I’ve actually used two of the tools on this page to run stock in my own pub, and looked hard at the public pricing and product pages of the rest. Most “best inventory software” roundups are written for a restaurant group evaluating a shortlist, by someone who’s never run a single tied pub’s stock themselves. This one is written from inside one.
The quick answer
| Tool | Built for | Price (published) | UK-specific | Hands-on in this review |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| StockTap | A single UK tied pub | £19/month (founding rate) | Yes | Built it |
| BevSpot | Multi-venue US bar/restaurant groups | Not published — sales quote | No | Yes — live trial |
| BarBrain | Multi-venue European hospitality groups | From EUR52/month | No | Yes — former account |
| StockLens AI | UK hospitality groups, single site to 20+ | £79–499/month | Yes | Public research only |
| Growyze | UK hospitality groups, multi-site focus | £79–139/month per venue | Yes | Public research only |
Why the existing “best inventory software” lists don’t answer this
Search for “BevSpot alternative” or “best pub stocktaking software UK” and what comes back is one of two things: a generic SaaS-directory list treating fifteen tools as interchangeable rows in a grid, or a genuinely well-written UK hospitality blog — Jelly’s and Growyze’s own content are the best examples I found — written for a restaurant group sizing up a shortlist. Neither is wrong, exactly. But neither has run a single tied pub’s stock themselves, and a tied pub’s stocktake has things a multi-site restaurant group’s doesn’t: a stocktaker’s report a pubco will actually accept, a tie that limits which suppliers you can even use, and a variance conversation that can turn into a chargeback rather than just a number on a dashboard.
StockTap
What it’s not: a multi-site tool. If you run several venues, look at Growyze or StockLens AI’s Growth tier instead.
I built this because I was already doing the job — splitting draught from packaged from spirits, reading variance by direction across periods rather than one bad report, logging the day something went wrong — on paper and in spreadsheets, and it took too long. It won’t fight a chargeback for you. It will give you the category-level numbers to fight one with.
BevSpot
The Pro tier’s published annual figure sitting below Standard’s looks like an inconsistency on BevSpot’s own page rather than a typo on ours — worth confirming directly with them if you’re pricing it seriously.
I ran a live BevSpot trial to write this. The trial itself is usage-capped rather than time-capped — it counts down “3 inventories, 5 orders, and 5 recipes left” rather than giving you a fixed number of days, which is a genuinely different model to StockTap’s 14-day trial and worth knowing before you start one. The counting workflow itself assigns every item to a storage area first, then counts storage-area by storage-area from a desktop-style screen with dropdown units and a manual +/− counter per line. It’s built to be thorough across a big multi-venue product catalogue, not to be fast on a phone behind a bar.
BarBrain
We ran a BarBrain account ourselves before building StockTap, and didn’t renew it. That’s not a knock on BarBrain as a product — it’s a genuinely capable multi-venue tool, built well for the European hospitality groups it targets. It’s that a single tied pub doesn’t need most of what a 90-to-unlimited-product, multi-user tier is built to solve, and paying in euros for a tool with no UK-specific angle on tied-tenant stocktaking added friction a UK licensee running one site doesn’t need to carry.
StockLens AI
This is the closest thing on this list to a direct UK competitor — phone-based scanning, AI invoice extraction, recipe variance, GP visibility across sites. Its Starter tier is genuinely aimed at a single independent venue, same as StockTap, at roughly four times StockTap’s founding-member price. Whether that gap is worth it depends on whether you need the AI invoice-extraction and multi-site headroom StockLens AI is built around, or just want the numbers a single tied pub’s stocktake actually needs.
Growyze
Growyze’s own published content is some of the best-written UK hospitality stock-management material out there — genuinely useful if you’re comparing tools from a restaurant-group perspective. The per-venue pricing model and multi-site admin features (stock transfers between locations, multi-site reporting) are built around exactly that: more than one site. For one tied pub, you’d be paying for headroom you’re not using.
Where this leaves a single tied pub
If you’re running one site, tied to one pubco, and the job is passing a stocktaker’s report and catching problems before they become a chargeback, most of what’s on this page is priced and built for a job one size up from yours. That’s the gap StockTap exists to fill. If you’re running three, ten or twenty sites, Growyze, StockLens AI’s higher tiers or BarBrain’s Growth/Enterprise plans are the more sensible starting point — they’re built for exactly that, and StockTap currently isn’t.