Ekos alternatives for Australian breweries: three honest exits

The short answer

• Ekos — the brewery software at goekos.com — is quote-only. Three tiers, every one a request-pricing button, no public trial. Every dollar figure on this page comes from brewers themselves, not from Ekos.
• Exit one: Breww. Published pricing by annual production volume with an online calculator, AUD billing, unlimited users, a 30-day trial without a card, and Xero integration. The strongest direct alternative for most small breweries.
• Exit two: BrewMan. Now live in Australia with Australian servers, excise, GST and AUD features; US$90 per concurrent user a month; Xero confirmed.
• Exit three: split the layer. Production software and business software are different jobs. If what pinches is the price of the stock, wholesale-ordering and Xero layer — not the fermentation tracking — BSimple runs that layer from A$180–399/month (AUD, ex-GST), published on this page, alongside whatever production tool you keep.
• Said plainly: BSimple does not track fermentation, schedule brew days, or run a taproom. It is not an Ekos replacement; it is the inventory, ordering and Xero layer breweries still need around production.

The Ekos pricing story, as brewers documented it

We cannot tell you what Ekos costs today — nobody outside a sales call can, because no dollar amounts are published. What is public is the trail long-time customers left behind, and we report it as theirs, dated and verifiable, not as our claim:

• 2017: long-time customers were on around US$179 a month, per the ProBrewer forum.
• August 2021: a 56% rise to US$279 a month — the thread on r/TheBrewery was titled "Email from EKOS to smooth over a 56% price increase".
• July 2022: legacy customers were moved onto packaged volume-tier plans. Brewery owners on r/TheBrewery documented repricing from ~$200 to over $1,000/month; a long-time ProBrewer poster reported $179 a month becoming $8,700 a year — a 400% rise.
• 2026: the exits continue on the same grounds — small-brewery brewers posting that April describe being quoted above existing customers and report peers who left years ago over price.

Fairness cuts both ways. Next Glass (the owner of Untappd) acquired Ekos in October 2025, users report a two-year price freeze as part of the deal, and defenders regard the software itself highly — the documented pain is pricing and small-brewery fit, not whether it can run a brew day. Ekos has an Australian customer in Akasha Brewing, Sydney. Judge the current quote on its merits; just get it in writing first.

What Ekos does well

The honest alternative page starts with the fact that Ekos is good software for its purpose. It is genuinely full production management: brew-day scheduling, fermentation and batch tracking, lot tracing, batch cost accounting, excise and TTB-style reporting, a floorplan view and a mobile app. It integrates with Xero and QuickBooks, taps into POS and ecommerce (Square, Arryved, Shopify), and carries the market-leader position in craft beverage management.

None of that is what BSimple does. If your brewery needs fermentation tracking, production scheduling and excise reporting — and it needs them in one system — Ekos (or one of the two below) is the right category, and no amount of inventory software substitutes for it.

Breww and BrewMan: the direct alternatives

Breww is the transparent one. Pricing is published on a calculator by annual production volume in hectolitres, with AUD among its billing currencies, all features included and unlimited users. A 30-day trial needs no card, and the contract rolls monthly. Real users, not marketing, anchor the numbers: around $95 a month reported by a small brewery, and about $180 a month reported at roughly 2,000 bbl of annual production. Xero integration is confirmed, and its Trade Store customer-ordering platform is now free. Complaints on record are workflow-level — racking and tax corrections are awkward, navigation buries common pages — from an otherwise positive user community.

BrewMan is the local-compliance one. UK-made by Premier Systems and now launched in Australia with Australian servers and AU-specific features — excise duty calculation, WA liquor returns, GST, AUD. Pricing is US$90 per concurrent user a month with unlimited named profiles and no fixed-term contract; Xero integration is confirmed. The watch-outs are structural: concurrent-user pricing compounds as the team grows, paid training days signal a steeper implementation, and its community is small enough that public user experience is thin — we could not find a substantial complaint record either way.

Choosing between them: published volume pricing and an active community favour Breww; Australian excise tooling and local servers favour BrewMan. Both are production platforms in the Ekos mould.

Where BSimple fits — and where it does not

The brewery software market runs on two layers. The production layer — Ekos, Breww, BrewMan — handles brew days, fermentation, packaging and excise. The inventory, order and wholesale layer is what BSimple is: ingredient and finished-goods stock across the whole business, stocktakes with variance review, batch traceability with use-by dates, mass-balance reporting for ACO, NASAA and OFC certification, a wholesale customer ordering portal — each account gets a unique no-password link with its own pricing and history — and invoices pushed to Xero or MYOB with payment and void status syncing back. It runs in any phone browser, and pricing is published: A$180–399 a month ex-GST, three tiers, free trial, no credit card.

That published price is the point. Breweries leaving Ekos over quote-only pricing can move to another quote eventually, or they can know the number before the first call. Splitting the layer works because production software does not cover the whole business anyway: merchandise, packaging consumables, cleaning chemicals and taproom food never touch a brew sheet — Ekos users describe falling back to spreadsheets for exactly that. Those flows are BSimple's home ground, and they pair with whatever production tool you keep. The brewing industry page shows the grain-to-tap stock side; the coffee roasters page shows the same complementary pattern next to a production system.

Where BSimple does not fit, stated as plainly as we can: fermentation tracking, brew-day and batch production scheduling for beer, taproom POS, and excise returns. If you need those, take one of the production platforms above — that is the honest answer. How the Xero integration, the inventory management overview, order management and the stocktake workflow cover the layer we do.

Compare further

The production platforms named here live at goekos.com (Ekos), breww.com (Breww) and premiersystems.com (BrewMan) — check their published details before any quote call. For our side of the layer: the brewing industry page covers grain-to-tap stock, the coffee roasters page shows the same complementary pattern, and inventory management, order management, the Xero integration and stocktakes cover the record in depth. The free trial runs the layer on your own stock before anything is paid.