Katana MRP vs Aleph Alpha

About

Katana MRP is a cloud-based manufacturing resource planning platform designed for small and medium-sized manufacturers, craft producers, and product companies that need real-time production scheduling, inventory management, and supply chain visibility without the complexity and cost of traditional ERP systems. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Tallinn, Estonia with US operations in New York, Katana has raised more than $35 million from investors including Atomico and Creandum. The company targets the large segment of manufacturing SMBs that have outgrown spreadsheets but find traditional MRP and ERP systems too complex, expensive, and slow to implement.\n\nKatana's platform provides a live master planner that gives manufacturers real-time visibility into production scheduling, material availability, and work order status. When new sales orders are entered — either manually or automatically through e-commerce integrations — Katana automatically calculates material requirements, identifies shortages, and suggests purchase orders to suppliers. The visual scheduling interface allows production managers to prioritize and reschedule work orders intuitively, with the system automatically updating material allocations and availability as changes are made.\n\nKatana integrates with Shopify, WooCommerce, Xero, QuickBooks, and other SMB business tools, positioning it as a manufacturing operations hub within a modern SMB tech stack. The company competes with Fishbowl Manufacturing, inFlow, MRPeasy, and the manufacturing modules of larger platforms like NetSuite. Katana's Shopify integration is particularly strong, making it the manufacturing operations platform of choice for many growing Shopify-native product brands.