Katana is for product companies.
You run a job shop.
Katana is a cloud inventory and manufacturing tool built for small product companies. Apparel, cosmetics, food and beverage, furniture, electronics. Shops that make a thing, stock it, and sell it on shopify or amazon. For that world its genuinely good software, well designed, fast to set up.
Machine shops dont work that way. You dont stock a product, you make one offs or small runs from customer prints. You dont sell on shopify, you quote directly to whoever sent the rfq. Half of katanas features are about amazon sync, bom management, batch lot tracking, multi currency. None of that matters if youre making 50 pieces of an aluminum bracket for a guy down the road.
No credit card required.
Swarf vs Katana
Katanas a good tool. Just not for you.
Katana nailed the small manufacturer selling on shopify market. If you were cranking out leather wallets or boutique chocolate bars, id tell you go look at it. Its fast, its clean, its priced fairly for what it does.
Machine shops are a totally different business. You dont sell products. You sell machining time to whoever walks in with a print. Theres no inventory of finished goods, theres no shopify store, theres no sku catalog. Youre quoting a custom job, running it through your machines, shipping it, and moving on to the next one.
Swarf skips all the product company stuff and just does job tracking. No amazon sync, no bom, no batch tracking, no warehouse. Drag the job through columns, see whats running on every machine, attach the print to the card, put it on a tv on the wall, ship it. Unlimited users, $49/mo. If youre looking for a katana alternative for a machine shop, thats the whole thing.
Frequently asked questions
Free tools · No signup
Get your shop math right first
Before you pick job tracking software, make sure your rates and quotes are solid. These calculators run in your browser — no signup, no email, your numbers stay on your computer.
Machine Shop Hourly Rate Calculator
What should your shop actually charge per hour? Loads labor burden, machine depreciation, and overhead.
Job Shop Quoting Calculator
Price a new job from material, setup, cycle time, and margin. Shows setup payoff quantity.
Job Profit Calculator
See which past jobs actually made money once all the real costs are loaded.
One price. The whole shop.
Unlimited users. Unlimited jobs. Unlimited files. No per-seat surprises.
14 days free. No credit card required.
Built for shops that make things,
not shops that buy software.
Try it free for 14 days. No credit card required.
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