer, the conversation rarely starts with a platform name.
It starts with the bill of materials, the sales channels, and where the current setup is breaking down. The platform recommendation follows from that, rather than the other way round. We are an implementation partner for all three platforms covered here, and the right recommendation depends on your business, not on which one we would rather sell.
If you are still weighing this up, independent software selection starts with your business, not a product demo. It gives you a clear recommendation across all three platforms and beyond.
Frequently asked questions
Not in the traditional sense. Cin7 is inventory and multi-channel order management, with light manufacturing support as a secondary function. If your core need is production scheduling and bill of materials management, MRPeasy or Katana are the closer fit.
Technically yes, but rarely the right answer. Running two platforms in parallel usually means duplicated data entry and two systems to reconcile, which recreates the exact problem you were trying to solve. Most manufacturers are better served by choosing the one category that matches their dominant problem.
Yes, though it is not a simple swap. Moving between platforms means migrating historical data, reconfiguring integrations, and retraining staff. Getting the category decision right the first time saves far more than treating the choice as easily reversible.
Not always, but it helps when the decision is not obvious from where you sit. An independent view that starts from your actual requirements, rather than a vendor's pitch, tends to save more in avoided rework than it costs.
Cost depends on the complexity of your bill of materials, how much historical data needs migrating, and how many integrations are required. We scope this properly during an initial conversation rather than quoting a figure before understanding your business in detail.
Simon Cohen
Written by Simon Cohen, Founder, Cohesis. Simon has over two decades of experience working with Australian SMEs and local government organisations on technology strategy, governance, and implementation.
