Sortly alternatives, without a renewing subscription

Sortly comes up in almost every search for inventory or asset tracking, and for good reason: it is well made, the mobile app is genuinely nice to use, and photographing things into a visual inventory is a much lower-friction way to start than a spreadsheet with forty columns.

This is not a page about why it is bad. It is a page about the shape of what it asks for, which is rarely the thing you compare when you are three tabs deep. I am not going to quote figures — they change, and a stale number about someone else's product is worse than no number.

What Sortly actually asks

Two things, and the second one is unusual.

A subscription, tiered by how many items you have. Standard enough. You start free with a small allowance, and as your inventory grows you move up.

And, at the same time, a limit on user licences. This is the part worth sitting with, because it is the only tool in this comparison that meters both axes at once. Adding items can push you up a tier. So can adding the person who needs to look at them. The warehouse supervisor, the second location, the volunteer who covers on Thursdays — each is a decision with a price attached, and the instinct to just give everyone access is the expensive one.

Read the asterisk on the pricing page

Sortly discloses this clearly and I want to be fair about that — it is not hidden. But it is easy to skim past: the headline monthly figures are introductory first-year rates. The discount that produces them applies to the first year of a new subscription, and a smaller one applies afterwards. So the number you budget from is not the number you renew at.

That matters more than it sounds, because inventory tools are sticky. You will have a year of data in it by the time the renewal arrives, and moving is work.

When Sortly is the right answer, plainly

There are things it does that a file on a disk cannot, and if you need them you should go and buy it rather than read the rest of this page:

• Quantities and stock levels. Sortly is as much about how many as which one — twelve cables, three left, reorder at two — with low-stock alerts. If your problem is running out of consumables, that is its problem, not mine.
• A real mobile app that works offline and syncs later. Walking an aisle with a phone, out of signal, and having it catch up afterwards.
• Several people using it at once, with roles and permissions.
• Alerts that reach you by email when you are not looking at the screen.
• Purchase orders and integrations — QuickBooks, an API, SSO higher up the tiers.

If two or more of those describe your week, buy Sortly. I would rather you found this page and went and bought the right tool than bought something from me that does not fit.

The difference nobody names in these comparisons

Sortly is an inventory tool. Most people searching for it want an asset tool, and the two overlap enough to be confusing.

Inventory is about stock: quantities of interchangeable things, going down as you use them and up as you order more. Assets are about custody: specific individual items, each with a serial number, and the question is not how many are left but who has that one, and when is it coming back.

If the question that made you search is “where did that laptop go” rather than “how many are left”, you are looking for an asset tracker, and quite a lot of what you would pay Sortly for is machinery you will never use.

Where the third option fits

Between a free tier that runs out and a subscription metered on two axes, there is a gap: the business or team with a few hundred specific items, one person who mostly manages them, nobody editing at the same moment, and no appetite for a recurring bill that grows when you add a colleague.

That gap is what this was built for. One Excel file with a dashboard on top:

• Check things out to real people, stamped with a name and a date, so a month later you can still answer who had it.
• A due-back date and an Overdue filter showing how many days late something is — so “who is late” is answerable, not just “who has it”.
• Printable barcode labels generated from your own list, and scanning to pull an item straight up.
• Depreciation and book value, and warranty dates colour-coded before they lapse.
• Unlimited items and unlimited people looking at it, because there is no server metering either.

What it asks of you, stated as plainly as the rest

It would be dishonest to list everyone else's trade-offs and not my own. So:

• One editor at a time. It is a file. Two people editing at once will lose work. This is the biggest limitation and it rules out some teams entirely.
• No quantities or low-stock alerts. It tracks individual items, not stock levels. If you need to know you are down to three, this is the wrong tool.
• No mobile app. It is a browser page. It works on a phone, but it is not an app built for an aisle.
• Nothing can be sent to you. Overdue and expiring items are colour-coded on screen, but no email or push exists, because sending one needs a server and there isn't one.
• No permissions, no SSO, no integrations, no purchase orders.
• Camera scanning only works on Android. Chrome and Edge on Windows do not support the barcode API, and neither does Safari on an iPhone or iPad. A USB scanner works everywhere and costs about $25.

In exchange: one payment, no renewal, no tier to outgrow, no per-user licence, and your records stay in an .xlsx on your own disk. Stop using the dashboard tomorrow and it is still just a spreadsheet you own.