Print-It 26 vs Shopworks: decorated apparel or commercial print?
Shopworks (OnSite) is an established shop management system built primarily around decorated apparel: screen printing, embroidery and the order management that goes with garment work.
Print-It 26 is a cost-based MIS for commercial print, wide format and mixed substrate. The two overlap on orders, production and invoicing, but they are built around different definitions of a job, and that is the honest place to start.
The short version
Choose Shopworks if decorated apparel is your business. Garment ordering, size and colour breakdowns, and decoration-specific production are its home ground, and a general print MIS will always feel like a compromise there.
Choose Print-It 26 if you print onto sheets and rolls, your cost is driven by substrate consumption, and you need estimating, production, purchasing and shipping in one place.
How a job is modelled
In apparel, a job is a set of garments with sizes, colours and decoration positions. Shopworks models that directly, which is exactly what a decorator needs and what a print MIS handles awkwardly.
In commercial print, a job is a piece at a finished size, printed onto a substrate, cut from a sheet or roll. Print-It 26 models that directly: nesting determines how much material the run consumes, and that consumption drives both the price and the purchasing requirement.
If you do both — and plenty of shops do — the question is which side carries more of your revenue, because that is the side that should own the system of record.
Feature comparison
| Area | Shopworks | Print-It 26 |
|---|---|---|
| Primary market | Screen printing, embroidery, decorated apparel | Commercial print, wide format, signage, mixed substrate |
| Job model | Garments with size and colour breakdowns | Pieces nested onto sheets and rolls |
| Pricing model | Decoration and garment pricing | Cost-based from substrate, waste and work-center time |
| Production | Decoration-oriented scheduling | Stage-based board with a shop-floor kiosk |
| Purchasing | Garment purchasing | Vendor purchase orders, receiving and FIFO costing |
| Quality | Order-level tracking | Non-conformance records and job actuals against estimate |
| Shipping | Fulfilment features | Carrier labels and tracking on the order |
Where Shopworks is the better fit
- Apparel decoration is the majority of your work.
- You need garment size and colour matrices as a first-class part of every order.
- Your purchasing is dominated by blank garment suppliers.
Where Print-It 26 pulls ahead
- Substrate-driven estimating with real nesting and waste.
- Margin rollup per line and per order, with role-based redaction.
- Purchasing, receiving and material cost feeding straight back into the quote.
- One record from lead through proof, production, shipping and invoice.
Moving your history across
Lists import from CSV or Excel, old documents can be read from PDFs printed by your current system, and your document numbering continues from where it is today rather than restarting.
Everything that imports also exports, so your data stays portable if you later decide otherwise.
Shopworks and Print-It 26 are not really competing for the same shop. If you decorate garments, stay with the apparel-native system. If your margin comes off a sheet or a roll, a cost-based print MIS is the right tool.
The Print-It 26 demo is open without a signup, and a 7-day trial lets you quote a real job with your own substrates and rates.