Blog · Software · August 8, 2026 · 7 min read
A Sortly Alternative for Service Fleets (Trucks, Not Folders)
Sortly is good at photos in folders. Service companies do not have a folder problem. They have a truck problem.
Folders cannot dispatch a van
A folder named Electrical can hold twelve capacitors. It cannot tell dispatch that Truck 101 is out and Truck 108 has two. That sentence is the entire reason shops outgrow Sortly.
If your techs work from vans, the unit of storage has to be the van. Tags and folders are a shop hobby. They are not a fleet model.
Photos are necessary and not sufficient
Sortly’s photos are why people buy it. Keep photos. Add job numbers, transfers, offline scans, and a tech phone view. Photos without a truck count are a pretty catalog of parts you cannot find.
FleetStock keeps the photo catalog and puts it on the scanner. That is the piece field techs actually use.
Per-user pricing fights field adoption
Folder apps often charge per person per month. That trains you to buy three seats and leave the rest of the crew on paper. Then the folders are wrong by Thursday.
A yearly fleet price is the shape that lets every tech install the app. FleetStock is $129, $197, or $249 once a year after a 14-day trial.
What to migrate (and what to leave)
Export the items you actually stock. Clean duplicate names. Import part number, cost, price, min. Leave the empty folders and the garage-sale SKUs behind. Then stock quantities onto trucks — do not import one company-wide on-hand number.
A weekend is enough for a five-van shop if you do not boil the ocean. One honest truck the first week beats a perfect folder tree that nobody scans.
Keep Sortly only if you are still a shop
If you are a one-bay shop with no rolling stock, a folder app can be fine. The day a van becomes your real warehouse, switch models. Do not wait until the third year of “we should really know what’s on the trucks.”
Read the full FleetStock vs Sortly comparison if you want a feature-by-feature grid. The short version: vehicles and jobs versus folders and tags.
FAQ
Can we run Sortly and FleetStock together?
Not for long. Two catalogs will drift. Pick the van as the source of truth.
Do we lose our photos?
Re-shoot the confusing parts with a phone. It is faster than a perfect migration and the photos will match what you stock now.
Is FleetStock only for huge fleets?
No. Two vans already break the folder model.
See what is on every truck this week
14-day free trial. Then one yearly invoice — $129, $197, or $249.