A Hosted Craftplan Alternative for Sourdough Bakers

Craftplan is a genuinely good open-source ERP for artisanal micro-businesses — recipes, inventory, allergen tracking, the works. But it's self-hosted and general-purpose. If you want bake-day planning that just works in a browser, built around sourdough fermentation, with no server to deploy, here's an honest comparison.

The short version: Craftplan is open-source production-management software for artisanal direct-to-consumer makers — a developer built it for his wife's micro-bakery, and it deservedly took off (1,000+ GitHub stars and a front-page Hacker News launch). It's powerful and free. The catch for most bakers is twofold: it's self-hosted (you deploy and maintain the server yourself), and it's general-purpose (it doesn't know what a levain is). DoughPlan makes the opposite trade: it's a hosted web app you open in a browser with zero setup, and it's sourdough-native — built around the time-reversed bake schedule and baker's-percentage scaling. If Craftplan's idea appeals but running a server doesn't, this page is for you.

What Craftplan is genuinely good at

Let's be clear up front: Craftplan is a well-made, generous piece of work, and if you're technical it may be all you need. It models the real workflow of a small-batch maker far better than a generic spreadsheet:

• Recipes & BOMs. Versioned recipes with bills of materials and cost roll-ups, including semi-products (an ingredient you make in-house and use in finished goods).
• Inventory & traceability. Stock tracking with lot traceability and allergen tracking — genuinely useful for food safety and recalls.
• Forecasting & purchasing. Demand forecasting and a reorder/purchasing flow so you buy the right raw materials.
• Orders & batch planning. Orders and production batch planning to organize what you make.
• Open-source & free. AGPL-licensed, so you can read the code, self-host it, own your data, and change it. No subscription.

For a maker who wants a full, free, general manufacturing ERP and is comfortable running it, Craftplan is a great choice — and on raw inventory and BOM depth it goes further than DoughPlan deliberately does. This isn't a "Craftplan is bad" page. It's aimed at a different baker asking a different question.

Where it leaves a non-technical sourdough baker stuck

Two walls tend to come up.

1. You have to run it. Craftplan is self-hosted software, not a service you sign up for. To use it for your real bakery you deploy an Elixir/Phoenix application and a PostgreSQL database, then keep them updated, secured, and backed up. If you're a developer, that's a Saturday. If you're a baker whose tech stack is a phone and a notebook, that's a non-starter — and there's no official hosted version to fall back on.

2. It doesn't speak sourdough. Craftplan is a general artisanal ERP — it thinks in BOMs and inventory, not fermentation. The question a bread baker actually wrestles with on a Friday night isn't "what's my lot-traced flour inventory?" — it's "if these loaves need to be cool and bagged by the 9 a.m. market, when do I feed the levain, and how much flour do I buy?" That's a time-reversed, fermentation-aware schedule, and a general manufacturing tool doesn't generate it. There's no levain-feeding timeline, no bulk/proof staging counted backward from pickup, and no baker's-percentage scaling — the things that make a sourdough plan a sourdough plan.

DoughPlan vs Craftplan, side by side

What DoughPlan does (and deliberately doesn't)

DoughPlan turns a week of orders into a bake you can actually execute — without you touching a server:

• A time-reversed bake schedule counted backward from each pickup, so you know exactly when to build the levain, mix, shape, proof, and bake.
• Recipes scaled in baker's percentages to the exact quantities you're baking — no re-typing the math each week.
• One aggregated shopping list across every order, so you buy the right amount of flour once.
• Cottage-food labels and a per-order packing list for market day.

And to be straight about it: DoughPlan is not a full ERP. It doesn't do deep inventory with lot traceability, demand forecasting, or general bill-of-materials manufacturing the way Craftplan does — and it's a hosted service, so you don't own the code or self-host your data. If full inventory control and open-source ownership are what you're after and you can run a server, Craftplan is the better-shaped tool. What DoughPlan replaces is the spreadsheet, the paper schedule taped to the fridge, and the weekly fermentation arithmetic — with nothing to install and a price a micro bakery can carry: a free tier, then $9–$39/mo.

Here's what the planning half looks like. Give DoughPlan one line — 60 country loaves, pickup 8:00 AM Saturday — and it works backward to a schedule you can tape to the wall, with the week's shopping totals already added up:

You can even use both

If you're technical and you love Craftplan for inventory and traceability, there's nothing stopping you from running it for the stock side and using DoughPlan for the bake-day plan — they don't overlap much. Craftplan covers materials and manufacturing depth; DoughPlan covers the fermentation timeline and the hosted convenience. But most home and micro sourdough bakers don't want to run two systems — or any server at all — so for them the honest answer is to start with the one that plans the bake and requires nothing to install.

Frequently asked questions

Comparing more broadly? See our honest roundup of the best bakery production-planning software for home & micro bakeries, our Craftybase alternative and CakeBoss alternative comparisons, or our roundup of sourdough baking apps.