Yantra Bhavan vs OctoPrint
One tab per printer, or one queue for the shop.
Free, open source, and yours forever — one instance per printer, which is exactly the point until you have twenty.
The short version
OctoPrint is the default. It is AGPL-licensed, free, endlessly extensible through hundreds of plugins, and it runs on hardware you own with no account and no vendor.
It is also one instance per printer by design, and its bundled slicer has not moved in years.
We are not open source and you cannot host us. What we offer instead is one queue across every machine and every process, and orders arriving in it.
Side by side
| Yantra Bhavan | OctoPrint | |
|---|---|---|
| Processes managed | Eight processes — 3D printing, CNC milling and turning, laser and plasma cutting, waterjet, drag knife, and wire EDM — each with its own operation template. | One 3D printer per instance, over USB or serial. |
| Fleet view | One queue across the whole shop. The dispatcher assigns work to a unit by capability and load, and can release the next job automatically once a part is cleared. | One instance controls a single printer; running several means several instances. |
| Where the work comes from | Orders arrive from the Yantra Bhavan marketplace. You do not need a storefront of your own for work to appear in the queue. | Files you upload to the instance yourself. |
| Hosting | Hosted by us. There is no self-hosted build. | Self-hosted and open source under the AGPLv3, typically on a Raspberry Pi you own. |
| Cost | Part of a Yantra Bhavan partner plan, billed per seat in INR. | Free, with development funded by donations. |
| Teams and access | Shops, named roles, invitations and per-seat billing, with permissions checked on the server rather than hidden in the interface. | User accounts on the instance, with an access-control system. |
The honest concession first: you cannot host us
OctoPrint runs on your hardware, keeps running when your connection drops, and cannot be taken away, repriced or shut down. Production Floor is a hosted service and there is no self-hosted build, so if sovereignty over your own tooling is the requirement, this comparison ends here and OctoPrint wins it. Everything below assumes you have decided you can live with a hosted service.
One tab per printer stops scaling at about the fifth printer
The design that makes OctoPrint excellent for one machine is what makes it painful for twenty: an instance per printer, a bookmark per instance, and no shared answer to "what is running and what is next". Production Floor holds one queue for the shop and a dispatcher that assigns work by capability and load — and it does the same for a mill or a laser, which no amount of plugins will make OctoPrint do.
Plugins will beat us on anything specific
Hundreds of them exist and someone has almost certainly already solved your exact oddity. We have no plugin system and no plan for one. What we have instead is the layer above: orders, scheduling across processes, roles, and an invoice in rupees at the end of it.
Pick Yantra Bhavan when
You have outgrown a browser tab per machine, your floor is not only printers, and you want the work as well as the tooling.
Pick OctoPrint when
You want to own the whole stack. OctoPrint costs nothing, runs on your own Raspberry Pi, keeps working with no internet, and its plugin ecosystem will do things no commercial product will ever ship. For one printer, or three, nothing beats it — and we cannot be self-hosted at all.
Questions we get asked
See what the floor looks like with work already on it
Listing a workshop is free, and the Production Floor comes with the plan rather than as a per-machine add-on.
List your workshop