Product lifecycle management for hardware teams

Your product structure, under your control

TurboPLM manages the things a hardware team actually lives in: the part master, the multi-level bill of materials, revisions and their lifecycles, manufacturing processes, and the engineering change control that keeps all of it honest — then follows the product past release, into what was built and what came back from the field. Start on ours in a minute, or run the whole thing on your own hardware.

Free for one person and up to 100 parts, with no card. Or run it on your own hardware — the whole thing is open source.

turboplm.com/parts/1
T TurboPLM Dashboard My Work Product Parts Documents Requirements Materials BOM Compare Baselines Changes Manufacturing Sourcing Projects Insights
DRN-1000 — TurboDrone X1 Quadcopter Assembly In Work
Revision B · bill of materials
PartFindQtyRevState
ASM-1100 Frame Assembly101AReleased
MEC-2001 Carbon Fiber Arm104AReleased
PUR-4001 M3×8 Cap Screw4016AReleased
ASM-1120 Power Module Assembly301AReleased
ASM-1121 Battery Pack Assembly101BReleased
PUR-4005 Li-ion Cell 18650108AReleased
ELE-3007 LED Navigation Light Set501AIn Work
Product tour

See it in action

Under three minutes through the real application — the part master, a four-level bill of materials, a structure comparison, a change notice with its dispositions and signatures, CAD in the browser, the CAD BOM reconciled against engineering, serial and lot traceability, and the analytics over the top. No narration; captions carry it.

Recorded before the most recent additions, so materials planning, the document vault, redline review and item-level access are not in this cut — the capabilities above and the live demo below cover them.

Capabilities

Everything a product record needs

Not a document dump with a parts list bolted on — a real product data model with the rules enforced on the server.

Product structure

Parts & revisions

Lettered revisions with a lifecycle state machine — In Work, In Review, Released, Obsolete. Released revisions are immutable, enforced server-side, not by convention.

Multi-level eBOM

Find numbers, quantities, units, reference designators, an indented structure tree, cycle prevention and where-used. Children resolve to their latest released revision — and a child that has none is shown at its working revision and flagged unreleased, rather than quietly omitted.

BOM compare & baselines

Diff any two revisions — or two entirely different products — as one aligned tree. Freeze a structure as a named baseline and compare baselines to each other.

Effectivity, alternates, variants

Date-effective BOM lines with an “as of” view, substitute parts per line, and option-driven variants resolved by a configurator.

Requirements traceability

Typed requirements with decomposition, linked to the parts that satisfy them and the documents that verify them, plus a coverage matrix.

Documents & CAD

Versioned documents

Every upload is a new version, never an overwrite, linked to the parts, revisions and changes it belongs to. The whole history stays downloadable.

The vault: check out, check in

Take the lock before you edit and nobody else can upload over you. Locks show who holds them and expire on their own, so a colleague on holiday never blocks the drawing.

3D CAD in the browser

STEP, IGES and BREP tessellated server-side by an OpenCascade kernel, plus STL, glTF, OBJ and 3MF — orbit and inspect an assembly with no plugin and no desktop licence.

Redline markup & review

Pin a comment to a point on a 3D model or an image and thread the discussion there; PDFs and other formats take document-level notes. When a redline turns out to be a real change, escalate it into a change request that carries the whole thread with it.

cBOM from CAD

Read the assembly structure straight out of a STEP file, match products to parts, and reconcile all three views: what was modelled, what engineering released, and what manufacturing consumes.

Manufacturing & the floor

Process plans (mBOM)

Per-revision routings: sequenced operations with work centers and setup/run times, each consuming materials — the mBOM alongside the engineering one, reconciled against it.

Materials & what to buy

Declare the stock a machined part draws — alloy, form, net quantity, scrap factor. Explode a build of any quantity into gross material totals and estimated cost, with the parts that declare no material listed just as loudly, because those are the holes you would otherwise order against.

Serial & lot traceability

Record what was actually built, not just what was designed. Ask which shipped serial numbers contain a suspect lot and get the list, with the chain of consumptions that put it there — plus an as-built versus as-designed report showing every substitution and unplanned draw.

Service & as-maintained

A unit in the field is not the unit you shipped. Book a repair against a serial number, record the part that came out and the one that went in, and the genealogy updates — so the as-maintained structure stays true years after release.

Quality: NCR & CAPA

Nonconformances with severity, quantity and disposition that escalate straight into a change, and CAPAs whose Verify step refuses to advance without a root cause and a corrective action, and whose Close step refuses while any linked nonconformance is still open.

Change, approval & access

Engineering change control

Requests triaged into change notices, affected items with from → to revisions and stock dispositions, effectivity by date or by serial number, and a printable notice for the floor. The rules it enforces →

Electronic signatures

Signature requirements per role or named signer, password re-entry at the moment of signing, and a printable record carrying printed name, meaning and timestamp. The authentication method is recorded on every signature, so the strength of each one stays auditable. Change what a signer attested to — the affected items, their revisions, their dispositions — and the signature voids itself.

Item-level access control

Restrict an individual part, document, change, project or build unit to named people and groups. A restricted item answers exactly like one that does not exist — absent from lists, absent from search, and a plain 404 on a direct hit, because a “forbidden” reply already tells an outsider it is there.

Redaction that keeps the maths honest

A restricted child on a BOM you can read stays as a Restricted row with its quantity intact — never silently dropped. Roll-ups say so when a total could not be completed, so no one mistakes a censored number for a small one.

Projects & phase gates

Projects with an ordered gate set and deliverables bound to parts, documents, requirements or changes. A gate refuses to pass while an earlier gate is open or a required deliverable is outstanding.

Sourcing & cost

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Cost roll-up

Unit costs rolled through the multi-level BOM, with the parts whose cost is unknown named rather than quietly counted as zero.

AML & supplier RFQ

Approved manufacturer lists per part, then RFQs with quote comparison, lead time, MOQ, automatic lowest-price flagging and award tracking.

Supplier portal

Invite a supplier to quote and they get their own scoped login. They see the lines and their own prices — never a competitor's price, never who won, never an RFQ they weren't invited to.

Vendor catalog import

Drop in a distributor's CSV export — Digi-Key, Mouser, Farnell/Newark and RS Components are recognised from their column headers alone — map the columns once, and see every row classified as new, an update or a problem before anything is written. A careless import is how a part master fills with duplicates.

The difference

Change control that actually holds

Most lightweight tools let you edit a BOM and call it a day. TurboPLM treats a change as a governed object, because that is the part auditors, customers and your own future self care about.

A complete change chain

  • Requests (ECR) raised against a part, triaged and accepted into a change notice
  • Change notices (ECN) carrying affected items and from → to revisions
  • Effectivity by date or by serial number — “from unit 0042 onward” is how a factory actually cuts a change in
  • Stock disposition per part: use as is, rework, scrap, return to vendor
  • A printable change notice for the people on the shop floor

Rules the server enforces

  • A part can sit on only one active change at a time
  • Revisions under a change cannot be released behind its back
  • Releasing a change releases every one of its revisions atomically
  • Nothing releases while a child part is still unreleased
  • Mutations through the internal API land in an audit trail with who, what and when

Approvals that fit your process

  • Flat reviewer sign-off, or a configurable multi-step workflow
  • Steps that need any one approver, or all of them
  • Assignees by named user or by role
  • Tasks queued in each reviewer’s inbox, with notifications

Know the blast radius first

  • Where-used rollup across every affected part before you approve
  • Side-by-side BOM diff of exactly what the change does
  • Requirement coverage so you see what a change puts at risk
  • Analytics on change cycle time and BOM health
Need to know

Not everyone should see everything

A customer programme under NDA, an export-controlled assembly, an acquisition still unannounced — most PLM either gives everyone the whole database or forces you into a second system. TurboPLM lets you close a single item without splitting your product record in two.

Closed means invisible, not scolded

  • Grant a part, document, change, project or build unit to named people and groups
  • A restricted item is absent from lists, absent from search and absent from exports
  • A direct hit answers 404, byte for byte the same as an item that never existed — a “forbidden” reply would confirm it is there
  • Read access and write access are separate grants, so a reviewer can be let in without being let loose

Opt-in, so nothing changes until you say so

  • An item with no grants behaves exactly as before — deploying this locks nobody out
  • The first grant is what closes an item, and the interface says so before you add it
  • Group membership is resolved at query time; deactivating a group suspends every grant it holds at once
  • Administrators always retain a way back in, so an item cannot be orphaned

Hidden without lying

  • A restricted child on a BOM you can read stays visible as a Restricted row with its quantity intact
  • Cost and material roll-ups that crossed something hidden say so, rather than returning a smaller number that looks complete
  • A recall trace still walks through restricted assemblies, so the shipped list is never quietly short
  • Where-used still reports that something you cannot see consumes this part — the honest answer to “is it safe to change?”

Verified, not asserted

  • The test suite enumerates the server's own GET route table at runtime and drives each route against a restricted item
  • A read endpoint added tomorrow is swept the moment it is registered — and the sweep fails if it cannot address a route, rather than scoring it as covered
  • Access is resolved in one place in the codebase — no route re-implements the rules
  • Machine credentials are subject to the same filter; an API key never outranks the person who created it
Live demo

Try it on real data

A running instance, seeded with a four-level quadcopter product — two variants that share subassemblies, released and in-work revisions, process plans, a declared material catalog with one part deliberately left unspecified so the planning gap is visible, drawings under vault control with live redline threads, serialised build units with their as-built genealogy, field service records, and changes in flight. Create an account and click around.

Create your own account

Sign up with an email and password, or continue with Google. Accounts are read-only, so you can explore the whole system without changing the shared demo data.

Create a demo account Sign in to the demo

Looking for your own private workspace instead? Start free — nothing shared, nothing read-only.

  • No approval step — you are in immediately
  • Explore every module with real product data
  • Nothing to install

Prefer your own copy? git clone, docker compose up -d --build, and you have the same thing on your laptop in a couple of minutes — demo data included. Get the source →

Pricing

Free to start. 10 USD a month when you outgrow it.

The live demo is read-only and shared. This is the real thing: your own workspace, your own parts, yours to change. Both plans are the same software — every module, nothing held back for the paid one. The only differences are the two limits below.

Free

0 USD

No card required. No expiry — it does not turn into a trial.

  • One member — just you
  • Up to 100 parts
  • Every module, exactly as Pro has it
  • Your own private workspace, not the shared demo
Start free

Pro

10 USD per month

One price for the whole organisation, not per person.

  • Unlimited members — invite everyone, the price does not move
  • Unlimited parts
  • The same software as Free, with those two limits removed
  • Monthly by card through Stripe. Cancel any time.

Start on Free and move up from inside your workspace, the day a second person needs in or the day you reach part 101.

There is no trial of Pro to forget to cancel, and no card on file on Free to charge. Already have an account? Sign in. Would rather run it on your own hardware? The open-source version is free too, with no limits at all.

Self-hosted by design

Your product data stays yours

Product structures, costs and supplier terms are among the most sensitive data a hardware company has. TurboPLM is built to run where you decide.

No tenant, no metering

Run it on a laptop, a NAS or a VM. No seat counts, no usage telemetry, no per-user tax on inviting a colleague.

Plain Postgres

Your data sits in a database you can query, dump and back up yourself — no proprietary store, no export fee.

Open integration

Scoped API keys, signed webhooks, ERP-shaped item and BOM export, CSV import that shows you what will change before it writes.

Readable source

TypeScript end to end, a documented contract between the API and the client, and a schema you can extend.

Download and run it yourself

Clone the repository and bring the whole stack up with Docker Compose — the application, the database and the CAD service, seeded with demo data, in a couple of minutes.

Open source under the GNU AGPL v3: read it, run it, change it, and use it for anything at all. The one obligation is reciprocal — if you modify TurboPLM and offer it to others over a network, your changes have to be published too.

Get it on GitHub
Services

Get expert help

Every one of these works on your own installation just as well as on the hosted version — including the one that puts it there. Nothing here is a route into our servers: if you want the open-source build running on your hardware and never to speak to us again, that is a service we sell, at a price, below.

The software is free to run, and plenty of teams run it alone. These are for the times you would rather not — a migration you only want to do once, an integration into systems that are already load-bearing, or a second opinion on decisions that are painful to reverse. Prices are starting points, not quotes: scope moves them, and you get a fixed number before anything begins.

BOM & data migration

from $2,500
about two weeks

Your existing part master and bills of material — spreadsheets, an old PLM, or exports from CAD — loaded, structured and reconciled, with the numbering and revision scheme agreed first. Into your own installation or the hosted version, whichever you have chosen.

ERP & CAD integration

from $6,000
scoped per system

Wiring TurboPLM to the systems around it: item and BOM sync, CAD exports, and the handoff to purchasing and production.

Install it on your infrastructure

from $4,000
one engagement

The open-source build, running on your servers, your cloud or your NAS — hardened with backups, TLS, accounts and access groups, then handed over with a runbook so you operate it without us. No licence, no seat count, no ongoing fee unless you want one.

PLM advisory

from $1,200 / day
usually two to three days

Part numbering, revision strategy, release gates and change process — the decisions that are cheap to make once and expensive to revisit after three thousand parts carry them.

Keeping it running, on your infrastructure

TurboPLM is open source, so every bug fix and security patch is published and yours for free, whether you pay us or not — you are never buying access to a fix. What a support agreement buys is priority, a response time you can plan around, and somebody who performs the upgrade instead of writing you instructions.

Community

Free
no agreement

GitHub issues, answered when we get to them. Every release, every fix and every security patch, same as anyone. Plenty of teams need nothing else.

Supported

from $750 / month
cancel any time

A reply within one working day. Your bugs triaged ahead of the queue. Security patches flagged to you directly rather than found in a changelog, with upgrade notes for your version. You run the upgrade; we tell you what is in it and what to watch.

Managed

from $1,500 / month
cancel any time

Everything above, and we do the work: scheduled upgrades performed on your instance in a window you choose, your backups restored into a scratch database and verified each quarter, and a same-day reply when something is wrong.

What none of these cover: your hardware, your network, your own database tuning, and code you have changed yourself. The licence lets you modify TurboPLM freely — but a fork is a different product, and supporting one is a conversation rather than a plan.

Start a conversation

Tell us what you build and where your product data hurts. We will come back with a straight answer on how we can help. No obligation.

Get in touch