Which WooCommerce Barcode Label Plugin Actually Prints Labels? YITH vs UKR Solution

If you run a WooCommerce store with physical inventory, at some point you'll need to print barcode labels - for stock management, order picking, warehouse organisation, or a point-of-sale setup. The obvious question: which plugin should you install?

For this review, we put two of the most popular options in the category through a real-world test: YITH WooCommerce Barcodes and QR Codes and UKR Solution's Print Barcode Labels for WooCommerce Products. Both plugins generate barcodes. Both claim to print them. But the real-world gap between the two, especially for anyone who actually needs to print onto label sheets or a thermal printer, turned out to be much bigger than their marketing pages suggest.

Here's how they compared.

What a barcode printing plugin actually needs to do

Most WooCommerce stores evaluating a barcode plugin have a fairly standard set of requirements:

• Generate barcodes for a catalogue of WooCommerce products.

• Print labels onto standard A4 adhesive label sheets (the kind you buy from Officeworks or any office supply retailer).

• Occasionally print to a thermal label printer for one-off labels.

• Filter which products get printed, by category, by selection, or by stock level.

• Format labels so they actually line up with the pre-cut stickers on the page, with no wasted sheets.

That last point is where things get interesting, and it's where the two plugins diverge sharply.

YITH WooCommerce Barcodes and QR Codes: the strengths

Let's give YITH fair credit first. They're one of the biggest WooCommerce plugin developers in the world, the plugin has over 10,000 customers and a 4.4-star rating, and there are genuine things it does very well:

• Automatic barcode generation on every new product and order. Set it up once and every product in your catalogue gets a barcode assigned automatically.

• Display barcodes on product pages and in order emails. If your use case is digital, say sending a QR code to a customer with their order confirmation, or displaying barcodes on the front-end, YITH handles this cleanly.

• Good integration with the YITH ecosystem. If you're already using YITH Point of Sale or YITH Event Tickets, the barcodes plugin slots in without friction.

• Stock management by scan. A built-in shortcode lets you create a page where scanning a barcode increases or decreases stock.

• Wide barcode format support for digital use. EAN-13, EAN-8, UPC-A, CODE 39/93/128, STD 25, INT 25, and Codabar.

If you only need barcodes to exist, stored in the database, displayed on the screen, emailed to customers, used inside a POS, YITH is a perfectly reasonable choice.

YITH WooCommerce Barcodes and QR Codes: where it falls short

The problem is that a lot of stores, and certainly most physical retailers, need to actually print the labels. Testing that side of the plugin surfaced limitations that YITH's own support team confirms are not configurable.

You can't print barcodes for a specific category. You can print for all products, or for one product at a time. There's no middle ground. When pressed on this, YITH support confirmed directly: "it is not possible to print the barcodes for a specific category." For a store with a few hundred SKUs across multiple departments, this is a significant workflow problem.

You can't configure label sheet layouts. This is the big one. If you're printing onto pre-cut A4 label sheets, you need to tell the plugin how many labels per page, what size each label is, what the page margins are, and where each label sits on the sheet. None of this is possible in YITH. Again, from YITH support directly: "it is not possible to set margins" and the plugin "just prints the barcodes with a basic page format" that cannot be customised. Rows are set automatically based on the number of products, which means the labels won't line up with the physical stickers on your label sheet. You end up either wasting entire sheets or giving up on label paper altogether.

There are no published label sheet specifications. Repeated requests for the dimensions of the default print format, so buyers could at least source matching label sheets, went unanswered. No specification is published.

No thermal or roll printer support. YITH's printing output is a PDF that assumes an A4 page. There's no native support for DYMO, Zebra, Brother, or any of the common thermal label printers that most small retailers actually use for barcode labels.

For a store that wants to print labels onto anything other than a plain A4 sheet and accept whatever layout comes out, these are disqualifying limitations. To YITH's credit, their refund process was fast and professional when we flagged the mismatch between the plugin's capabilities and the printing use case.

UKR Solution Print Barcode Labels: what it does

UKR Solution's Print Barcode Labels plugin approaches the problem from the opposite direction. Where YITH treats printing as a secondary feature bolted onto a digital-first plugin, UKR treats printing labels onto physical paper and thermal stock as the core job.

Here's what that looks like in practice.

Every printer type is supported. A4, Letter, P4, and roll/thermal printers from DYMO, Zebra, Brother, Arkscan, MFLABEL, ROLLO, BCL, TEROW, and others. If your printer isn't on the list, you can define custom paper and label dimensions in millimetres or inches, and the plugin handles it. The documentation claims support for 99.9% of printers on the market, and in testing that's not marketing puff, it genuinely handles whatever you throw at it.

Configurable label sheets. You can select from a range of common label sheet layouts or build your own. Every dimension is editable: page size, number of rows and columns, label width and height, margins, gaps between labels. If you've got a box of pre-cut label sheets sitting on your desk, you can set the plugin up to match them exactly. For anyone who's spent time trying to print labels and having them drift across the page by a few millimetres, this alone is worth the price of admission.

Flexible generation: products, categories, orders, users, promocodes. You can generate labels for an entire category, for selected products from the product list, for specific orders, for product variations, or manually by entering data. Category-level printing, the thing YITH can't do, is a first-class feature here.

Quantity control. You can specify how many of each label to print, print based on stock quantity, or print one-offs. This matters when you're relabelling after a stocktake or printing in bulk for a new product launch.

More barcode formats. GS1 family, GTIN, UPC-A/E, EAN-13/8, QR Code, CODE128, Data Matrix, and CODE39. Notably, Data Matrix and GS1 are supported here but not in YITH, which matters if you're working with modern retail or pharmaceutical requirements.

Custom label templates with full design control. The Business and Premium plans include a Label Template Editor where you can add your logo, arbitrary static text, product images, multiple barcodes on a single label, and any custom field or attribute from your store using shortcodes like [cf=_custom_field_name] or [attr=attribute_name]. If you've got ACF fields, ATUM stock locations, or WooCommerce attributes, you can put them on the label.

Integration with third-party plugins. ATUM (for inventory management), Contact Form 7, Flamingo, and others are supported out of the box. The Premium plan includes an API for custom integrations.

Save as PDF. Every label run can be exported as a PDF and printed later, or sent to a different device.

Side-by-side feature comparison

Pricing

YITH WooCommerce Barcodes and QR Codes is sold as a single tier for around US$89.99 per year (the exact list price on the YITH site is revealed at checkout).

UKR Solution offers three tiers, all annual:

• Basic - US$99/year. One site, basic label template (4 text fields), standard support. This is the comparable tier to YITH, and it already outclasses it on every print-related feature.

• Business - US$159/year. One site, basic template with 8 text fields, priority support, Label Template Editor for custom designs, logos, and multiple barcodes per label.

• Premium - US$279/year. Five sites, everything in Business, plus top-priority support, custom label development by the UKR team, and API access.

For a single-site store needing proper label printing, UKR Basic at US$99 is roughly US$10/year more than YITH and delivers a feature set YITH doesn't come close to matching. If you need branded or complex labels, Business is the sweet spot.

Which one is right for you?

YITH is the right choice if:

• You need barcodes primarily for digital use: product pages, order emails, on-screen display.

• You're already running other YITH plugins (Point of Sale, Event Tickets) and want unified barcode handling across them.

• You don't need to print onto physical label sheets with any precision, or you only print the occasional one-off label on a standard A4 printer.

UKR Solution is the right choice if:

• You actually need to print barcode labels onto pre-cut label sheets (A4, Letter, or otherwise) and have them line up properly.

• You use a thermal or roll label printer (DYMO, Zebra, Brother, etc.).

• You need to print by category, by variation, by stock quantity, or by any other filter.

• You need custom fields, attributes, or branding on your labels.

• You want multiple barcodes, logos, or images on a single label.

• You're using ATUM, WCFM, or other inventory plugins you need to integrate with.

Verdict

For the WooCommerce stores most likely to be shopping for a barcode plugin, that is, those printing physical labels as part of their operations, UKR Solution is the clear winner. It's not close.

That's not a knock on YITH as a company. They're a reputable developer and the Barcodes and QR Codes plugin is genuinely useful for digital barcode workflows. It's just not built for serious label-printing use, and anyone trying to use it that way will hit walls fast: no category filtering, no custom label sheet layouts, no margin control, no thermal printer support.

UKR Solution, by contrast, is built by people who clearly understand the practical realities of printing barcode labels in a working retail or warehouse environment. Their support is responsive (their CEO personally answers questions in the comments section on their product page, often within a day), the plugin is actively maintained, and the pricing is fair for what you get.

If you're evaluating barcode plugins for WooCommerce and printing is any part of your use case, save yourself the detour and start with UKR.