This question usually arrives late. A business has outgrown spreadsheets, a bookkeeper has recommended one system, a competitor uses another, and there is a demo booked for Thursday.

Having built integrations on top of all three, the differences that matter in practice are narrower and more specific than the feature lists suggest.

Unleashed

The most predictable of the three for classic wholesale. Purchase, hold, sell, invoice through Xero. Batch tracking is solid, the API is stable, and support understands Australian operations.

Where it strains: assembled products sold as bundles across several channels, and anything where manufacturing steps have real sequencing.

Cin7

Strongest where sales channels multiply: a wholesale book, a Shopify store, a marketplace, and a third-party warehouse doing fulfilment. It carries more configuration weight, which is fine if someone owns it and costly if nobody does.

Katana

Built around making things rather than moving them. If your business is defined by work orders, material consumption and production scheduling, it fits the mental model far better than the other two.

If you are primarily a distributor, that same orientation becomes overhead.

The question nobody asks in the demo

Not what the system can do, but what it assumes. Each of these products encodes a view of how a business should operate. The cost of the wrong choice is not licence fees; it is the workarounds your team invents to keep working the way they actually work.

Before you sign, write down your three most awkward order types and ask the vendor to process them live. The awkward cases decide this, not the clean ones.

What the switch really costs

Licence cost is the smallest line. Data cleanup, historical stock reconciliation, retraining, and the two months where your team runs both systems in parallel are the real spend. Budget for those and the project stays calm.