Free Restaurant Inventory Management Software (2026)

“Free” in software usually means one of three things: genuinely free, free until you hit a wall, or free trial with an invoice coming in 14 days. Most lists of free restaurant inventory management software blur these together. This one won’t.

Here’s every real option, sorted by what “free” actually means, with the trade-offs nobody else mentions.

The quick comparison

Tool	Actually Free?	Limits	Best For
Google Sheets template	Yes, forever	Manual everything	Restaurants spending under $15K/mo on food
KEXY	Yes, forever	None listed	Ordering + inventory + COGS
Yokitup	Yes, forever	Basic features	Recipe costing + data sheets
Square for Restaurants	Free software (2.6% processing fee)	Basic inventory only	Small restaurants already on Square
xtraCHEF (Toast)	Free with Toast POS	Requires Toast hardware + 2-year contract	Toast users only
Xenia	Free up to 5 users	Limited features on free plan	Small teams needing checklists
Sortly	Free plan	1 user, 100 items	Visual inventory tracking
Floreant POS	Yes, open source	Self-hosted, requires setup	Tech-savvy owners
MarketMan	No — starts at $199/mo	Often listed as “free” but isn’t	Ignore if budget-conscious

Start here: spreadsheet templates

Most independent restaurants don’t need software. They need a spreadsheet that’s organized better than the one they cobbled together at 11pm on a Sunday.

Free templates worth downloading:

• Supy’s template (Google Sheets / Excel) tracks COGS, stock variance, and ingredient-level counts. The best free option if you want something structured.
• Square’s restaurant inventory template has separate sheets for kitchen and bar. Includes COGS and variance calculations.
• Apicbase’s template (Excel) auto-calculates gross profit margin and cost variance from your stock counts.
• Smartsheet food inventory templates track purchase dates, use-by dates, and storage locations. They also have a food waste tracking template.

These all work. The limitation is the same for all of them: every number is manual. You type in prices, you type in counts, you do the math. When your tomato supplier raises prices, you update every recipe that uses tomatoes yourself. For a restaurant with 20-30 recipes and steady suppliers, that’s fine. For 80+ recipes with weekly price swings, it becomes a second job. When you outgrow the spreadsheet, DishCost Pro has a CSV import. Same format you’re already using. Upload it and your ingredients are in. (More on when spreadsheets stop making sense.)

Truly free software

These tools don’t charge a monthly fee. Some make money other ways (processing fees, upsells, paid add-ons). But the core inventory features are free.

KEXY

Built by restaurant workers who got tired of expensive, clunky tools. KEXY was $100/mo before COVID. They dropped the price to zero during the pandemic and kept it there. It handles inventory tracking, ordering, vendor communication, COGS, and multi-location management.

The pitch sounds too good: full-featured and free. KEXY is a smaller company, so support and updates depend on a lean team. But for a single-location restaurant that wants inventory + ordering without paying MarketMan prices, it’s worth trying.

Square for Restaurants

If you’re already on Square, you have basic inventory built in. The free plan covers menu management, order tracking, table management, and stock-level monitoring. Inventory updates as you sell.

“Free” here means free software. Square makes money on payment processing at 2.6% + $0.10 per transaction. On $10K in monthly card sales, that’s $260. On $40K, it’s over $1,000. And the inventory features on the free plan are basic: no recipe costing, no COGS calculations, no supplier management. It tracks quantities, not costs.

xtraCHEF (Toast)

Toast includes xtraCHEF with its POS packages. Invoice OCR, recipe costing, theoretical vs. actual food cost, and inventory variance tracking. If you’re already on Toast, turning on xtraCHEF costs nothing extra.

You need Toast. That means Toast hardware, a Toast subscription, and a 2-year POS commitment. If you’re not on Toast, xtraCHEF doesn’t exist as a standalone tool. As one restaurant owner put it on Reddit: “If you ever want to switch POS, you’re completely boned.” Your inventory data lives inside Toast’s ecosystem.

For more on xtraCHEF, see the full inventory software comparison.

Yokitup

French-origin tool that lets you create recipe data sheets, calculate cost prices per dish, and manage basic inventory. All free. Good for recipe costing and margin analysis. Less useful for physical inventory counts or purchase order management.

Xenia

Free for up to 5 users. Includes receiving verification, waste tracking, and stock count checklists. More of a kitchen operations tool than an inventory management system, but the free tier covers the basics for a small team.

Sortly

Visual inventory tracker with photo attachments and barcode scanning. Free plan is limited to 1 user and 100 items. That 100-item cap is tight. A typical restaurant kitchen has 150-300 ingredients. Sortly works for tracking equipment or supplies, less so for food inventory at any real scale.

Open source (free, self-hosted)

If you or someone on your team is comfortable installing software on a server, open source tools are free with no feature limits. You’re trading money for setup time and ongoing maintenance.

Floreant POS

Free, open-source POS with inventory tracking built in. Java-based, runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Handles orders, table management, split bills, and basic inventory. It’s been around for years and works fine for smaller operations.

The reality: you need someone technical to set it up and keep it running. No cloud sync, no mobile app, no automatic updates. If your router dies during a Friday dinner service, you’re on your own.

ERPNext (with URY module)

A full open-source ERP system: inventory, accounting, purchasing, POS. The URY module adds restaurant-specific features like table ordering.

This is massive overkill for a single restaurant. ERPNext makes sense for a restaurant group with a developer or IT person on staff. For a chef-owner, the setup alone could take weeks.

Grocy

Self-hosted household/kitchen management tool. Tracks ingredients, expiration dates, and supports barcode scanning. Docker-deployable. More suited to a home kitchen or very small cafe than a full restaurant, but it’s free and well-maintained.

The “free” tools that aren’t free

These get listed in every “free restaurant inventory software” article. They’re not free.

MarketMan often appears on “free software” lists because it once had a limited free tier. Current pricing starts at $199/mo per location with a $500 setup fee and 12-month contract. Not free.

MarginEdge costs $300+/mo per location plus a $250 setup fee. Some articles list it as “free” because of a demo period. That’s a free trial, not free software.

Restaurant365 is $400+/mo per location, annual contract. Enterprise software. If it shows up on a “free” list, close that tab.

TouchBistro is sometimes listed as having a “free version.” Their inventory features are paid add-ons to a paid POS subscription.

When free stops working

Free tools work until they don’t. Here’s when you’ve outgrown them:

Your spreadsheet takes more than 30 minutes per week. If you’re spending an hour updating ingredient prices across 60 recipes, that’s your time at whatever you value it. A $10-40/mo tool that auto-recalculates pays for itself.

Ingredient prices are changing faster than you can track. Egg prices doubled in 2023. Chicken breast went from $2.80/lb to $3.40/lb in six months. If your recipes still show last quarter’s prices, your food cost numbers are fiction.

You have more than one person touching inventory. Shared Google Sheets break when two people edit at once. Formulas get deleted. Rows get shifted. One bad paste and your COGS report is wrong for a month before you notice.

You’re making menu pricing decisions without real data. If you’re guessing which dishes are profitable, you’re probably guessing wrong on at least a few. Recipe costing software shows you the actual margins.

The honest recommendation

If you’re spending under $15K/mo on food and have fewer than 30 recipes, start with a spreadsheet template. It’s free, it works, and you can upgrade later.

If you’re on Toast, turn on xtraCHEF. It’s already included.

If you’re on Square, use the built-in inventory. It’s limited but it’s there.

If you want a standalone free tool with real features, try KEXY.

If you’ve outgrown free and need recipe costing without the $200-400/mo price tag of enterprise inventory software, that’s the gap DishCost fills. $39/mo, cancel anytime. Start free.

For a full comparison of paid inventory management tools with real pricing, see Best Restaurant Inventory Management Software (2026).