💰 What is the cheapest PDM tool out there?

Product Data Management (PDM) is how you manage and publish your product data. The goal is to ensure all the stakeholders share a common understanding, confusion is minimized, and quality is maintained.

The simplest PDM system is to put a bunch of files on a fileserver and talk about them in meetings, emails, or other messages. This is a start, but it is error-prone and does not scale.

There are many commercial PDM tools available. CAD systems, like Onshape, provide PDM features. Software developers have been doing PDM to various degrees for decades using open-source tools. You have SCCS (1972), RCS (1982), CVS (1986), SVN (2000), and Git (2005).

Git and its various hosting platforms support a number of the features needed for PDM. The cost is minimal and you probably already have people on staff who are experts at using it. For small teams, Git may just be the PDM solution you need. However, there is a learning curve, and some additional tooling may be required to make it accessible—more on that in the future.