Backbone 2026: Benefits, Features & Pricing

Wondering if Backbone is right for your organization?

Our Apparel Management Software selection experts can help you in 15 minutes or less.

On this page

Overview
Screenshots
Pricing and Plans
Features
User Reviews
Popular Comparisons

Overview

Backbone

4.2

(68)

Pricing

Starting at $199.00 per month

About Backbone

Backbone is a product development platform designed to empower brands to make products faster, smarter, and at scale. Backbone’s cloud-based system of interconnected libraries puts dynamic data at designers’ fingertips to allow them to focus on design rather than searching for information. Users can design faster, reduce sampling with fewer errors, and improve quality control.

Backbone also gives users greater visibility into product data, to improve decision making on material costs, design changes, and timelines with the aim of safeguarding revenue and cutting down on waste. The centralized system of record helps users to manage information across teams and move at digital speed.

Backbone Screenshots

Backbone Pricing and Plans

Starting price: $199.00 per month

Free Trial

Free Version

Basic

$199.00

per user, per month

No plan information available

Confused about pricing? We've got you covered.

Get a personalized pricing breakdown tailored to your specific needs—no guesswork, no generic estimates.

Backbone Features

Popular features found in Apparel Management
Billing & Invoicing
Catalog Management
Materials Management
Production Management
Product Management
Purchasing & Receiving
Reporting & Statistics
Returns Management
Shipping Management
Supplier Management
Supply Chain Management
More features of Backbone
Accounting Integration
Activity Tracking
API
Bills of Material
Collaboration Tools
Commenting/Notes
Communication Management
Cost Tracking
Customizable Fields
Data Import/Export
Design Management
Document Management
Document Storage
Drag & Drop
EDI
Fashion Illustrations
File Management
Inventory Management
Inventory Tracking
Multi-Channel Management
Pattern, Color & Art Storage
Pattern Grading
Pattern Layout/Print/Cut
Portfolio Management
Presentation Tools
Price/Margin Management
Product Catalog
Product Data Management
Production Tracking
Product Lifecycle Management
Progress Tracking
Quality Assurance
Requirements Management
Status Tracking
Textile Pattern Design
Third-Party Integrations
Version Control

Backbone User Reviews

Overall Rating

4.2

Ratings Breakdown

40%

43%

13%

Secondary Ratings

Ease of Use

4.1

Value for money

4.2

Customer support

4.7

Functionality

3.9

Nicole K.

Verified reviewer

Textiles

11-50 employees

Used daily for less than 6 months

Review source

Reviewed September 2021

Backbone - the foundation of our product lifecycle

I REALLY appreciate the consistent cadence of touch bases with my customer service team as well as their prompt reply to one-off questions I have had over time. They have been super helpful at guiding me on ways to work through questions and set best practices around system functionality.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

Integration with our existing business was relatively easy because we were starting with Backbone as we started our first production season, so we did not have to manage a massive data migration into the system. Having the training tools to learn the system functionality as I was setting up our business was great - the training documentation and videos provide the perfect balance of high level explanation and detailed focus.

Cons:

One missing function in Backbone is a color tracking app. We are exploring ways to include and track lab dips within the platform. If there was existing functionality to dynamically track lab dips on a component level, that would be amazing! Not sure if that would integrate the color palette app with the component app or if an entirely new app would be needed to solve for this need. I wish there were more ways to search for products and components besides name and item code/style number. We have adapted by including specific info in our component names and we use the filters as a work around. It would be nice for the auto-generated item codes to default to ALL CAPS and not include 0/O or I/L/1 to avoid confusion.

Anna F.

Verified reviewer

Apparel & Fashion

2-10 employees

Used daily for less than 12 months

Review source

Reviewed September 2021

Fairly new user

The use of component creation, palettes, BOM, spec sheets is very easy and there are a lot of short-cuts that make data entry easy. It is also configurable - i.e . the way it prints out, and is shared with factory/supplier.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

love the drag and fill in for spec sheets (like excel), love that there are images in the components and palette pulls in, love the ability to print different configurations of tech packs, love the drag and drop in the BOM area, love the customer service that is super responsive and the video's for help with how-to

Cons:

several places don't show lists in alphabetical order, several places show the "name" only while others show the "code" only, sometimes the "search" only picks certain fields, some of it is just getting used to what areas do what functions and what the "work-around" is to do what you need. don't like that the images are not easy/intuitive to update, correct... I find it simpler to download a new illustrator each time.

Matthew L.

Verified reviewer

Apparel & Fashion

11-50 employees

Used daily for less than 12 months

Review source

Reviewed September 2021

Backbone Review

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

I like how easy and straight forward the software is to use. It was easy to integrate into our current work flow.

Cons:

Some bugs here and there, but was able to communicate with the support team to work around or notify of the issue.

Vendor Response

Thank you very much for taking the time to leave us a review and provide our team feedback on your experience with Backbone! We greatly appreciate it. As much of our team comes from design and development backgrounds, we're so glad you've found Backbone easy and intuitive to use--it's a huge part of our core mission! We have a number of exciting updates planned for the rest of this year and into 2022 based on client requests that will enhance the functionality of our platform in ways that should address your frustrations. Please continue to contact your CSM to review any specific workflow stops or bugs, we greatly appreciate your patience with us as we continue to grow the company and platform!

Replied October 2021

Grace D.

Verified reviewer

Apparel & Fashion

11-50 employees

Used daily for less than 12 months

Review source

Reviewed September 2021

Simple to use interface and time saving features

I have used

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

A big plus is how visual the interface is, and as a Designer, it is what makes this so much easier and more pleasurable to work in. It's super easy to clearly annotate images, and automatically link components to the BOM, another feature that saves me so much time and makes our tech packs very clear for our suppliers. Work automatically saves unlike other PLM software, which I love - no more lost BOMs or annotations!

Cons:

I like to work very quickly and efficiently, which is why I love Backbone for the most part. I do find a few glitches within the BOM function where it can be slow to move my headers, or for the data to populate. Overall this is a very minor thing and we have regular communication with the Backbone team and they plan to improve this.

Angelina K.

Verified reviewer

Apparel & Fashion

2-10 employees

Used daily for less than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed September 2021

Backbone 1-2 year User Review

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

The conveniency and easy features. I started working for Southern Shirt while still in college and I had never worked with a PLM system before. Even though I was a first time user, it was easy for me to understand and on top of that the free training sessions really helped.

Cons:

My least favorite is how the spec system is set up. What I mean by that is when I download a tech pack and add a sample stage, it does not download all of the tabs. So for like size sets, where we get every size we make, we have to go and download each file and combine it into one CSV file. It is a bit time consuming having to do that for each product we get multiple sizes in one sample stage.

Vendor Response

Thank you for taking the time to review Backbone and leave our team valuable feedback! As much of our team come from design and development backgrounds, we're so glad you've found Backbone easy and intuitive to use--it's a huge part of our core mission! We also very much value the feedback you've provided as it helps us further enhance the platform to meet your and other client needs. We will pass on your specific comments regarding Backbone functionality to our product and engineering teams as they continue to work on new features and release enhancements.

Replied October 2021

Louise K.

Verified reviewer

Apparel & Fashion

11-50 employees

Used daily for less than 6 months

Review source

Reviewed October 2021

Worth every penny!! The best system available!

Amazing!! [SENSITIVE CONTENT] is my rep and she is super responsive and always totally solves the issue for me and my team. I've never had to wait longer than an hour to hear back from her and she's always really sweet and pleasant to work with.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

I literally decided to take this position because they were using Backbone. I had seen a demonstration at my previous position and really wanted to use it there. They thought it was too expensive and stayed with a really archaic system that crashed often, took up to 18 minutes to PDF a tech pack, and didn't have half of the great functions that Backbone has. It is so intuitive I only needed to sit with a coworker for 10 minutes to be ready to use. It saves automatically, so I have literally never lost any work. It is so fast and PDF's a tech pack in less that a minute all of the time. It has the option to load point of measurement sketches for each point of measurement simply, just drag and drop the image.

Cons:

I wish there was a back end option for the production team so we could all share the same data.

Reasons for switching to Backbone

Changed jobs

Vendor Response

Thank you so much for taking the time to leave Backbone a review! We're happy to hear you've had such a positive experience with your Client Success Manager and our support team. We're delighted to hear Backbone is such an essential part of your company's design and development workflow. Being an intuitive, easy to learn and use platform is extremely important to us, and we're so glad that's been your experience so far. We look forward to growing with you!

Replied October 2021

Teri C.

Verified reviewer

Design

11-50 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed October 2021

easy to use, but slow / time consuming than other programs

with all the Cons I listed, it's still the best, easiest system I've ever used. I prefer using backbone but really wish it had those features. (TP review, group TP generating/printing)

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

Easy to use. almost self-explanatory, visual. ability to upload AI or PDF files with multiple pages.

Cons:

not able to review TP before downloading. also the fact that you can only generate 1 TP at a time. it's very time-consuming and can be annoying during crunch time to generate multiple TP individually. it really needs "TP review" as you did in version 1, also a group TP generating and printing feature, which we asked for since backbone version 1, and was told multiple times that version 2 will have it. but it still doesn't have it, and not sure if it will ever have it. the website slows down from time to time, especially around 5-6pm EST.

Joshua S.

Verified reviewer

Consumer Goods

51-200 employees

Used daily for less than 12 months

Reviewed October 2022

Headwear Design PLM for Imperial Sports

The ability to create consistent tech packs in an organized and detailed manner is outstanding.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

Once the initial setup and load-out was completed, it is very easy to use and maintain. I most appreciate the way I'm able to build detailed tech packs in a consistent manner.

Cons:

I wish there was an ability to arrange tech packs within a shared folder in an alphabetized or numerical order.

Reasons for switching to Backbone

Backbone forces me to be very consistent with image, text and info placement.

Vaida P.

Verified reviewer

Apparel & Fashion

11-50 employees

Used daily for less than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed September 2021

Great user interface

Most problems were solved or found a workaround. Some functionality is just not compatible with us so that had to be moved to other software. We only use it for PLM. We do Quality Control in house and that is not compatible with the limited measure function.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

It's like iphone software for garment industry. Easy to train on, easy to use, easy to customize. Essential part of our technical design department.

Cons:

The occasional bugs and software issues set us back on some work. Many functions are not useful for us, some useful functions were taken away. To each their own I guess. This is probably best software for smaller amount of product variants.

Reasons for switching to Backbone

we were growing too fast, needed a user friendly PLM software.

Vendor Response

Thank you for taking the time to review Backbone and leave our team valuable feedback! We're delighted to hear Backbone is such an essential part of your company's design and development workflow. Being an intuitive, easy to learn and use platform is extremely important to us, and we're so glad that's been your experience so far. We have a number of exciting updates planned for the rest of this year and into 2022 based on client requests that will enhance the functionality of our platform in ways that should address your frustrations. We appreciate your patience with us as we continue to grow the company and platform!

Replied October 2021

Torrey M.

Verified reviewer

Apparel & Fashion

11-50 employees

Used weekly for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed October 2021

SSCO Review

Started off with minimal features and a buggy interface but it has steadily improved since being launched and has more features and tools to help make it work with our other software that manages inventory and our books

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

Using blocks and components to quickly build tech packs

Cons:

Not being able to undo updates to size specifications. I would like to have a save button instead of it saving automatically when new values are entered so all potential size updates can be applied and then saved at the end when all adjustments are confirmed.

Reasons for choosing Backbone

The pricing was the biggest draw

Vendor Response

Thank you for taking the time to review Backbone and leave our team valuable feedback! We're sorry to hear some parts of the platform have not met your expectations. Like many companies, we experienced setbacks in 2020 related to the pandemic. In 2021 our engineering team has made significant progress in releasing over 300 performance improvements. We have a number of exciting updates planned for the rest of this year and into 2022 based on client requests that will enhance the functionality of our platform in ways that should address your frustrations.

Replied October 2021

Showing 1 - 10 of 68 Reviews

See All Reviews