Inventory Planner alternative for Shopify brands that watch their cash

The honest version first: Inventory Planner, now owned by Sage, is the heavyweight of this category. SKU-level demand forecasting, automated replenishment, purchase orders, multi-location support, unlimited users. If you're a larger operation with an ops team and complex warehousing, it's a serious tool and this page won't talk you out of it.

Two things about it are worth knowing before you book the sales call, and one thing it structurally can't do.

The two frictions

• You can't see the price. Pricing is volume-based on inventory managed and only available through sales. Their own site's framing is "pricing that always fits your business", which means the price fits what you look like you can pay.
• It's a project, not a signup. Sage's own numbers: four-week average implementation, live in five to six weeks. That's fine for an enterprise rollout. It's a long time for a founder who needed the answer for this month's reorder.

The structural gap: it can't see your bank

Inventory Planner computes the ideal order: what to buy, how much, when, per SKU, per location. What it never asks is whether you can pay for it. There is no cash model anywhere in the product.

Every brand operator knows the moment this bites: the tool says reorder 2,000 units, the supplier wants 30% down, and the VAT quarter lands the same fortnight. The recommendation was mathematically right and practically unaffordable, and the tool had no way of knowing.

Inventory Planner vs Cushion

Who should pick which

Pick Inventory Planner if you're big enough to have someone whose whole job is replenishment, you need deep multi-location automation, and cash isn't the constraint on your ordering.

Look at Cushion if you're the founder placing the orders yourself and the real question was never "what's the optimal order", it was "can I afford the order, and when". Cushion answers that with your cashflow, your stock and your sales forecast on one screen.