Inventree review covering the open-source inventory and parts management system, its BOM and build tools, plugin system and alternatives.
InvenTree is a free, open-source inventory management system created in March 2017 by Australian electrical engineer Oliver Walters, originally to manage stock and bills of materials for his own electronics projects. It has since grown into a widely used community project on GitHub with dozens of contributors and a large, active user base.
Unlike a commercial vendor, InvenTree has no formal company or venture backing; it is maintained by Walters and a distributed group of volunteer contributors, sustained by community donations, with an ecosystem of third-party consultancies and hosting providers offering paid setup and managed-hosting on top of the free core software.
InvenTree is built on a Python/Django backend with a full REST API, supporting PostgreSQL, MySQL or SQLite databases and a React/TypeScript frontend. Core functionality includes structured part categorization, barcode and QR-code scanning, multi-warehouse stock tracking, and intelligent Bill of Materials management showing exactly which sub-parts are required to build a new item.
A build-order system consumes stock to produce finished parts with automatic or manual allocation, while purchase-order and sales-order management ties suppliers and customers into the same system. An extensible plugin architecture lets developers add custom logic, labels, reports and third-party part-data integrations such as DigiKey, Mouser and LCSC without modifying the core codebase.
InvenTree is released under the permissive MIT license, meaning the core software has no subscription fee or feature paywall: anyone can download, self-host and use it for unlimited parts, stock items, users and warehouses at zero licensing cost.
The only recurring cost is the organization's own server or cloud hosting bill. For teams without in-house DevOps resources, third-party consultancies and hosting providers offer paid deployment, customization and managed-hosting services on top of the free software.
Inventree is an open-source system for tracking parts, stock levels, bills of materials and manufacturing builds.
Yes, the core software is free and open source under the MIT license, with no seat fees or feature paywalls.
Yes, Inventree is designed to be self-hosted, though third-party providers offer paid managed-hosting options.
Yes, it includes intelligent BOM management and a build-order system that consumes stock to produce finished parts.
Yes, native Android and iOS apps support barcode scanning and stock-taking on the go.
Common alternatives include Fishbowl, Sortly, Odoo Inventory, PartKeepr and Zoho Inventory.