The extensive use of mobile devices has made it challenging to manage the printing process. Though portability and mobility have dramatically improved productivity, unsupervised printing has raised the printing cost.
Print management software provides an intelligent approach to optimize your overall print infrastructure efficiency. To understand how the software can help you cut unnecessary printing costs, secure the printing process and reduce environmental footprint, review our list of best print management software now.
What are the Benefits of Using a Print Management Software?
Print management software ensures that businesses have a secure and easy printing experience. Here are additional benefits of print management software.
Shrinks your carbon footprint and waste
Waste reduction and cost control are drastically changing user behavior. Print management software encourages responsible printing using quotas, print policies and duplex printing. It helps businesses to hit green targets by providing at-a-glance reporting on carbon emission and energy usages.
Ensures document security
Print management software safeguards your confidential documents by controlling device access, implementing secure print release and adding a watermark. It enhances document security through user authentication and print approval.
Tracks cost
Print management software provides reporting tools to track the cost of printing, copying, scanning and faxing. It also allows creating rules for load balancing and budgeting. The software notifies you if the printing costs exceed the allocated budget.
What to Look for in the Best Print Management Software?
Before you settle on print management software, you will have to evaluate your options by comparing the features offered by different providers. Let’s review some factors you should consider while choosing the best print management software.
Rule-based printing
When your printing job is left unsupervised, it can quickly raise operating costs and wastage. With rule-based printing, you can establish general printing rules to avoid unnecessary expense and wastage. Be sure to check if the print management software lets you create printing rules.
Centralized print management
The centralized print management captures every print transaction data, like who printed what and the cost to print the document. Ensure your print management software provides centralized administrative access to track all print, scan, copy activities in real-time.
Private cloud printing
Private cloud printing allows users to log in using their credentials, upload their documents and submit the job for printing. It also enables the business to provide multi-layered security to safeguard from potential print vulnerabilities. The best print management software should offer private cloud printing.
Reporting and proper analysis
Reporting tools provide greater transparency to printing usage, cost and wastage. If you have access to reports for each user or device, you can plan how to cut unnecessary expenses. Choose a print management software that offers reports and analytics in all standard formats like PDF, Excel, HTML and Docx.
The Best Print Management Software
Let’s get started now with our picks of the best print management software.
PaperCut
PaperCut provides various print management products to secure and ease your printing experience. It empowers you to make printing easy from any device, including smartphones or BYOD.
Pros: PaperCut takes your print job security to a new level with digital watermarking, automated print queues, and control device access. It reduces and controls waste by encouraging duplex printing, grayscale printing or implementing reasonable use of quota printing. Additionally, it provides insights and in-depth statistics on printing costs and wastage identification.
Cons: PaperCut’s initial setup and device logging can be ambiguous.
Pricing: It provides free access for up to 5 users. Its commercial business pricing starts at $435.
Rating: 4.4 stars
PrinterLogic
PrinterLogic allows you to eliminate print servers and deliver Serverless Printing Infrastructure. It offers self-service printer installation, modern enterprise print management and a centrally-managed Direct IP printing platform to streamline all your print management operations.
Pros: The key features of PrinterLogic include advanced reporting to see printing activity across your organization, secure release printing, mobile printing and support for VDI users.
Cons: You can face some browser compatibility issues with PrinterLogic.
Pricing: PrinterLogic offers a free trial to try out serverless printing. You can contact its sales team for its paid plan subscription.
Rating: 4.4 stars
Print Conductor
Print Conductor supports fast and bulk printing of various types of documents. It’s best known for large volume print management, supporting over 90 document types.
Pros: With Print Conductor, you can print as many files as you want in one click. You can batch print all documents with more than 100 advanced print settings. It’s simple and friendly interface lets you easily add and arrange files before printing. Additionally, it offers a multi-language interface for global businesses.
Cons: The major downside of Print Conductor is the difficulty in configuring print settings for an individual file.
Pricing: Print Conductor offers a lifetime license for the business. It charges $149 per user for Commercial License and $2,450 for Enterprise License.
Rating: 4.9 stars
uniFLOW
uniFLOW is the all-in-one platform for your print, scan and device management needs. It is a Modular Multifunction Printer (MFP) management tool that saves your organization time and money by providing effective control of overprinting.
Pros: You can scale uniFLOW to fit any businesses to manage printing, scanning and copying. It supports universal printer drivers, secure printing, Google Cloud Print and device authentication. It also tracks all output costs for different printers, fax machines, scanners and print room jobs.
Cons: uniFLOW software doesn’t support offline data caching and suffers heavily from network issues or crashes.
Pricing: You need to contact the sales team for the pricing. Pricing depends on your needs and requirements.
Rating: 4.1 stars
Print Manager
Print Manager redefines print management by helping businesses to leverage print management with next-generation accessibility, mobility and cloud integration. It aims to eliminate wasted printing materials and energy with its environmental impact reporting.
Pros: This software increases cost saving by taking control of critical cost generators and offers greater transparency and printing intelligence. It also provides live auditing, quota and budget tracking, mobile printing via the cloud and advanced reporting.
Cons: One of the shortcomings of Print Manager is its limited customer support.
Pricing: Similar to other print management software, Print Manager is available through one-time licensing. You can try out its feature in a 30-day free trial.
Rating: 4 stars
Save with Print Management Software Now
If you want to seamlessly monitor and control your print resources with an easy-to-use administrative dashboard, you should use print management software. Implementing the best print management software is definitely worth the time and money. This software can fully optimize your print infrastructure, save cost, enhance productivity and security and shrink your carbon footprints.
