Inventory Planner vs Stockful: Which Shopify Inventory App Is Right for You?

If you are looking for a Shopify inventory app, you have probably come across both Inventory Planner by Sage and Stockful. They are both popular choices, but they solve different problems. Picking the right one depends on what you actually need.

Here is an honest comparison of both tools, including where each one is stronger and where the other is a better fit.

What each tool does

Inventory Planner by Sage is a demand forecasting and purchase order management tool. Its core job is to predict what you will sell in the future and help you create purchase orders to restock accordingly. It focuses on the planning and buying side of inventory management.

Stockful is a Shopify inventory analytics and purchasing tool. It gives you visibility into how your inventory is performing right now and how it has performed over time, and it runs the buying and counting that follows from that: purchase orders, stock adjustments, counts and transfers, all written back into Shopify.

There is real overlap between the two, but the emphasis differs. Some merchants use both. If you are choosing one to start with, understanding where each is strongest matters.

Demand forecasting and purchase orders

This is Inventory Planner’s core strength. It uses historical sales data to forecast future demand, calculates how much you need to order, and lets you create and send purchase orders directly from the app. If your primary pain point is knowing what to buy and when to buy it, Inventory Planner is built for that.

Stockful covers this ground too. It provides reorder recommendations based on sales velocity and current stock levels, then turns them into native purchase orders: suppliers with full price lists, a draft order per supplier, sending by PDF or email, and receiving with partial deliveries and landed cost. Receiving a purchase order writes the stock into Shopify at the destination location, so there is nothing to re-key afterwards.

Inventory Planner goes further on multi-channel buying. If you purchase for Shopify alongside Amazon or BigCommerce and want one forecasting and purchasing workflow across all of them, it has the edge here.

Inventory analytics and reporting

This is Stockful’s core strength. It captures daily inventory snapshots across every Shopify location and provides over 100 built-in reports: low stock, out of stock, overstocked, dead stock, ABC analysis, inventory valuation, reorder recommendations, location comparison, transfer suggestions, sell-through rate, and profit and COGS breakdowns among them. Anything the library does not already cover, you can build yourself.

Reports can be scheduled for automatic delivery via email or Slack on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. You can also view any report live in the app and export on demand.

Inventory Planner includes reporting as well, with over 200 metrics and detailed SKU-level profitability analysis. Its reports lean more toward purchasing intelligence (what should I buy?) rather than inventory health monitoring (how is my stock performing?).

If your primary need is understanding what is happening with your inventory, spotting dead stock, tracking sell-through rates by location, and getting scheduled reports delivered to your team, Stockful is purpose-built for this.

Data capture and integration

Stockful reads your Shopify data through the official API and webhooks and captures daily snapshots. Nothing is written back on its own. The writes are the ones you perform in the app: receiving a purchase order, a stock adjustment or count, and transfers you create, plus the metafields behind storefront stock display. Your products, orders and customers are never modified, which makes it safe to install alongside other tools.

Inventory Planner is more deeply integrated into your purchasing workflow. It syncs with Shopify and other platforms (Amazon, BigCommerce, QuickBooks), pulls in data from multiple sources, and can push purchase orders back into your system. This deeper integration is powerful but means there is more setup and more potential for sync issues if something goes wrong.

Multi-location support

Both tools support multiple Shopify locations.

Stockful tracks inventory at each location independently, provides side-by-side location comparisons, calculates per-location health scores, and generates transfer suggestions to balance stock across locations.

Inventory Planner supports multi-location stock planning and can factor location-level data into its forecasting and replenishment recommendations.

Historical data

Stockful captures daily inventory snapshots and retains up to two years of historical data. This is particularly valuable because Shopify’s native adjustment history only goes back 180 days. Having two years of daily data enables year-over-year comparison, seasonal trend analysis, and more accurate forecasting baselines.

Inventory Planner stores and analyses past sales data to feed its forecasting models. It can pull historical data from Shopify and factor in seasonality.

Pricing

Stockful publishes fixed pricing with every feature included on every plan, so plans differ only by how many SKUs and locations you track. There is a 14-day free trial to start.

Inventory Planner does not publish fixed pricing on its app store listing. Pricing is quote-based and adapts to business size. Based on reviews, annual costs can run into the thousands, and the tool is primarily positioned for merchants doing $1M+ in revenue. Some smaller merchants have reported being told their business was too small for the service.

Which one should you choose?

Choose Inventory Planner if: Your primary problem is knowing what to order and when. You want automated demand forecasting and purchase order creation within the same tool. You are a larger operation (typically $1M+ revenue) with complex purchasing needs and supplier relationships.

Choose Stockful if: Your primary problem is lack of visibility into how your inventory is performing, and you want the purchasing and counting that follows to live in the same place. You need reports that Shopify does not provide natively (dead stock, ABC analysis, sell-through rates, inventory trends). You want scheduled, automated reporting via email or Slack. You want fixed, published pricing you can read before you commit.

Choose both if: You buy across several sales channels and want Inventory Planner’s multi-channel purchasing alongside Stockful’s Shopify-level daily history, reporting and alerting.

The bottom line

Inventory Planner and Stockful overlap more than they once did. Inventory Planner is built around multi-channel planning and buying. Stockful is built around Shopify: the daily history, the reporting and the forecasting, plus the purchasing, counts and transfers that follow from them, written back into Shopify as you go.

The right choice depends on your biggest pain point today. If purchase orders across multiple channels are the bottleneck, Inventory Planner is built around that workflow. If you want visibility and forecasting - Stockful now fits five self-tuning models per SKU, learns each product’s seasonality from up to 2 years of history, and tracks its own accuracy - at a flat price, that is what Stockful is built for. See the full breakdown on our Inventory Planner alternative page, and if you are also weighing Prediko, we compare against it too: Prediko alternative.

Want to see what Stockful can do for your store? Get started free at [stockful.app](https://stockful.app) with a 14-day free trial.