Decide whether you need shop-floor ERP or just estimating
Some of these tools run the whole shop: quoting, production scheduling, purchasing, invoicing. shopVOX and Cyrious Control both cover CRM through accounting. Others do one job well. EstiMate is estimating only, with material and labour pricing libraries, and Sign Customiser is a customer-facing configurator that produces instant priced quotes, not a production tracker. If your bottleneck is scheduling jobs across a shop floor, an estimating-only tool doesn't solve it; if your bottleneck is turning around quotes fast, a full ERP is more system than you need to administer.
Decide your deployment constraint before you take a demo
Most vendors here are cloud: shopVOX, Corebridge, SignTracker, Ordant, Mothernode, Printavo, PrintPlanr, Sign Customiser. Three are hybrid: Cyrious Control, Print ePS, Print Reach. EstiMate is the only one listed as on-prem. If your shop has no IT staff and no server room, on-prem is a cost you're taking on beyond the licence: someone has to patch it and back it up. Hybrid deployments split the difference but ask what stays local and what doesn't before you sign anything.
Work out who administers it day to day
A one-person quoting tool and a full ERP touching purchasing and accounting need different administrators. Cyrious Control and Print ePS are pitched as enterprise-grade sign-shop systems; running one well usually means someone owns it part-time at minimum. SignTracker and Ordant look built for smaller shops where the owner or office manager is also the administrator. Match the tool's complexity to who actually has the hours to run it, not to who signs the contract.
TODO(editor): verify actual seat-administration requirements for Cyrious Control and Print ePS versus SignTracker and Ordant before asserting a complexity gap.
Check what it has to talk to
SignTracker syncs with QuickBooks; that's the only integration explicitly named in what's published here. If your shop runs a different accounting package, or needs to talk to a specific label printer or cutter, that has to be confirmed directly with the vendor rather than assumed from the product category.
TODO(editor): confirm which of these twelve integrate with QuickBooks, Sage, or other accounting systems beyond SignTracker's stated sync, before publishing an integration comparison.
Compare price only where price is published
Only three vendors publish a number: shopVOX at $109/mo plus $29/user/mo (with a PRO tier at $249/mo), Printavo at $109/mo, and Sign Customiser at $29 to $299/mo depending on tier. The other nine, including both enterprise-leaning options (Cyrious Control, Print ePS), quote only. That's worth noting on its own: the tools built for larger or more complex shops tend to be the ones that don't publish a number.
TODO(editor): verify whether the correlation between "quote-only" pricing and larger target company size holds up once quotes are actually obtained from Cyrious Control, Print ePS, Corebridge, and others.
Decide what "smb" means for your shop
Eleven of the twelve listings target smb; only Print ePS targets mid-size companies. If you're a 20-person shop, most of this list was built with you in mind. If you're closer to 200 employees with multiple production lines, Print ePS is the one entry here explicitly aimed at that size, and it's worth asking the others directly whether they scale that far before you invest time in a trial.
