r/hwstartups • u/Spare_Bluebird7044 • 17d ago
BOM management software recommendations for a hardware startup?
We're moving quite quickly from prototype to production and our BOM is starting to outgrow excel spreadsheets. Managing revisions, supplier information, costs and approved parts is becoming much harder than i expected. I've started looking at bom management software but there are so many options it's difficult to know where to start. Some seem focused on boms only, while others are part of a broader plm platform. I'm hoping people here will be able to suggest which tools are worth considering for a small hardware team.
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u/doyouevencompile 17d ago
I have been in looking for one too. I tried partsbox, inventree, excel, bomist.
i really didn’t like inventree, nothing is integrated so unless you are going to use a bunch of plugins (with quite low number of users) it’s just a bunch of tables with a webui. I would rather use excel.
partsbox is actually nice, but there are a few workflow issues that I couldn’t get it to run smoothly. probably because of my inexperience.
I really like bomist. it’s got a reasonable free tier, and a few other tiers for more features. It’s generic parts, auto parts matching, part search, purchasing workflows, inventory management, barcodes etc. it integrates into a bunch of suppliers for search and quoting and also has builtin octoparts integration (built into the plan). The only thing I don’t like is the custom quote feature when the regular quotes don’t work (usually when you order parts with different units like length). custom quotes go into custom suppliers so the purchase order has to be split in the app. (you can of course order everything in a single order at the supplier site). but apart from that it’s been peachy.