The category is four categories
The reason this decision feels confusing is that products which appear in the same Google search are not actually alternatives to each other. Sort them first and the shortlist gets short.
1. Accounting and billing
Tally, Marg, Vyapar, Busy. This is your books. If you are reading this you almost certainly already have one, and nothing below replaces it. Marg ERP is the real alternative if you want your distribution logic and your accounting in one on-premise system — it is dominant in pharma distribution for good reason. Published pricing is a one-time licence in the ₹8,000–25,000 range plus annual maintenance, which makes it a capital purchase rather than a subscription. That framing matters more than the number to most owners in this trade.
2. Mobile layers on top of Tally
Biz Analyst is the one your accountant has probably already heard of, around ₹3,300 per device per year. It puts ledgers, stock and outstandings on a phone and can create vouchers that sync back into Tally. SalesOn is in the same family, built around Tally for Indian distributors.
Be clear about what this category is: it makes Tally reachable from outside the office. That is a real and useful thing. It is not a system for running deliveries, staff or approvals, and it does not claim to be.
3. Field sales / SFA
SalesJump (from roughly ₹300 per user per month) and Delta Sales App sit here, alongside a long tail of similar products. Beat planning, rep tracking, order capture in the market, GPS attendance, expense claims. Delta in particular markets attendance and expenses prominently — if that is your main problem, it is a serious option and I would not pretend otherwise.
The thing to check is pricing shape. These are priced per user. At 20–30 staff, per-user pricing produces numbers that surprise people, so do the multiplication before the demo rather than after.
4. Brand-mandated DMS
Bizom, FieldAssist, Botree, Ivy Mobility. If you are using one of these it is almost certainly because a principal told you to, and you are a data source rather than the customer. Entry tiers assume user counts in the hundreds; contracts run for years. You are not choosing these and they are not choosing you. They are on this list only so you can cross them off.
Published prices, and why I'm not putting them in one big table. The figures above come from vendors' own public pages, checked in August 2026. They move, tiers change, and every one of these vendors will quote you something different from their list price once you are on a call. Treat them as order-of-magnitude anchors for sorting the shortlist, not as quotes. Ask for a written quote at your actual user count before comparing anything.
Sort by which problem is costing you money
This is the part most comparisons skip, and it is the whole decision.
- “My salesman doesn't know the party's outstanding when he's standing in the shop.” A Tally mobile layer. Cheapest real fix in this entire list.
- “I don't know where my reps are or whether they covered their beat.” An SFA product. This is exactly what they were built for.
- “My books and my billing are a mess.” Fix accounting first. Nothing downstream works on top of books you don't trust.
- “Deliveries get disputed and I can't prove what was delivered.” This is a delivery-execution problem, and it is genuinely poorly covered by the products above. It is also what we built for.
- “Attendance, expenses, approvals and payroll are eating my office's month.” Read the next section carefully, because the honest answer here is probably not a distribution product.
Where I'd tell you not to buy from us
Three cases, stated plainly, because you will find them out anyway and I would rather you found them out from me.
If staff administration is your only problem, buy an HR product. The HR and payroll category is mature, cheap, and in at least one case free — Kredily gives away attendance, leave and payroll for unlimited employees. PagarBook and SalaryBox were built specifically for Indian staff with shared or basic phones. greytHR and Zoho Payroll are strong at the next tier up. A distribution system that also does payroll is only worth paying for if you need the distribution half.
If you are under about ten people, don't buy anything yet. A well-built set of Google Sheets next to Tally is genuinely the right answer at that size, and I say that as someone who ran one for years. I wrote up exactly where and in what order sheets stop working — if you are not at stage four on that list, your money is better spent elsewhere.
If you need iPhones for your field staff, we are not ready. Our field app is Android-first. Several competitors ship both. That is a real gap and it is not closing this quarter.
Five questions that reveal more than any feature list
Ask all five of every vendor, us included. The answers separate products that have been through a real distribution operation from products that have been through a pitch deck.
- When a voucher is edited in Tally, what do you match on? The right answer is Tally's internal ID, not the voucher number. Here's why that specific question matters.
- Can one person mark attendance for others, and what does the system record about who marked it? Half your staff won't have a usable smartphone. More on that here.
- How long does onboarding take, in hours, and who does the data entry? Vague answers here are the single most reliable predictor of a stalled rollout.
- What are your support hours, in writing, and what is the escalation path when deliveries are blocked? Not “24/7”. Actual hours, actually honoured.
- If I leave in a year, what do I get and in what format? Your delivery history and your party data are yours. The answer should be immediate and specific.
What we actually are
Honest positioning, in one paragraph. Stemzo is a distribution operations system: deliveries and proof of delivery, transporter handover, attendance including staff without smartphones, expenses and approvals, payroll, and a two-way Tally sync. It is priced per organisation rather than per user, which matters at 20–30 staff. It runs my own FMCG distribution business in Siliguri every day — Red Bull, Cadbury, Wipro and others across North Bengal and Sikkim — which is the only real claim I have at this stage. We are pre-launch and have no long customer list to point at, and you should weigh that against everything above.
The part I believe is genuinely uncovered by the alternatives is delivery execution: the handover, the proof, and the dispute three weeks later. If that is not your expensive problem, one of the products above is a better buy than ours.
We're opening the system to five other businesses before we launch properly, at introductory pricing, with me doing the onboarding personally.
If you want to see it, book fifteen minutes. If you'd rather just describe your operation and be told which of the products above fits it, email customer@stemzo.ai — I'll answer that straight even when the answer isn't us, because a distributor who buys the wrong thing on my advice tells everyone in the market.