Sortly review (2026): pricing, features and who it fits

How your parts list sets the price

A unique item is one part number, one SKU or one piece of gear. The quantity you hold does not count. Forty of the same fitting is still one item, not forty. That sounds generous until you look at a real trade list.

An HVAC or plumbing van carries a lot of distinct parts. Capacitors, contactors, filters by size, fittings, valves, a few sizes of pipe, refrigerant, sealants, hand tools. Count them as separate lines and a stocked shop passes 100 fast. So the Free plan, at 100 items and 1 user, suits a solo owner with a short list or a shop kicking the tires. Most trade shops land on Advanced (500 items, 2 users) or Ultra (2,000 items, 5 users).

Owners describe that same split. One operations manager keeps a free account for home and pays for the work one, because the job needs room for more items. That is the line the pricing draws. Free is fine for a short list, and you pay the moment the list grows.

Two other ceilings sit alongside the item count. Seats are capped at 1, 2, 5 and 8 across the four plans. Jobs, which Sortly uses to group stock for a project, are capped at 2, 5, 10 and 15. For most shops the item count is the first wall you hit, because parts pile up faster than crew or open jobs. If your list runs past 2,000 SKUs, you are into Premium at $299 a month whether or not you need eight logins.

Scanning is the draw, and owners agree

The feature that earns Sortly its keep is on every plan, free one included. Barcode and QR code scanning through the phone camera. No handheld scanner to buy, no extra hardware. A tech points the camera and the item comes up. Sortly holds a 4.6 out of 5 ease-of-use score on Capterra, and owner accounts back that up. One project coordinator credited the app and the web version with helping restructure a whole equipment warehouse.

Stock lives in folders and locations, so you can hold inventory per truck, per van and per job, each item with a photo. That photo helps in the field, where a part is easier to spot by picture than by a number. Offline access is on every plan too. A tech in a basement or a rural crawlspace can still look up and adjust stock, and it syncs once the signal returns.

There is a limit inside the scanning worth knowing before you count on it. Scanning a barcode pulls up the item, but it does not change the quantity on its own. You still type in how many you took or added. One project coordinator wanted exactly that fixed, so she could scan a barcode and have the app update the count. For a shop hoping to scan parts in and out fast, that is a manual step the scan does not remove.

Labels are where scanning gates upward. Making your own QR code labels starts on Advanced. Printing barcode labels and plugging in a third-party scanner start on Ultra. If part of your plan is to relabel a whole warehouse, that pushes you to the $149 tier.

The pricing pain owners name

The owner accounts turn sharp on one topic. The loudest complaint is not about features. It is about the bill jumping at renewal. One IT director wrote that his group had to drop from Enterprise to Premium after a price hike of over 77%, which he called untenable. A second reviewer reported a 300% increase with, as they told it, only 30 days notice.

We cannot audit either renewal, and both come from a review page the vendor solicits. But two separate owners naming steep, sudden jumps is a pattern worth pricing in. The published rates are one thing. What the number does at year two is the risk.

This ties back to the caps. Because every tier is boxed in by item count, growth forces an upgrade, and an upgrade is where a jump can land. A shop that fills Advanced and steps up to Ultra goes from $49 to $149 a month, three times the cost, just to hold more parts. Add a renewal increase on top and the yearly bill can climb well past what the grid first suggested.

So treat the entry price as a floor, not a ceiling. If your list is near a cap today, the tier above it is where you are headed. The vendor has shown it will move the price once you get there.

What it skips, and the rough edges

Sortly tracks inventory and nothing else. It will not schedule a job, dispatch a tech, write an invoice or hold a customer record. If you want one tool to run the whole day, this is not it. Pairing it with a field-service tool means two systems and one more bill. QuickBooks Online sync is the only accounting link, and it does not arrive until Premium at $299 a month, so a shop on Advanced is exporting by hand.

The app itself is not flawless in the field. One facilities tech who liked seeing his own stock and the stock on nearby trucks also noted it can lag or show the wrong inventory now and then. That is a non-incentivized account, so we weight it. A count that is stale for a few minutes is a small thing in a warehouse and a bigger thing on a truck at the supply house.

Support is thin on paper. The documented routes are a help center and email tickets. A named success manager comes only with Enterprise. There is no phone line published on the pricing page. Records also fade on the lower plans. Activity history is kept one month on Free and one year on Advanced, so a shop that wants a long audit trail needs Ultra or above.

Who should buy it, and who should not

For a van-based crew, Sortly does one job well. It tells you what you have, where it is, and when to reorder, and it does it with a phone camera instead of a clipboard. Owners praise the ease of setup and the photo tracking, and the day-to-day accounts are consistent on that. Start on Free to see whether scanning fits how your crew works. Then size the paid plan by your item count, not by the feature list.

Buy it if your parts list is countable, you want stock split across trucks and jobs, and a reorder nudge would save you a mid-job supply run. Advanced at $49 covers a small shop with alerts and check parts in and out. Ultra at $149 adds purchase orders, pick lists and stock counts for a shop that buys and counts in volume.

Skip it if your list runs into the thousands of SKUs but you only need two logins, because you pay Premium prices for the item count alone. Skip it if what you want is scheduling and billing. And go in with open eyes on price. Two owners reported renewal hikes, so put the tier above yours, and a possible increase, into your budget before you sign.

One note on the evidence. These owner accounts are from Capterra, which the vendor solicits, and Sortly ran a review push in 2025, so the page skews positive. We weighted the praise lightly and the specific complaints more heavily. Take the ease-of-use praise as real but rosy, and treat the price-hike and lag reports as the floor of the problem, not the whole of it.

What owners actually say