Inksoft vs. Printavo vs. Teesom vs. PriceIT vs YoPrint vs DecoNet and anyone I may have missed.

Which screen printing management software is the best for my company, and how to choose your business management software.

• Inksoft vs Printavo vs Teesom – Why am I writing this article?
• Setup & Training Costs
• Mistakes
• The Company
• How many users do they claim to have?
• How long have they been in business?
• Owner / Developer’s background
• Pricing
• Comparing Apples with Apples
• Hidden costs and upsells

Disclosure

First and foremost, I need to tell you that I’m the co-founder and co-developer of Teesom Business Management Software for Screen Printing, Embroidery, DTG and Embroidery Companies.

Even though I’m probably not the most objective person to write this article, I’m very much aware that there is an incredible need to address this topic and therefore I’m going to approach this with all the objectivity I can muster. At any time feel free to comment below if you think that I’m not being fair or if I got something wrong. I will gladly correct any mistakes.

Inksoft vs Printavo vs Teesom – Why am I writing this article?

So why am I writing this article? As any good CEO will do, I Googled my own company name, and alas, the first search result was an ad by my competitor, “Printavo VS Teesom” and why Printavo is the better option.

At first, I was flattered that Printavo considered Teesom important enough to bid against us, but I obviously knew this was not a fair statement. I clicked on the link and found it simply took me to Printavo’s Home Page, so now I’m even more bullish to challenge Printavo and say “Dude you are saying you’re the better choice, but nowhere are you backing it up?” Truth be told. Teesom was only a few months old and of course, it will be easy to find features that Printavo has that we do not. The opposite is also true. I can give you a list of reasons why Teesom is the better choice.

I then googled, “What is the best screen printing shop management software” and again no actual results. I also searched topics like Inksoft reviews, Printavo reviews and so on. This time I found an Inksoft vs Printavo link from InkSoft, taking you to a comparison page between them and Printavo.

Even though they did a better job than Printavo by actually having a landing page, they did not justify why they are better, other than they are the big guys and Printavo is for the smaller screen printing and embroidery shops. Just off the bat, I knew that was not true. It was all sales talk.

The point I’m making is there is not a single objective article, no real Inksoft vs Printavo reviews or for that matter there are no Software A vs Software B vs Software C articles, anywhere on the web, and this industry definitely needed one. So, I figured why not? I am going to put on my “I’m objective” hat and write this article.

Another reason that motivated me to write this article was that very early on while talking to a customer, I realized Teesom may not be the best fit for their company. Now, even though I really would love to have them as a customer, I just know that I’m going to dig a hole for myself and them and honestly I love to see other companies succeed so why waste their time if one of my competitor’s software would do a better job.

Besides, there are around 30 000+ companies in the US only, and more than enough customers for Teesom, Printavo, InkSoft, and the others to share. Nobody is going hungry here folks.

The fact is we can argue all day long which print shop management software is better, but that is incredibly subjective. It all depends on your business model. In many cases, Teesom would be the best fit but in many cases, it may not.

Your time is unbelievably valuable, and I feel taking up hours of your time, just to find out down the line that Teesom is not working for you, is not good for you or us.

It doesn’t take a lot of time to identify “Deal Breakers” and if we can help you to make the decision faster, why not?

Choosing the wrong Business Management Software can be a very costly exercise. Believe me, the setup and software costs that all of us charge is nothing compared to the cost of your lost time or production mistakes made because of your software.

In fact Teesom now has a FREE version and even so, it’s not FREE if you are going to invest hours of your time just to find out that it is not the right fit.

The importance of choosing your Business Management Software and the cost of choosing the wrong one is a lot more than just the price.

Time invested

Let’s say it takes only 2 hours to do the setup of the software (it can be a lot more, depending on your requirements)

Now add in an hour every day for the next 3 months to train yourself, and maybe one staff member to use the software properly.

That’s already 134 working hours invested in setting up, implementing, and learning a new program.

Training Staff / Staff Resistance and how it impacts their lives

Your staff might be very comfortable and not inclined to embrace a new system. This can lead to even longer learning and implimentation times.

But without further delay let’s get to

Inksoft vs Printavo vs Teesom

Setup & Training Costs

Setting up is an unavoidable part of any new software system and a lot of the time, it goes hand in hand with setup fees. These fees can accumulate to be more than a thousand dollars. This may seem insignificant compared to the indirect cost incurred, implementing the software, but it is still hard cash that you had to pay out, just to discover that the software is not the right fit for your business. Cash is king, and if you are a smaller company it will have a significant impact on your cash flow, especially if you have to bounce from one software package to the other to find the right fit.

Inksoft vs Printavo vs Teesom’s setup costs. Comparison at the time of writing this article (May 2021)

Printavo

InkSoft

If you only compare Inksoft vs Printavo on setup fees the big difference will be the fact that Inksoft’s upfront fee seems to be mandatory and it is labeled as a “License” fee. Where in the case of Printavo the onboarding is optional, and if you are able to do it yourself, then you don’t have to layout that money.

Teesom

Deconet

PriceIT

YoPrint

Mistakes

With new software come mistakes. The staff has to familiarize them with new work order layouts and in some cases, they don’t see a color change or understand that some prints won’t go on some of the garments. Regardless this could cost you anything from a few cheap shirts to several expensive jackets. Implementing ANY new system or process comes with risks.

You have to ask yourself how many times do you want to take risks like that?

The Company

Who are you dealing with?

20 years ago a friend of mine who was a lawyer gave me 2 tips when choosing who you want to work with. This applies to choosing a spouse, business partner, or supplier. It doesn’t matter what type of relationship you are going to engage in, these tips would probably apply.

1. There are rules, boundaries or terms. It doesn’t matter what you want to call it but they should be in writing. Whether it is legally binding as a contract or terms of service or even just a promise of good service, you want to see it in writing. It’s a form of commitment.
2. Follow your gut. This point kind of follows point one above, any contract is meaningless if you don’t feel comfortable with the person you are dealing with. You can have the best lawyer draft the most comprehensive contract to protect you, but in the end it can cost thousands of dollars in litigation and there will always, but always be some loophole that the other party can exploit to win or run up your legal costs. Even in marriage, no prenup can protect you enough from an evil person. So, if your gut feels you cannot trust the other party, then any of your agreements really becomes meaningless. I’ll conclude with a partial quote “If it walks like a duck…”

The one thing all businesses have in common is that they sell trust.

When choosing software, ask yourself;

• Is this a company I want to do business with?
• Do they nickel and dime or, are they transparent with their pricing?
• Do they make unrealistic promises?
• Do they make false claims, or use vague terms to describe a feature or policy?

These are things to look out for.

This is a huge investment, and in the SAAS (Software As A Service) business model, software companies change their terms of service and privacy statements all the time. You need to feel like you are dealing with a company that has integrity.

If they make changes to their Terms of Use or Privacy Policy, will they do what is right?

How many users they claim to have ?

This is a fun topic.

Customers is such a vague term. How many are paying customers, for those who don’t have a subscription-based module? How many are users vs companies? How do you know they are telling the truth? Do they deduct customers who left? I have seen several software companies, where the user count on their site has not changed in 4 years.

Too many users can also mean less support. 

I’m hesitant when companies brag about the number of users. It’s an easy way to create social validation without actual social validation.  Also, demographics play a huge role. Software like Impress only sells to bigger companies, so their user count will be much less. This doesn’t mean that it’s not good software. It just means they appeal to a different business model.

It’s not important how many users a company has. It’s important how many users they retain and how many new users they gain. I once saw a live session from Bill Gates in the early years when Wordperfect was still the dominant word processor around. He said, “I was told to no longer say Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software out there, so I will just say it is the fastest-growing software out there”.

New products will have fewer users but may gain in popularity very quickly. 

You may never know the truth, but at the very least ask these questions. Don’t underestimate the new kid on the block. I just have two words for you, “Myspace and Facebook”

How long have they been in Business?

There are a couple angles you can view this from.

Experience and understanding this industry

The longer a company has been in business the greater their advantage is (If they listened to their customers.) Customer feedback generates a wealth of data and information, from tech support to sales and wish list items, to understand the industry’s needs better.

New companies will have to go through all those hurdles to understand their customer’s needs.

On the flip side a large, old company may have fundamental problems with their initial database design which will now prevent them from changing direction in the design of their software. It’s hard and slow to turn a large ship in another direction.

Product Development

Developing great software takes time and discipline. I cannot speak for our competitors, but I can tell you how we think at Teesom and then you can ask our competitors how and why they approach development in a certain way.

Our experience has shown that the development time only gradually decreases, even when increasing the number of developers. It is extremely hard to coordinate and plan with many developers on a project. It makes you less agile, which means a small change can take a long time to implement, especially when you have too many spoons in your programming gumbo. Changing course when the facts suggest you should is much harder if you are a big company.

Number Of Developers

The more developers the higher the risk for a security breach. Most security breaches happens when a disgruntled ex employee knows the ins and outs of the code and how it works.

The more developers, the more bugs you will find. One developer’s mistake impacts all other areas that they’re not a part of and therefore they could not predict other possible bugs or the impact of their changes.

The downside of having a small development team is that it takes much longer to deliver a product, specifically new modules.

In my view it’s much easier to steer a smaller team, especially when it comes to something like business management software for complicated industries, and let’s face it this industry of ours is no picnic.

Owner / Developer’s background

Many of our competitors including ourselves boast that we have first-hand experience in this industry.

I myself had my own shop with an M&R Automatic press and managed around 40 employees. This is great and it gives us the ability to empathize with your needs because we have all been there. That being said, software like this should also make sense from a business management and accounting point of view.

My first job ever was selling accounting software, such as QuickBooks, to companies.

Those years it was called Brilliant Accounting and they sold out to another company who eventually sold out to Sage.

I also studied Financial Management and Accounting at The University Of Port Elizabeth (Now known as the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University), yup I’m South African.

This gives me not only the understanding of basic accounting principles, but while developing I’m fully aware of how every transaction, will impact your income statement a.k.a. profit and loss, as well as your balance sheet.

For example, Teesom has an inventory module.

To develop something like this you have to understand more than just adding and subtracting quantities. You need to understand concepts like average costing vs. latest cost, FIFO (First In First Out), and more. You have to understand what happens in the balance sheet if the value of an item changes and make provision for journal entries to accommodate that.

It is important that a new feature is designed with purpose and the future in mind. These are the fundamentals of designing good software.

Find out more about the people, behind the software’s, background. Ask every company you’re considering about that. It will give you a better perspective in which direction future development will go.

Pricing

Price vs Savings

First of all you should not see monthly subscription prices as a cost.

If you pay out money to us or any of our competitors and we don’t save you more money, than the subscription fee, then that should be a deal-breaker off the bat. If you spend $100 per month on software you want to save at least double that in time, mistakes, etc.

Calculating your savings will be different for your company than it is for another company. If the software merely saves you 3 hours a day creating purchase orders well then it is easy. Take the hourly wage; multiply it by the 3 and the number of working days in that month and you will know exactly how much you are saving.

If dropping the ball in production is costing you a lot of money then the calculation becomes more complex and the software you choose should directly address the area of concern so that you can save money.

In summation, if you are paying $50 per month for software but only save $100 per month because you still have to do all your purchasing manually, then you are better off paying $100 per month and saving $300 per month. That is a $200 saving vs a $50 savings.

Time is money. There is no way around it. We all have 24 hours in a day.
Inksoft vs Pintavo vs Teesom vs Other Software Pricing. Let’s compare!

Inksoft

Inksoft’s subscription plans start at $299 per month but it comes with a hefty “License Fee”. Not sure if the term “License Fee” was purposely chosen. But don’t confuse setup with license fees because legally they are very different.

Again, they also refer to their one time charge, as an activation fee, so be sure you ask what it is you are paying for? A great question to ask is, “what happens if you cancel?”. You paid for a license to use the software. Do you get that back? I’m speculating here and assumed a few paragraphs earlier. I do think the fee is probably for setup and training. But I digress, you need to ask! You can view their pricing here.

Printavo

Teesom

Teesom starts at $67 per month for a single user. Teesom only limits the number of users on their paid packages and all features are included. Teesom also has a FREE version that has transactional and support limitations. You can click here to see Teesom’s pricing or click here to compare Teesom’s free and paid versions.

YoPrint

YoPrint subscriptions start at $39 per month. There is a discount if you buy annually. You can see their pricing here.

Deconet

Deconet starts at $99 per month but again, just like Inksoft they have a “Licensing Fee” which doesn’t make much sense to me for a subscription based model. Still not sure how you separate a usage from a license to use fee. You can click here to see their pricing.

Comparing Apples with Apples

Different software packages have different features. If you compare Inksoft vs Printavo (vs Teesom) make sure you get the same value.

When we developed Teesom we decided that we are not going to do any feature limitations. ALL our features are included in ALL of our packages.

We only limit the number of users. That made sense to us. The more users the more resources we have to pay for to ensure that you have a fast and pleasant experience using Teesom.

But if you are a small company it is best to start off on the right foot from day one. It is much harder to implement systems when you are in over your head in production delays and problems.

It’s best to have these systems and procedures ironed out before you get into that situation. We don’t want to limit companies in any way.

Some things to consider.

When I did my research for this article I saw that YoPrint, like Teesom. has a comprehensive inventory module that seems to support multi warehousing. But I did not find any features or information on purchasing. That seemed odd because I cannot see how you could build an inventory management system without a purchasing module? This may be a good question to ask YoPrint. I’m sure they have one, but there is not a lot of information on their purchasing features.

Speaking of purchasing, many of our customers said that our competitors did not have, what they called, “flexible” purchasing capabilities. Questions you should ask here are;

• Can you create partial orders?
• Can you create orders for contract printers (Outsourcing)?
• Can you purchase part of the items from one vendor and the balance from another?

In summation, it is impossible for us to explore every feature of every company. Teesom has over 80 features alone. But every one of these software companies has a features page and we urge you to go there and do further research. If a feature description is vague, contact them and ask to explain how it works. Most importantly ask, what is the benefit to you.

Hidden Costs / Upsell

I once visited a good friend of mine in CA and he said to me, the one thing people hate the most, is being nickeled and dimed. And that is so true. Ask every company you are considering if there are any other costs. What happens if you exceed a certain amount of transactions are there any upsells and what will the cost be? Are they transparent about their pricing on their website, or do you find out about all the extra costs, after you invested several hours checking out their software?

That being said, I’ve not seen or heard of any, of our competitors being sneaky about their pricing. Even Printavo who is not very clear on their setup charges makes it known that there may be optional charges. It is big and bold at the top of their price list. You just need to ask what they are or do some hunting on their website.

One of my not negotiable policies, when we started Teesom, was pricing transparency. You can see everything on our site. There is no additional or hidden costs. We don’t charge for initial setup and training, we show clearly the number of hours included, and the cost for additional training, should it be required.

I don’t get why companies are afraid to show their pricing. It’s a great qualifier. You don’t waste people’s time.

Conclusion

When looking at Inksoft vs Printavo vs Teesom vs any of the other companies, we’ve only started with all the questions, that you need to ask.

There are many other things to consider and I’m not nearly done yet. This was no doubt a lot of information to process.

If you are serious about implementing print shop management software in your business, I highly recommend that you read part 2 of this article. This is an important decision and I personally would love to see you succeed, even if it’s with my competitor’s software.

Like I said, I’m not nearly done yet, but hope I that, what you have read so far was helpful. To read part 2 of this series, click here.

Here are links to all of the programs discussed in this article and some other companies we did not include in our research.

Want to visit the Inksoft vs Printavo vs Teesom companies? Simply click on the links below.

• https://www.inksoft.com/
• https://www.printavo.com/
• https://teesom.com/
• https://www.yoprint.com/
• https://www.deconetwork.com/
• https://priceitsoftware.com/
• https://fastmanager.com
• https://priceitsoftware.com/
• https://www.shopworx.com/
• https://www.impresserp.com/
• https://www.shopvox.com/
• https://www.theprintlife.com/