AfterShip vs Katana

AfterShip is a post-purchase platform for ecommerce brands, started in Hong Kong around 2011 to 2012 by Teddy Chan, Andrew Chan and Dante Tsang after Teddy built a script to cut where-is-my-order emails in his own store. It raised a $66M Series B led by Tiger Global in 2021. Its core job is keeping shoppers informed after checkout and reducing support tickets about deliveries, returns and delays.

The suite is sold as separate products: Tracking (branded tracking pages, delivery notifications, estimated delivery dates and analytics across 1,300+ carriers), Returns (self-serve returns and exchanges), Shipping (label printing and rate comparison), Protection (shipping insurance), plus personalization and warranty tools. AI features and an MCP server give assistants read access to shipment and return data. Each product has its own tiers, and the Shopify App Store versions are priced differently from direct plans.

AfterShip fits Shopify, BigCommerce and WooCommerce brands that ship thousands of orders a year and want to turn tracking emails and pages into a marketing channel. Brands mainly needing cheap labels should look at Shippo, Easyship or ShipStation, and EU merchants often pick Sendcloud.

Buying tip: in mid-2026 AfterShip cut its direct Tracking plans from four to three, renamed Pro to Premium at $59 a month billed yearly, and moved to annual shipment quotas (6,000 a year on both paid tiers). API and webhooks start on Premium. On Shopify, compare the app's own plans, which include a free tier for 50 shipments a month.

Katana is a cloud manufacturing ERP built in Tallinn, Estonia, for small and mid-size manufacturers and brands that make their own products. It gives a real-time view of raw materials, work in progress and finished goods, and ties sales orders to production and purchasing so a business knows what it can make, what it needs to buy and when orders will ship.

Core modules cover inventory across multiple locations, multilevel bills of materials and recipes, production scheduling with a drag-and-drop priority list, purchasing with reorder points, batch and serial number tracking, and a shop floor app for operators. Native integrations with Shopify, WooCommerce, Amazon, QuickBooks Online and Xero sync sales orders and accounting, and an API and Zapier extend it further. A free plan covers up to 30 SKUs with unlimited users, while the custom-priced Advantage plan adds unlimited SKUs, custom integrations and a success manager on an annual contract.

Katana fits cosmetics, food and beverage, furniture, apparel and electronics makers that sell online or wholesale and have outgrown spreadsheets. Growing businesses may find the jump to custom pricing steep, and large manufacturers needing complex costing, quality management or multi-entity accounting will look at full ERPs. MRPeasy is a cheaper, more traditional alternative, Cin7 and inFlow focus on inventory for resellers, and Odoo offers manufacturing within a broader open-source ERP.