Katana is manufacturing software you drive. Pallas is a whole back office that drives itself.
Katana is a genuinely good manufacturing tool with a clean interface, and for a shop whose entire problem is production scheduling it is a fair choice. The catch is the pricing shape: the advertised number is a base, and the configuration you actually need adds users and modules on top.
Pallas is broader and flatter — manufacturing plus purchasing, sales, invoicing and the actual books, at one price, run by an assistant. Here is the honest comparison, including where Katana wins and what we would say back.
Every other product on this page is software you operate. Pallas is software that operates itself when you ask it to. That is not a feature bolted on the side; it is how you use the thing.
It drafts the purchase orders for the items you buy, queues production runs for the items you make, shows you the list, and sends them when you confirm. No screens to find, no order in which things have to be done.
It highlights the real buttons on your real screens, one step at a time, instead of handing you a help article. And when something is not possible yet — a product with no recipe, a lot with no expiry — it tells you why up front and offers to fix it, rather than letting you find out at the point of failure.
It also reads. Hand it the spreadsheets you already keep and it maps the columns itself; hand it a PDF bank statement and it pulls out the transactions and matches them to your invoices. Nobody has to become the person who knows the system, because the system explains itself.
Base plans start around $179–$359 a month, but real-world setups commonly reach $747–$1,095 once you add users and the modules you need.
One flat price of $189 a month. Every module, every user. The number you see is the number you pay in month twelve.
Priced per user, so putting the floor staff on it costs more each time.
Unlimited users. Putting your whole team on it costs nothing extra, which is the only way shop-floor data stays accurate.
Accounting is elsewhere — you connect Xero or QuickBooks and reconcile between systems.
Double-entry accounting and bank reconciliation are built in, alongside the production that generated the costs.
A clean interface you still have to learn, with production concepts to absorb before it is useful.
You say “build the production run for 500 cases” and it checks components, tells you what is short and mints the lot. The concepts are still there; you just do not have to navigate them.
Answers come from documentation and support.
Answers come from the assistant, using your live data, on the screen you are standing on.
Data comes in through import templates.
Data comes in as whatever spreadsheet you already keep, mapped automatically, with questions only where genuinely ambiguous.
Strong production scheduling and shop-floor features — the core of the product.
Recipes, production runs, component consumption and traceable output lots, with pallet numbers tracked separately from lot numbers.
Purchasing and sales exist, but the centre of gravity is manufacturing.
Purchasing, sales, invoicing, receiving and the books carry the same weight as production, because most small makers are doing all of it themselves.
Financial reporting depends on the accounting system you connected.
The books are native: post an invoice, run production, receive a shipment, and the ledger reflects it without a sync.
Katana is deeper on production scheduling. Multi-level operations, shop-floor sequencing and capacity planning are more developed than what Pallas does today.
— If scheduling is your bottleneck, take Katana. Most small makers are not scheduling-constrained; they are drowning in everything around production — POs, invoices, counts, books — which is the part Pallas absorbs.
Katana has a polished, purpose-built manufacturing interface refined over years with a real design team.
— A better interface is still an interface you have to learn. The fastest screen is the one you never open because you asked for the outcome instead.
Katana has more integrations and a larger company behind it.
— And a bill that reflects it. At the configuration most shops end up with, Katana runs several times the price of Pallas every month, for the same year of work.
Katana has been proven across thousands of manufacturers. Pallas is new.
— Fair, and the reason the demo is public with no sign-up. Judge it in ten minutes on real data rather than on our word, then keep a full export of everything whenever you like.
People stay on software they have outgrown because moving looks worse than staying. Export whatever you have out of Katana — items, stock on hand, customers, suppliers, open orders — and send the files in whatever shape they come out. Pallas reads them, maps the columns itself, and asks only about what is genuinely ambiguous. Most businesses are running the same week.
The demo is a full working company with real data in it. No sign-up, no sales call, nothing to install. Ask the assistant what is low on stock and watch what it does.
Other comparisons: Pallas vs. Unleashed · Pallas vs. Cin7 · Pallas vs. Fishbowl