Zebra gives its own label design software away free, and for a great many people it is the whole job. BarTender is what you move up to when that stops being enough — and it is bought more often than it is needed, so most of this page is about how to tell.
We supply, install and teach BarTender, and we use it every day — the templates behind our pre-printed labels and asset labels are built in it, on the same version we would sell you. You may still not need it, and we would rather say so than sell you one.
More people arrive here looking for help with BarTender than looking to buy it, and it is nearly always one of these three. None of them is a bug, and none of them is you being slow — they are the three places the program assumes you already know something.
Almost always the label size in the document does not match the stock actually in the printer, and the printer driver is quietly holding a third opinion. Three places, three answers, and the print only comes out right when all three agree.
Measure the label itself — across and down, the liner does not count — and set that in the document and in the driver, not just in one. On a Zebra driver the stock size lives in the printing preferences, which is not where most people look for it.
This is the thing BarTender is actually for, and the step that stops people. The label does not hold the data. It holds a set of fields, and the spreadsheet or the database fills them one row at a time. Until a source is connected, every field is just typed text and the software is an expensive way to design one label.
Once it is connected, one template prints five thousand different labels and you never open it again. Getting there is half an hour with somebody who has done it before, and a long afternoon without.
Usually the barcode has been made small enough to fit rather than large enough to scan, or it has been pushed hard against the edge of the label. A barcode needs clear space either side of it — no border, no text, nothing — and one that reads perfectly on the screen will still be refused on the label.
Print one and scan it with the actual scanner, from the actual distance, before you run the job. That thirty seconds catches nearly everything.
None of that is a sales pitch and none of it needs us. If you would rather not spend the afternoon on it, the rates are further down and most of these are a twenty-minute job over AnyDesk — but the answers above are the answers, and you are welcome to them.
They are completely different problems and only one of them is solved by buying software.
If you print the same label over and over, a few thousand times a year, and the artwork changes about never — you do not need design software and the hours to learn it. You need the labels printed and delivered.
And if your ERP or accounting system already prints labels, it is already doing this job. Adding BarTender underneath it is a project, not a purchase.
New products every month. Customer-specific labels. A compliance panel that gets revised. Something that has to pull a description and a price out of a database rather than be typed twice.
That is what BarTender is for, and at that point it stops being a cost and starts being the thing that saves somebody a day a week.
Better you hear that now than buy a licence you use twice. It is not a cheap product and the learning curve is real. The question is not whether BarTender is good — it is — the question is whether label design is a job your business actually has.
Zebra gives its own label design software away. It is not a trial and it does not expire. The free one stops at exactly one line — connecting a label to data — and knowing where that line falls saves most people a purchase.
Zebra's own, free, and downloaded from Zebra rather than from us. Put text, a barcode and a logo on a label and print it. If somebody types the details in and prints as needed, that is the whole job and there is nothing here for you to buy.
Adds the thing Essentials will not do: connect the label to data — Excel, Access, a text file, or ODBC to a real database. Also RFID and simple scripting. It is a one-time activation key rather than a subscription, and for a good many businesses the ladder ends here.
For when printing has stopped being something a person does. Several printers across several sites, labels triggered by your ERP rather than by somebody at a keyboard, print runs that have to be logged. That is a different problem, and the rest of this page is about it.
Start at the top and stop when it does what you need. That is the honest order and it is the order we would give you on the phone. Quite often the answer is the free one — we would rather tell you that in ten minutes than sell you a licence you open twice.
The distance between the bottom and the top of the range is enormous, and plenty of warehouses are running an edition they will never use half of.
Design a label, print a label — barcodes, RFID, and the printer support that is the reason anybody buys BarTender rather than fighting with Word. For the business that wants to lay out its own artwork and press print. Most people asking about BarTender for the first time want this one.
Adds the thing most people actually came for: pulling data from a spreadsheet or a database so the label fills itself in rather than being retyped. Add printing from other machines on the network and, for most warehouses with a parts list, this is where the answer lands. It is the edition we supply more often than all the others put together — which is worth knowing if somebody has quoted you Automation.
For labels printed by a system rather than a person — triggered by a dropped file, a REST call from your ERP, or a form somebody fills in without ever opening the designer. This is an integration job, not an installation, and it should be treated as one.
Automation, plus who is allowed to change a label, who approved it, and a full record of every one printed. A real requirement if your labels are audited — food, pharmaceutical, aerospace, anything regulated — and expensive shelfware if they are not.
And then there are two different ways to licence it. You either licence the printers — you pay for how many machines print, and as many people as you like can design — or you licence a workstation, which is one person printing to as many printers as they want, and is available on Starter and Professional only. Which of the two is cheaper depends entirely on the shape of your business. One person and one printer and one person and twelve printers are the same money on a workstation licence. Six people and one printer is not.
It is also a subscription rather than something you buy once. Terms run one, three or five years, and support is part of it rather than an extra. Three is what most people take — one year comes back around quickly and five is a long commitment to software you have not used yet. Worth knowing before you budget for it as a capital purchase, because that is not how the product is sold any more.
You do not have to work any of this out. Tell us how many people will design labels, how many printers will print them, and how many sites, and the quote comes back with the edition and the licensing already worked out. Those three numbers decide everything else.
Installing it takes twenty minutes. Having somebody who can build a label that scans, on the right stock, at the right size, is the part that takes a morning — and it is the part that decides whether the licence gets used.
We come to you, install it, set up the printers, build the first few templates with your own labels on your own stock, and show whoever is going to use it how it works.
Minimum two hours for Starter or a straightforward Professional install. Minimum four hours for Automation or Enterprise, because those are integrations and nobody has ever done one in an hour.
Over AnyDesk, on your screen, with your printer and your data. For most BarTender work this is genuinely the better answer rather than the consolation prize — it is cheaper, there is no travel to pay for, and it can be done in two sessions a week apart instead of one long day.
Which matters more than it sounds: people learn this software better with a week in between to try it and get stuck.
Already own BarTender? Then you do not need a licence from us, and we will still help. Building a template that prints correctly, connecting it to a database, working out why a barcode will not scan, or picking up something set up by somebody who has since left — all charged by the hour, all of it usually remote.
These are the rates for software work — installing, building templates, connecting a database, teaching somebody to use it. Repairing a printer is a different job done by a technician and priced separately. The software itself is quoted on its own, because the licensing depends on those three numbers above.
| Inc GST | |
|---|---|
| Remote support, per hour Over AnyDesk, anywhere in Australia. No travel, no minimum beyond the hour. |
$132 |
| Onsite, half day Sydney only. Four hours — the same $132 an hour, bought in a block. |
$528 |
| Travel to and from site, per hour Sydney onsite visits only. Nothing to pay on remote work. |
$110 |
| The software itself Edition and licensing quoted for your three numbers. |
Quoted |
Which is why we push people to remote. A half day onsite in Sydney is $528 plus the travel each way. The same four hours remote is $528 with no travel at all — and for software that lives on your screen rather than in your racking, there is very little an onsite visit does that a shared screen does not. We will come if you want us to. We will usually suggest you do not need us to.
The Automation and Enterprise editions above are named for this and almost never shown. A label that prints because a record appeared, a file landed, or SAP said so — with nobody at a keyboard and nobody clicking Print.
A folder, a port, an email account. Something drops a file in and the label comes out. That is the whole of what Automation buys you — it is not a faster designer, it is BarTender running without anybody in front of it.
SAP and Oracle WMS both have documented routes in — XML, IDocs, and more than one way to wire it. This is the part that turns a label printer into part of the system rather than something somebody remembers to do afterwards.
Terminal Services and Citrix are documented properly, which matters because printing is exactly what breaks in those setups. Or drive it from your own code through the ActiveX interface, if the trigger is something only your application knows.
These are Seagull Scientific's own papers and they are not new. We have hosted them for years because the detail in them is architectural — how Commander watches, how an IDoc is read, how licensing counts printers — and that has aged far better than any feature list would. Check anything version-specific against Seagull before you build on it, and ring us if you would rather just ask.
How many people will design labels, how many printers will print them, how many sites. That is enough for a licence quote and an honest opinion about whether you need one at all.
