In the choice between bespoke software and off-the-shelf software, off-the-shelf should be the starting assumption. A packaged product costs less to begin with, is available now and is kept up to date by its vendor. Bespoke software, written for one organisation, earns its higher upfront cost only where the work is particular to you and no product fits it. The decision is therefore less about pros and cons in general than about one question: does a product you can buy fit the work closely enough?
The general pros and cons of each are set out, with a comparison table, in our guide to what bespoke software development is. This article is about making the decision, and it spends most of its time on the option we do not sell.
When off-the-shelf software is the right answer
The work is the same in every business. Accounts, payroll, email, document storage and basic customer records are done in much the same way everywhere. Products for them are mature, and their cost is shared across a great many customers. Tax and payroll rules also change, and a vendor tracks those changes for all its customers at once. Building any of this yourself would mean paying to recreate something you can rent.
A product does most of what you need, and you can live with the rest. No product fits perfectly. If the gaps are irritations and not costs, accept them.
The product’s way of working is as good as yours. It is worth asking, honestly, whether the way you do something is an advantage or only a habit. Where it is a habit, changing the process to match a well-designed product is cheaper than building software to preserve it.
You cannot yet describe what you need. A new line of business or a process still taking shape is a poor subject for a build. A period with a packaged product, or even a spreadsheet, will show you what matters.
The need is short-lived. Bespoke software repays its cost over years. If a reorganisation or a change of system is likely to retire it soon, rent something.
Nobody has time to be involved. A build needs someone in the business to explain the work, review progress and test the result. A product needs far less of that.
How to test whether a product really fits
Sales demonstrations show a product at its best, with tidy sample data. A proper test takes a few days and is worth doing before you commit to either route.
- List tasks, not features. Write down the ten to twenty things your staff do most weeks, in their own words: raise a quote with a customer-specific discount, split a delivery, correct an invoice after it has been sent.
- Run each task in a trial, with your own data. Have the people who do the work try it. Note every task that cannot be done, and every one that needs a workaround.
- Count what would stay outside. If staff would still keep a spreadsheet alongside the product, write down what would be in it and why.
- Check how it connects. Ask whether the product has an API, a published way for other programs to exchange data with it, and whether it already connects to the other systems you use.
- Check how you would get your data out. Find out what can be exported, in what format, and whether that includes history and attachments.
- Work out the cost over five years. Use the vendor’s current price list, the pricing tier that includes the features you tested, and the number of users you expect to have, not the number you have today. Add set-up, data import and any paid add-ons.
- Read the terms. Look at how prices can change, how much notice you must give and what happens to your data if you leave.
Where you can, speak to a customer of similar size in a similar trade who has used the product for more than a year.
Signs that a product does not fit
The test above will usually settle it. These results point towards bespoke software, or towards one of the middle options below.
- Several of the tasks you listed cannot be done, and they are tasks the business depends on.
- Staff would keep spreadsheets alongside the product for anything beyond occasional use.
- Making it fit would need heavy customisation by the vendor or a consultant. In our view this is often the worst of both: you pay for a build, you do not own the result, and each new version of the product can break it.
- The cost per user becomes hard to justify once customers, suppliers or occasional users need to log in.
- The process in question is one you compete on, and the product would make you do it the way everyone else does.
If you have already bought a product and find yourself in this list, the product is not necessarily wrong. It may be the right tool for the standard part of the work and the wrong one for a single process around it.
The options in between
The choice is seldom all one or the other.
A product plus an integration. If the product fits but does not talk to your other systems, a small piece of bespoke software can pass data between them so that it is entered once. Our page on systems that do not talk to each other describes how this is done.
A product plus a small bespoke system. Keep packaged products for the standard work and build only the part that is yours alone, such as the quoting rules or the job schedule, with data flowing between them.
A low-code platform. Tools for assembling an application from ready-made parts suit simple forms, lists and approvals with a modest number of users. Our comparison of bespoke software and low-code platforms covers the limits.
A guide to the decision
| Your situation | Likely answer |
|---|---|
| The work is done the same way in every business | Off-the-shelf |
| A product covers most of it and the gaps are minor | Off-the-shelf, accepting the gaps |
| A product fits, but data is retyped between systems | Off-the-shelf, plus an integration |
| Simple forms and approvals for a small number of users | A low-code platform |
| You cannot yet describe what you need | Off-the-shelf or a spreadsheet for now |
| The standard work fits a product, but one process of your own does not | Off-the-shelf, plus a small bespoke system for that process |
| No product handles a process the business depends on, and you have tested several | Bespoke |
If the answer is bespoke, set the cost against the five-year figure you worked out for the nearest product. Our cost calculator gives a range for a build, and a bespoke system brings hosting and maintenance costs in place of licence fees.
What to do next
Write the task list. It takes an hour with the people who do the work, and it is useful whichever way the decision goes: it is the script for testing a product, and it is the start of a scope if you build.
Then run two or three products against it before you speak to a software developer. A supplier worth using will ask what you have already tried, and should tell you plainly if something you could buy would do the job for less. CodeFirst does not sell or support packaged products, so we have no stake in which one you choose.