Back in 2022, we tried to answer the questions WMS buyers kept asking: how much will it cost, how long will selection take, and should we go cloud or on-premise? Four years on, a lot has moved. Buyers are choosing faster, cloud has become the default, and vendor pricing has gone up across the board.
Our 2026 WMS project report draws on 840 WMS selection projects recorded between January 2020 and September 2026 (our last edition looked at just over a hundred). That gives us nearly seven years of data, so we can show how selection has changed rather than just where it stands today.
As before, headline figures quote the most recent full year, which is 2025. Figures for 2026 cover January to September only.
Quick jump to:
- WMS costs
- Selection timeframes
- Shorter buying windows
- Deployment preferences
- Project motivators
- Most popular WMS vendors
Here is a summary of some of our main findings:
1. The average budget per user for WMS software is now around $12,800
In our last report, the answer to "how much does WMS cost?" was around $10,000 per user over a five-year period, or roughly $167 per user per month.
At today's vendor pricing, that figure has risen to $12,790 per user in 2025 ($12,763 so far in 2026), about 28% higher than in 2021. That works out at roughly $213 per user per month.
Most of the increase comes from what vendors charge rather than from who is buying. Here is how cloud WMS pricing has moved since our benchmark rates were set:
| Cloud WMS cost | 2021 | Now |
|---|---|---|
| Subscription, entry-level (per user per month) | $75 to $100 | $100 to $200 |
| Subscription, enterprise (per user per month) | $350 to $500+ | $400 to $600+ |
| Implementation, entry-level | $3,000 to $12,000 | $5,000 to $25,000 |
| Implementation, enterprise | $80,000 to $300,000+ | $250,000 to $1,000,000+ |
Smaller companies still pay the most per seat, at $13,905 per user for companies with fewer than 50 employees. The gap to companies with 250 or more employees ($10,366) has narrowed from almost double to around a third, because enterprise implementation costs have risen the most.
These budget figures are modeled rather than observed: we apply our benchmark rates, uprated to current vendor pricing, to the mix of companies entering selection each year. They show what a typical buyer should plan for, not what any one company paid.
2. On average, companies now spend 12.8 weeks selecting WMS software
Selection has sped up since our last report, when the typical project took 15 weeks.
In 2025, companies with fewer than 50 employees took an average of 11.1 weeks, those with 50 to 249 employees took 12.3 weeks, and those with 250 or more took 15 weeks.
In our last report, companies with over 250 employees took 19 weeks, and we put the extra time down to having more stakeholders to consult. The gap between the smallest and largest companies stood at around seven weeks then and is now under four (though the 250+ group is a small sample of 13 projects in 2025, so treat that figure with some care).
Across the whole period, selection timeframes peaked at 20.4 weeks in 2023 and have fallen every year since, reaching 12.7 weeks in the first nine months of 2026.
3. Three in four buyers plan to choose a WMS within three months
In 2020, 57.4% of buyers planned to select a system within three months (including those who wanted to move immediately). That rose to 65.9% in 2025 and 74.6% so far in 2026.
At the other end, projects allowing six months or more have fallen from 22.6% in 2020 to 6.7% in 2025 and 4.5% in 2026.
With a shorter window, it pays to have comparison and pricing information to hand before you start speaking to vendors, so you aren't doing your research and your shortlisting at the same time. Buyers already work this way: comparison content made up 63.4% of the content WMS buyers requested from us in 2025, with pricing next at 16.17%. Demo requests accounted for just 5.96%, so most buyers want to weigh up their options well before they sit through a demo.
4. Nearly three-quarters of companies want a cloud-based WMS
In 2022, we reported that 53% of businesses were specifically searching for a cloud-based WMS, and we suggested on-premise might be on the decline.
Cloud is now the clear default. It was the stated preference in 72.59% of projects in 2025 and 77.61% in the first nine months of 2026. The share of companies happy with either model has dropped from 41.74% in 2020 to 17.91%.
Smaller companies remain the most committed to cloud at 76.14%, which matches what we saw last time.
That said, on-premise hasn't faded the way we expected. It has held between 2.59% and 6.96% of projects every year and sits at 4.48% in 2026, because warehouse operations that depend on local infrastructure keep it in play. Companies with 250 or more employees are the most likely to want an installed system, at 15.38% (on a small sample of 13 projects).
Cloud also carries a higher budget per user in WMS: $16,500 at current pricing, against $13,750 where either model is acceptable. Companies open to an installed system often already have the infrastructure and team to run one, so the shift to cloud has added $718 per user to the modeled budget since 2020.
5. The top reason for implementing a WMS is still to gain greater functionality
As was the case last time, gaining greater functionality was the most cited reason in 2025, at 31.76% of all reasons given.
What comes next has changed. Increasing efficiency (28.04%) has overtaken supporting growth (21.96%) as the second most common reason, and so far in 2026 efficiency has moved into first place at 37.40% while growth has dropped to 16.03%.
Better reporting and business intelligence have also become a mainstream requirement, rising from 1.57% of reasons in 2021 to 10.81% in 2025.
In our last report, motivations varied by company size. Now the same three reasons lead at every size, and only the emphasis differs: supporting growth makes up 23.98% of reasons at companies with fewer than 50 employees, against 13.79% at those with 250 or more.
6. The systems buyers compare look very different
Odoo Inventory was the most compared system in 2025, at 12.55% of all system mentions. Blue Yonder followed at 8.79% and NetSuite WMS at 5.02%, with Extensiv 3PL Warehouse Manager (4.60%) and Logiwa WMS (3.77%) rounding out the top five.
That's a very different list from our 2022 report, when HighJump led at 7.26%, ahead of 3PL Warehouse Manager, Manhattan and SAP. HighJump is still in the mix, though under a new name (it rebranded to Körber and then Infios), and took 2.51% of mentions in 2025.
Read more statistics, including how many employees use a WMS by company size and industry, which systems buyers are replacing, and the content they look for during selection, by downloading the full Software Path 2026 WMS Software Project Report.
