Content by Lidia Vijga
The retail industry is on the brink of a major shift, with category management softwares leading the charge. After years of stagnation, we’re now seeing a surge of innovation, especially in assortment planning. As we approach 2025, advanced data analytics and AI are transforming how retailers optimize their product selections.
These new tools promise to create more personalized shopping experiences and boost retail efficiency. They’re enabling smarter decisions about product stocking, placement, and pricing, benefiting both shoppers and retailers alike.
In this post, we’ll explore the top category management software solutions for 2025, focusing on assortment planning. I’ll highlight their key features and provide guidance on selecting the best tool for your business.
What is Category Management Software?
Category management software is a specialized tool designed to help businesses streamline and optimize their product assortment and merchandising strategies. It enables retailers, manufacturers, and suppliers to effectively manage their product categories, analyze consumer demand, and make data-driven decisions to enhance profitability and customer satisfaction.
The primary purpose of category management software is to provide a comprehensive solution for managing and analyzing product categories across various channels, including brick-and-mortar stores, e-commerce platforms, and omnichannel operations. By leveraging advanced analytics, forecasting, and optimization techniques, these software solutions help businesses achieve the following objectives:
- Product Assortment Optimization: Category management software assists in determining the optimal product mix and assortment for each category, ensuring that the right products are available in the right quantities to meet customer demand.
- Space and Shelf Management: These solutions help optimize shelf space allocation, planogram design, and product placement to maximize sales and improve the overall shopping experience.
- Demand Forecasting: By analyzing historical sales data, consumer trends, and market conditions, category management software provides accurate demand forecasting, enabling businesses to make informed inventory decisions and minimize stockouts or overstocking.
- Pricing and Promotion Strategies: These tools help analyze pricing strategies, promotions, and merchandising tactics to maximize profitability and competitiveness within each product category.
- Supplier and Vendor Management: Category management software facilitates collaboration with suppliers and vendors, enabling efficient category planning, negotiation, and performance evaluation.
What are the key features to look for in category management software?
Before we dive into my curated list of top category management software solutions, it’s important to understand what sets the best tools apart. To guide you, I’ve identified six critical features that define top-tier category management software.
1. Ability to monitor new trends
The new innovation of category management software has trend monitoring data, which automatically scans the market for trends that may fit your assortment.
2. Provides analytics on existing assortment
Category management software delivers powerful analytics on your current assortment, helping you evaluate product performance, identify gaps, and uncover opportunities for new products.
2. Ability to organize and cleanse data
Category management software optimizes the cleansing process, ensuring data is structured, accurate, and securely stored. Clean data is the foundation for meaningful insights and better workflows.
3. Easy to use
Intuitive design and user-friendly dashboards are critical features of category management software. With clear, impactful visualizations, teams can easily interpret complex data, identify patterns, and communicate results effectively across departments.
4. Ability to visualize data and category performance
Intuitive design and user-friendly dashboards are critical features of category management software. There should also be the ability to easily export data into excel or other formats.
5. Ability to customize to meet unique needs
Every organization has different goals. The best category management software offers flexibility to customize tools, dashboards, and reports based on individual business needs, ensuring it aligns with specific objectives.
6. Ability to have some automation while having control
While automations are powerful, the ability for users to adjust settings and processes manually is equally important. Category management software strikes a balance by combining smart automations with the freedom for human intervention when needed.
Top Category Management Softwares
When it comes to selecting the best tools, these six category management software solutions stand out for their features, ease of use, and ability to deliver insights:
Granularity – Real-Time Data Integrations and Powerful Analytics
Granularity represents a significant leap forward in category management, offering retailers a proactive approach to assortment optimization. This category management software excels at identifying gaps in product offerings and filling them with trending items before they reach peak popularity.
- Spot unmet consumer needs: Use data-driven insights to identify products or categories that are missing from your assortment but are in high demand.
- Trend overlap analysis: Compare emerging trends with your current assortment to measure alignment and identify gaps or opportunities.
- Identify key trend indicators to find products before they peak. Granularity’s models predict a trend will grow, stable, or decline.
Granularity’s AI models identify product trends 3-6 months out, offering retailers a significant advantage in assortment planning. Key features include:
- Trend Detection: Leverages AI to find what’s trending, where, and how.
- AI-Powered Forecasting: Predicts upcoming trends using advanced statistical, AI, and ML models.
- NLP Summaries: Provides concise, easy-to-understand trend summaries using natural language processing.
These capabilities enable retailers to make informed decisions, anticipate market changes, and optimize their product offerings well in advance of emerging trends.
Granularity’s software identifies how similar trends are to current assortments, allowing retailers to align their offerings with market demand:
- Maximize existing strengths: Highlight products in your assortment that closely match trending items, enabling you to capitalize on their growth potential.
- Refine product strategies: Use similarity insights to prioritize updates, expand high-performing categories, and phase out underperforming products.
Symphony RetailAI – Category Optimization and Shelf-Space Planning for CPG
Symphony RetailAI specializes in CPG category management, offering tools for category optimization, shelf-space planning, and demand forecasting. It leverages AI to analyze sales data, consumer trends, and inventory performance, helping retailers improve product placement and increase revenue. Its advanced visual tools streamline category management, making decision-making faster and more accurate.
Planorama – Visual Merchandising and Planogram Optimization
Planorama, now part of Trax, is a leading solution for visual merchandising and planogram optimization. It allows businesses to monitor shelf compliance, optimize product placement, and enhance store execution. With real-time performance insights, Planorama helps businesses visualize category performance and make informed decisions to boost sales and profitability.
JDA Category Management -User-Friendly Tools for Assortment and Space Planning
JDA Category Management (part of Blue Yonder) unifies automation and customization through user-friendly tools for assortment and space planning, enabling retailers to efficiently optimize their product categories and shelf layouts.
Its advanced features include AI-driven optimization, intuitive planogram design, and customizable reporting dashboards. JDA helps businesses enhance category performance while balancing automation and user control for tailored solutions.
LEAFIO AI – AI Driven Retail Automation Software
LEAFIO AI Assortment Performance stands out for its advanced AI-driven tools that enhance shelf-space efficiency. It provides actionable recommendations based on inventory data. LEAFIO’s automated workflows and performance tracking enable businesses to streamline operations, reduce out-of-stock issues, and maximize category performance.
Mi9 – Retail Planning for Store-Specific Assortments
Mi9 Assortment Planning helps retailers create highly targeted, customer-centric assortments with features like dynamic clustering, sales and receipt planning, and omni-channel line planning. It combines analytical insights and visual merchandising, supports top-down and bottom-up planning, and optimizes sizing and inventory flow. The solution automates processes like breadth analysis, markdown strategies, and real-time re-trending, ensuring assortments align with market demand and financial goals. Available on-premise or cloud, it improves decision-making, profitability, and customer satisfaction.
Top Category Management Software for Grocery Retail
Grocery retailers face unique challenges with fast-moving goods, and ever-changing consumer trends. Category management software designed specifically for grocery retail helps streamline:
- Real-time analysis of consumer preferences
- Assortment optimization
- Promotions strategies
Granularity offers advanced tools for real-time trend tracking, predictive analytics, and detailed assortment insights. By leveraging AI-driven data, Granularity empowers grocery retailers to identify emerging trends, optimize new product offerings, and proactively meet consumer demand.
The Next Generation of Category Management Software
The evolution of category management software has been driven by advancements in data science. In the past, these tools were limited to manual spreadsheets and basic reporting. Today, modern software integrates:
- Real-time data processing
- AI and machine learning for trend forecasting
- Social media and other market datasets
- Cloud-based storage for secure, collaborative access
- Powerful automations that reduce manual workload
- Interactive, visual dashboards for better decision-making
These improvements enable businesses to be customer-centric. The next generation of category management software will combine cutting-edge technology with the flexibility to adapt to rapidly changing business environments.
Making the Final Decision
Choosing the best category management software for your organization is a critical decision that should involve careful consideration and collaboration among stakeholders. As you evaluate the various options, it’s essential to summarize the key factors that align with your business needs, weigh the pros and cons of each solution, and involve relevant stakeholders in the decision-making process.
Begin by revisiting your organization’s specific requirements, goals, and challenges related to category management. Assess how well each software solution addresses these needs and prioritize the features and capabilities that are most crucial for your operations. Consider factors such as ease of use, integration capabilities, scalability, and vendor support.
Next, create a comprehensive comparison matrix that outlines the strengths and weaknesses of the top contenders. This will help you visualize the trade-offs and make an informed decision based on your priorities. Involve key stakeholders, such as category managers, procurement professionals, IT personnel, and end-users, to gather their perspectives and ensure that the chosen solution meets their needs and aligns with your organization’s overall strategy.
It’s also essential to consider the long-term implications of your decision. Evaluate the total cost of ownership, including implementation costs, ongoing maintenance, and potential future upgrades or expansions. Assess the vendor’s reputation, financial stability, and commitment to continuous product development and support.
Ultimately, the final decision should be a collaborative effort that considers the input of all relevant stakeholders and weighs the potential risks and benefits of each option. Once a decision has been made, develop a comprehensive implementation plan that addresses change management, user training, and ongoing support to ensure a smooth transition and maximize the return on your investment.
FAQs
Category management software benefits retailers by providing data-driven insights to optimize product assortments, pricing, and promotions. It helps increase sales, improve profit margins, enhance customer satisfaction, and streamline inventory management. The software also enables better collaboration with suppliers and more efficient use of shelf space.
AI enhances category management software by providing more accurate demand forecasting, personalized product recommendations, and automated decision-making. It can analyze vast amounts of data to identify patterns and trends, optimize pricing and promotions in real-time, and predict consumer behavior to improve category performance.
The ROI of implementing category management software can be significant, with potential improvements in sales, profit margins, and operational efficiency. Retailers typically see a 2-5% increase in category sales, 1-3% improvement in margins, and 10-20% reduction in out-of-stocks. The exact ROI depends on the size and complexity of the business.
Category management software integrates with existing retail systems through APIs, data connectors, and middleware solutions. It can sync with point-of-sale systems, inventory management tools, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to ensure seamless data flow and provide a holistic view of category performance.
The latest trends in category management software for 2025 include advanced AI and machine learning capabilities, real-time analytics, omnichannel integration, sustainability features, and enhanced collaboration tools.
Category management software handles omnichannel retail by providing a unified view of product performance across all channels. It analyzes data from in-store, online, and mobile sales to optimize assortments, pricing, and promotions across channels. This ensures a consistent customer experience and maximizes overall category performance.
Challenges of implementing category management software include data integration, employee training, and change management. Ensuring data accuracy and consistency across systems can be complex. Retailers may also face resistance from staff accustomed to traditional methods. Selecting the right software and managing the implementation process are crucial.
Small retailers can benefit from category management software by leveraging cloud-based solutions with scalable pricing models. These tools provide access to advanced analytics and optimization capabilities previously available only to large retailers. Small businesses can improve decision-making, compete more effectively, and grow their operations.
