Order Book vs Cropster
Cropster is the roasting software most roasters know, and for good reason. It is built around the roast itself — profiles, quality, green, traceability. Order Book does none of that. The only place the two meet is order taking, and even there they are pointed at different things.
Published 16 September 2026
Pick Cropster if the problem you are solving is the roast: consistent profiles across machines and operators, cupping and QC records, green stock and contracts, landed cost, traceability an auditor will accept.
Pick Order Book if the problem you are solving is the wholesale desk: cafés ordering without a password, deliveries they confirm themselves, and knowing which account has gone quiet before it is gone.
Order Book does not roast
This is worth saying before anything else, because the two products are usually put side by side as if they competed. Order Book has no roast curves and no profile logging. It does not connect to a roaster. There is no green inventory, no contracts, no landed cost, no cupping or sensory scoring, no QC objectives, no batch traceability from lot to bag. If any of that is what you need, Cropster does it and Order Book cannot.
What Order Book calls a roast plan is not a roast log. It is arithmetic on confirmed orders: this much of that coffee for Thursday, split into batches by your batch size, printed as a run sheet and a picking list. It tells you what to roast. It has nothing to say about how.
Where the two actually overlap
The overlap is orders. Cropster's order and fulfilment side — sold as Commerce, and included in the Scale and Advanced packages — pulls orders in from a webstore such as Shopify, WooCommerce or Beans, or over the API, allocates roasted stock FIFO, and turns the demand into an automated production plan. It is very good at that, and it carries traceability right through to the bag.
It is aimed at the roaster's side of the transaction. Order Book is aimed at the café's side: how the order gets placed at all, by a manager counting bags on a Sunday night. That is a different job from scheduling the roast once the order exists, which is why a roastery can sensibly run both.
Side by side
| Area | Cropster | Order Book |
|---|---|---|
| Built around | The roast: profiling, quality, green, traceability | The wholesale desk: café accounts and reordering |
| Roast profiling and machine connection | Yes, the core of the product | No |
| Cupping, sensory and QC | Yes | No |
| Green inventory and contracts | Yes, contracts and landed cost | No |
| Traceability | Lot to bag, for audits | No |
| Production planning | Automated plans, FIFO allocation, non-coffee materials | Roast plan, run sheet and picking list from confirmed orders |
| How cafés order | Webstore orders aggregated in, or synced over the API | An account per café, no password, at its own prices with its usual order at the top |
| Delivery confirmation | Not described on their public pages | The café marks each order Received; a problem it reports is credited against the order |
| Drift detection | No | Core feature: rhythm per account, weekly call list |
| Orders from a text or email | No | Paste the message; it becomes a draft order |
| Price changes | Price lists in the catalog | Scheduled and announced per café before they take effect |
| Payments and invoices | See their site | No payment processing and no invoicing: you issue the invoice in your own software and attach it to the order, then mark it as paid |
| Cafés you supply, in their own shops | Cropster Cafe reads the espresso machines, from €39 per machine per month | Loan equipment register with a QR fault page |
| Pricing model | Monthly package plus volume: "volume charges begin after 250 kg are roasted" | Flat monthly on the number of clients; no per-kg and no per-order fee |
| Published prices | Starter free, Core from €95, Scale from €275, Advanced from €999 per month, before volume and add-ons | €49 (≤20 clients), €149 (≤100), €249 (unlimited) |
| Add-ons | API €100, Sample Management €199, Resource Planning €500, Green Contracts and Costs €500, Cafe €39 per machine | None — every feature is on every plan |
| Team seats | Unlimited users from the Core package | Whole team included on every plan |
| Trial | Starter package is free: 10 roasts a month at no cost | 30 days, no card |
Where Cropster is stronger
- Everything to do with roasting. Profiles, curves, machine connection, repeatability across operators and machines. This is what Cropster was built for, and it has had a long time and a lot of roasters pushing on it.
- Quality. Cupping records, sensory analysis, QC objectives, sample management as a module. Order Book has no opinion about how the coffee tastes.
- Green and cost. Contracts, landed cost, coffee and non-coffee inventory, resource planning. If you need to know the true cost of a kilo before it is roasted, that is Cropster's ground, not ours.
- Traceability and audits. Lot to bag, which matters for certification and for EUDR-style reporting. Our EUDR guide is a guide; Cropster is a system of record.
- Scale and integrations. Multiple machines, multiple sites, an API, a partner ecosystem, and a much larger company behind it with support, training and a community of roasters who already know the software.
Where Order Book is stronger
- An account per café, no password. The café signs in with the address you already hold and finds its own prices, with its usual order at the top of the sheet. Nothing to install, no password to reset, no account for a new barista to be shown how to use.
- Deliveries the café confirms. The café marks an order Received when it arrives, or reports what was wrong, and you decide the credit on that order — without a back-and-forth by email.
- Drift detection. Order Book learns each café's own rhythm and basket size and tells you who has broken it, in days, while there is still something to call about. How that works.
- Price changes announced per café. Schedule the new price sheet, and each café is told what changes and when, before the order that carries it. How to raise prices without losing accounts.
- Orders from a text or an email. The manager who sends "same as last week plus 2 kg of the decaf" at eleven at night does not have to change what they do; paste it in and it becomes a draft order.
- Pricing you can predict. Flat monthly plans on the number of cafés, every feature on every plan, your whole team included. A busy roasting month does not change the bill, and neither does adding a second person to the desk. What it costs.
The pricing models are shaped differently
Cropster's published packages start at free for the Starter package, then €95, €275 and €999 a month, and on top of the package it charges by volume: the pricing page states that "volume charges begin after 250 kg are roasted", with the cost per kilo falling as volume rises. Several modules are separate add-ons — €100 for the API, €199 for sample management, €500 each for resource planning and for green contracts and costs, and €39 per machine for Cropster Cafe. Annual payment takes 10% off.
Order Book is €49, €149 or €249 a month on the number of café accounts, with every feature on every plan and no per-kilo or per-order charge. Neither model is wrong. They bill for different things: Cropster's bill follows the kilos through your roaster, ours follows the number of accounts on your desk. Which one reads as fair usually depends on whether your roasting volume or your account count is the number that grows faster.
Can you use both?
Yes, and for a lot of roasteries that is the sensible answer. Cropster for the roast, the green, the quality records and the traceability. Order Book for the wholesale desk: the account each café orders from, the delivery confirmations, the drift list on a Monday morning, the price change that goes out in March. They barely overlap, so running both is not paying twice for the same thing.
Order Book exports confirmed orders as CSV, and has a public API, so the demand it collects can be handed to whatever plans your production. If the only thing you were ever going to use Cropster for was taking wholesale orders, one of the two is redundant. If you roast on profiles and care about what is in the cup, it is not Cropster.
Cropster details and prices are taken from public pages at cropster.com, read on 16 September 2026, and may have changed; prices are the published starting points before volume charges. Where their pages do not describe a feature, this page says so rather than guessing. If something here is out of date or unfair, write to [email protected] and it will be corrected.