Print-It 26 vs Printavo: an honest comparison for commercial print shops
Printavo is a well-established shop management system with a large, loyal following, particularly in screen printing and apparel decoration. Print-It 26 is a newer cost-based MIS built for commercial print: sheetfed, wide format, and the mixed-substrate work that sits between them.
Both tools cover quoting, orders, and invoicing. They differ most in how a price is arrived at, how production is modelled, and how much of the shop floor lives inside the system. This guide lays out those differences plainly, including the places where Printavo is the better fit.
The short version
Choose Printavo if you run apparel or promotional work, price mostly from a matrix or a saved price list, and want a mature product with a long track record and a large user community.
Choose Print-It 26 if your margin depends on material yield — sheets, rolls, offcuts, nesting — and you need every quote to trace back to real substrate cost, real press time, and a real markup you set.
How pricing is calculated
This is the single biggest difference, and it is worth being precise about.
Printavo's strength is speed: pick a product, pick a quantity, and a price comes off a matrix you have configured in advance. For repeat apparel work, where a 250-piece two-colour tee is a known quantity, that is exactly the right model. Fewer inputs, faster quotes.
Print-It 26 starts from cost instead. A quote line names a substrate, a size, and a quantity; the system nests the piece onto the stock sheet or roll, works out how many sheets or linear feet the run actually consumes including waste, prices that against the FIFO cost of the stock you hold, adds work-center time at your hourly rates, and applies your markup. The price is an output of the job, not a lookup.
The trade-off is honest: cost-based pricing takes more setup. You have to enter substrates, costs, and work-center rates before your first quote means anything. In exchange, you can see the margin on every line, and you find out when a job is underwater before you run it, not at month end.
Feature comparison
| Area | Printavo | Print-It 26 |
|---|---|---|
| Primary market | Screen printing, embroidery, apparel decoration | Commercial print: sheetfed, wide format, signage, mixed substrate |
| Pricing model | Price matrix and saved price lists | Cost-based: substrate yield, FIFO stock cost, work-center rates, your markup |
| Material nesting | Not a core concept | Built in — sheet and roll nesting with waste shown per run |
| Inventory | Basic product and stock tracking | FIFO material ledger, stock forms, reorder points, purchase-order suggestions |
| Production tracking | Status-driven workflow board | Work centers, capacity scheduling, shop-floor kiosk mode, job actuals |
| Customer portal | Approvals and payment links | Passwordless portal: quotes, proofs with annotation, invoices, reordering |
| Proofing | File attachments and approval | High-resolution proof review with mark-up, versioning and audit trail |
| Quality | Not a core module | Job actuals versus estimate, spoilage and rework capture |
| Accounting | QuickBooks integration | QuickBooks Online one-way push of customers and invoices |
| Maturity | Long-established, large community, deep integration ecosystem | New product, smaller ecosystem, actively developed |
Where Printavo is the better choice
- You decorate apparel. Printavo's product catalogue, size-run handling, and mockup workflow are purpose-built for it, and Print-It 26 is not.
- You want a large peer community, an established integration marketplace, and years of published how-to material.
- Your pricing genuinely is a matrix and you do not want to model material cost at all. Forcing a cost-based system onto matrix pricing adds work without adding insight.
- You need a mobile-first sales workflow for reps quoting in the field on a phone. Print-It 26 is designed desktop- and tablet-first for the estimating desk.
Where Print-It 26 is the better choice
- Material is your largest cost line and yield decides your margin. Nesting and waste are first-class, not an afterthought.
- You need per-job truth: estimated versus actual material, time and cost, with the variance visible on the job.
- You run mixed substrates and stock forms — sheets, rolls, and items — and need square-foot and per-unit costing to coexist without confusing anyone.
- You want production, purchasing, and shipping in the same system as quoting, so a signed quote turns into scheduled work and a purchase order without re-keying.
- You care about who can see money. Roles separate cost and margin visibility from shop-floor access, so production staff see the work without seeing the numbers.
Switching cost, realistically
Any MIS migration takes a week of real effort, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling. The honest sequence for Print-It 26 is: import customers and vendors from CSV, enter your substrates with current costs, set your work-center rates, then quote one live job in both systems and compare the answer.
That last step matters more than a feature list. If the cost-based number lands close to the price you would have quoted anyway, your matrix is well-tuned and the gain is mostly visibility. If it lands well apart, you have just found where your margin has been going.
Neither tool is a universal answer. Printavo is a strong, proven system for decorated apparel. Print-It 26 is built for shops whose profitability turns on material yield and true job cost.
The fastest way to decide is to look at both with your own numbers. The Print-It 26 demo is a fully worked example shop you can open without signing up, and a 7-day trial lets you quote a real job end to end.