Stalmio compared with Ibcos Gold
Gold is the UK incumbent and has been since before most of us were in the trade. This is a fair account of where each one is stronger, written from what Ibcos publish about themselves and from what our own code does.
What Ibcos Gold is
Founded in 1979, based in Poole, owned by Constellation Software since 2012, and used by more than 330 dealerships across over 850 depots and 10,700 users in the UK and Ireland. Ibcos report that 81% of their customers have been with them for ten years or more. The product line splits into Gold for full dealerships and Gold Lite for smaller ones. Gold Cloud launched in September 2024, removing the need for an on-site server, and a modernisation programme with a dealer council began in January 2025, with a modernised portal reaching selected customers from autumn 2025, one module at a time. Those are their figures and their dates, not ours.
Side by side
Rows marked “they win” are the ones where the honest answer is that the other option does it and we do not. A comparison without any is not a comparison.
| What a dealer asks | Ibcos Gold | Stalmio |
|---|---|---|
| A website with your own stock on it | Not part of Gold. Dealers who want one buy a separate ecommerce product that bolts on. | Built in. Your storefront reads the same stock as your yard, so it is current without anyone updating it. |
| Posting to the machinery portals | Not part of the system. | Built in. Stock goes out to portals from the same record rather than being typed in twice. |
| What it costs | Not published. You ask, and they quote. | Published on our pricing page, in your currency, before you talk to anybody. |
| How long before you are running | An implementation, scoped with you. | Days rather than months for the modules you start with, because there is no server and no on-site install. |
| Hire contracts and the hire desk | Partial. Gold is built around sales, parts and service. | A full hire desk: contracts, deposits, per-period billing, overdue flags and a public availability catalogue. |
| General ledger and accountsThey win | Built in. One system holds the ledger as well as the trade. | Not built and not planned. Bills flow to Xero or wFirma, which own the ledger and issue the invoice. |
| Parts counter depthThey win | Deep: supersession, cores, barcode scanning and cycle counting. | Stock levels, bins, reorder points, costs and compatibility. Not a full parts counter, and there is no point of sale. |
| Depots as an organisational unitThey win | Yes, at 850 depots across their customer base. | Not yet. Stock is scoped by yard; a depot with its own users, permissions and separate figures is on the roadmap rather than in the product. Worth a conversation if you run several. |
When Ibcos Gold is the better choice
If you need your general ledger inside the same system, if manufacturer integrations matter to your franchise, if your parts counter needs supersession, cores and cycle counting, or if you run several depots each with its own manager and its own numbers, Gold does those things and Stalmio does not. Ten years of parts and machine history in Gold is also a real switching cost and pretending otherwise would waste your time.
What moving actually looks like
We do not have a Gold migration tool and will not claim one. Our import tooling was built for dealers coming off spreadsheets, not off a mature DMS. In practice a dealer moving from Gold is a project we scope with you, your accounts stay where they are for the year, and the parts of Stalmio that make sense first are the ones Gold does not cover at all: your storefront, your portal listings and your enquiry pipeline. Several dealers run that alongside Gold before deciding anything.
Questions we get asked
- Can we run Stalmio alongside Gold rather than replacing it?
- Yes, and for a Gold dealer it is usually the sensible first step. The overlap is smallest exactly where Stalmio is strongest, so the storefront, the portal listings and the enquiry pipeline can run beside Gold without touching your accounts or your parts counter.
- Does Stalmio do accounts?
- No, and by design. Bills raised here flow to Xero or wFirma, which issue the formal invoice and hold the ledger. Gold has accounting built in, so if a single system for everything including the ledger is the requirement, that is a genuine point in their favour.
- What does Stalmio cost compared with Gold?
- Our prices are published on our pricing page in your own currency. Ibcos do not publish theirs, so any figure we quoted for them would be guesswork and we are not going to print one.
Bring your own numbers
The fastest way to settle a comparison is to put your own stock and your own week in front of it. That is what a demo is for.