Spoolman alternative: Printyard vs Spoolman

Spoolman and Printyard both answer the question every long print starts with: is there enough on this roll. They answer it from opposite ends. Spoolman is a database your printer talks to. Printyard is a set of books you carry to the printer. Which one fits depends mostly on what firmware your machines run and whether you sell what they make.

What Spoolman is

Spoolman describes itself as a self-hosted web service that keeps a central database of filament types, manufacturers and individual spools. Connected to Klipper through Moonraker, or to OctoPrint, it updates spool weights automatically as the print progresses, and it handles updates from several printers at once.Spoolman README

It ships with a web client for searching and filtering the inventory, custom fields, a REST API, and a label designer that prints QR codes for each spool. It runs on SQLite, PostgreSQL, MySQL or CockroachDB, it also integrates with OctoEverywhere and Home Assistant, and it is open source under the MIT license.Spoolman README

You run it yourself. The project offers a Docker install on any system that runs Docker, and a standalone install that needs Linux; Docker is the method it recommends.Spoolman wiki

Where Spoolman is the better choice

• Your printers run Klipper or OctoPrint and you want the roll to come down with no taps at all. Spoolman does that, and Printyard does not: nothing here talks to a printer.
• You already keep a home server or a Raspberry Pi running and like owning the database. Spoolman costs nothing and the data never leaves your network.
• You only want inventory. If nobody pays you for what comes off the plate, a quote and a monthly profit figure are features you would never open.

Where it stops

Spoolman tracks plastic. It has no quote, no customer, no order and no month, so the grams it counts never turn into a price or a margin. The automatic part also depends on the printer reporting to it, so a printer that talks to neither Moonraker nor OctoPrint gets a manual inventory with a server to maintain.

Not everyone wants the bookkeeping either. One maker who tried it wrote: “Didn’t love Spoolman. Felt like too many steps to add and track filament and I don’t weigh my failament or care to track it on that level.”r/3Dprinting

What Printyard does instead

Every roll is a record with its maker, material, colour, location and the grams left on it. Logging a print takes the model and the purge off the roll it ran on, in three taps, and a failed print is logged the same way because the plastic is gone either way. A roll under its reorder point turns red and joins a reorder list.

The roll opens from a QR sticker or an NFC tag written from the app, and Prusa’s OpenPrintTag rolls are read as they come. The phone works with no signal and syncs when it is back in range, and the same shop opens in a browser on the desk. There is no Docker and no server to keep up.

The part Spoolman does not have is money. The same grams price the quote, with electricity, machine wear, labour, the failure reserve and the marketplace’s cut as their own lines, and the order and the month are built from those quotes. To see the material side of that on its own, the filament cost calculator turns a spool price and a gram count into a per-print cost.

Where Printyard falls short

• Nothing is deducted automatically. The roll comes down when you log the print, not while the printer runs.
• Bambu Lab’s own spool tags cannot be read. They are MIFARE Classic, which no iPhone supports, and the app says so instead of failing.
• No push notification when a roll runs low. The warning is the red row.
• It is iPhone and web only. There is no Android app.
• There is no free tier. On the web it is $9.99 a month, $69.99 a year or $149.99 once, as shown in US dollars before checkout converts them.Printyard pricing

Side by side

Which to pick

If your machines run Klipper and you print for yourself, run Spoolman. If you sell what you print, your printers do not report to anything, or the books need to be on the phone in your hand at the machine, Printyard is built for that. Some shops run both: Spoolman for the automatic count on the Klipper rig, Printyard for the price and the month.

More on keeping a shelf honest is in how to track filament inventory, and the other tools in this space are in the phone cost calculators compared.