DEAR Systems Is Now Cin7 Core: What Changed (2026)
DEAR Systems is now Cin7 Core. Cin7 acquired DEAR in 2021 and renamed it on January 9, 2023, in the same announcement that renamed the original Cin7 product to Cin7 Omni. The software did not shut down, your data did not go anywhere, and if you’re logging in every morning you already know that.
What is confusing is not the rename. It is that the rename only reached the marketing. Your login page, your API host, your developer docs and your Shopify listing all still say DEAR, and Cin7’s own current help center still tells you to go to a dearsystems.com address to get your API key.
Every URL on this page I loaded myself on September 9, 2026. Where a date comes from somebody other than Cin7, I say so on the line it appears. The links are here so you can check them yourself.
What happened to DEAR Systems?
Cin7 bought it in 2021 and gave it a new name two years later.
The announcement is dated January 9, 2023, and the operative sentence is short:
“The Cin7 product will now be Cin7 Omni; DEAR will be Cin7 Core, and the Cin7 Orderhive name will not change.”
The announcement describes the change as the culmination of Cin7’s 2021 acquisitions of DEAR Systems and Orderhive, and attributes that to CEO David Leach. So one company ended up with three products and three names, and renamed two of them on the same day.
That is the whole event. No shutdown, no forced migration, no data export deadline. If you have been waiting for the other shoe to drop on this one, it dropped in January 2023 and it was a logo.
Is DEAR Systems still available?
Yes, under a different name, and the search results are a worse guide than you would expect.
I ran the searches again on September 9, logged out, from one machine. Ranks move, so read the positions as a snapshot rather than a law. Ask Google what happened to DEAR Systems and the top two results are news stories about Cin7 acquiring it in 2021. Right company, wrong event, two years early. Cin7’s own rename announcement sits fifth. The pages that do explain the rename correctly are third-party consultancies and blogs rather than the vendor.
Search the product name instead and it gets worse. softwaresuggest.com/dear-inventory is titled “DEAR Inventory: Details, Pricing, Features, & Integration in 2026”. softwarepath.com/software/dear-systems offers “DEAR Systems | Compare 2026 Reviews, Pricing & Features”. Both invite you to shortlist this year a product whose brand ended in January 2023. The one that made me laugh is seo.ai/blog/cin7-vs-dear-inventory, still titled “Cin7 vs DEAR Inventory: Which Is Better in 2025?”. It is a head-to-head comparison of a product against itself.
The page you would most want to be current is not either. dearsystems.com/inventory-software/development-roadmap still resolves, and it redirects to Cin7’s marketing homepage, which says nothing about DEAR at all. You asked where the product was going and got a brochure for a company you did not search for.
None of these people are lying on purpose. They are about three and a half years out of date, and nobody has an incentive to fix a directory page. But the practical effect is that a buyer doing normal research gets told DEAR is a separate product they can still choose, and it has not been one since 2023.
I’m not neutral here, so read this next part with that in mind: I sell against Cin7. That is exactly why I would rather this page be the boring accurate one. If you are evaluating Cin7 Core, the useful version of that conversation starts from what it actually is.
Why does everything still say DEAR?
Because renaming a brand is a marketing project and renaming a system is an engineering one, and only the first one shipped.
Every row below I loaded on September 9, 2026:
| What you touch | Address | What the page calls itself |
|---|---|---|
| Marketing site | dearsystems.com | Redirects to cin7.com |
| Login and the app | inventory.dearsystems.com | Login | Cin7 Core |
| API v2 documentation | dearinventory.docs.apiary.io | Cin7 Core Developer Portal |
| Shopify App Store | apps.shopify.com/dear-inventory | Cin7 Core Inventory Management |
| Old support site | support.dearsystems.com | Redirects to help.core.cin7.com |
The marketing brand is gone. The machinery is still called DEAR.
My favorite detail is not the old stuff, though. Cin7 now runs a separate help center per product, help.core.cin7.com for Core and help.omni.cin7.com for Omni. The plain help.cin7.com forwards through a second domain and lands on the Omni side, where the page I asked for came back 404. Fine, I had the wrong address. But the current Core connection guide, on the current Core domain, the one a developer reads this week, says the API “is part of Cin7 Core web application at https://inventory.dearsystems.com. You will need to create an account there before you can use the API.” Cin7’s newest documentation sends you to the dead brand’s front door. The same article points you at dearinventory.docs.apiary.io for the v2 documentation, so both addresses it hands a developer carry the old name.
There’s one part of this I could not resolve, and it may matter more than the rest. Cin7 Core’s v2 API documentation is hosted on Apiary, which is an Oracle property. Several developer write-ups, this one included, say Oracle is retiring Apiary, some pointing at a 2026 sunset. I could not confirm that from Oracle directly, and apiary.io itself was serving normally on September 9 with no notice on it. So I don’t know whether Cin7’s developer portal has to move again. I’m flagging it because if it does, the docs will change address for the second time while still carrying the old brand in the hostname.
For an operator this is mostly harmless. For anyone integrating, it is a small tax that never stops being charged: every guide, forum answer, Stack Overflow post and internal runbook written before 2023 points at hostnames that still work, under a product name that no longer exists, and you can never quite tell whether the thing you are reading is current or ancient.
I keep running into this and it keeps being the same shape. When Linnworks bought SkuVault the docs stayed put. When Skubana became Extensiv they did the same. TradeGecko is the version where the software actually ended. DEAR is the fourth in a row, and at this point the pattern says more about the category than about Cin7.
Even the people paid to know get caught. An e-commerce systems consultant I work with, who implements these platforms for clients and refers some of them to us, was talking to me in March 2026 about support quality and said “DEAR Systems, and Cin7” as though they were two different companies. Three years after the rename. One operator comparing platforms called it “Cin7 DEAR,” splitting the difference. Nobody is confused about the software. The noun is what keeps tripping people.
What happened to Cin7 Orderhive?
It is gone, and the way it went is worth thirty seconds of your time.
Re-read the January 2023 announcement above. It renamed two products and reassured everyone about the third: “the Cin7 Orderhive name will not change.” That was accurate and beside the point.
What I can tell you first-hand, because I checked on September 9: orderhive.com redirects to cin7.com, app.orderhive.com does not answer at all, and Cin7’s own /orderhive/ page returns a 404. The product is gone. For the dates I’m relying on migration guides and review sites, which put Cin7’s discontinuation announcement in April 2023, about three months after the rebrand, and end of service at March 31, 2024. I could not find Cin7’s own announcement still published anywhere, so treat those two dates as secondhand.
None of that means Cin7 behaved badly. Consolidating three overlapping products into two is a defensible call, and plenty of companies would have done it sooner. The useful takeaway is narrower: a vendor telling you a name will not change is a statement about this quarter’s branding, and it says nothing about whether the product survives. So ask about the product.
Did the software change, or only the name?
Mostly the name, at least at the moment of the rename. Same database, same login, same features the next morning.
Since then Cin7 Core has been developed as Cin7’s mid-market product, and it is a capable one. It is the platform I run into most often in deals, and it wins plenty of them. If you want the specifics of how it’s built rather than how it’s branded, I ran six API checks against it in Cin7 API vs SKU.io API using only Cin7’s published documentation. Two findings from that piece are worth carrying here: Cin7 Core V1 reports a rate limit as 503 while V2 reports the same limit as 429, and API access is a paid add-on on every plan rather than something included.
Should the rename make you switch?
No. If Cin7 Core is running your business and you are not fighting it, a new logo is not a migration trigger, and I would say that even though I would like your business.
Migrations cost more than the quote says. You lose the muscle memory, you rebuild the integrations, and the first month is worse than the last month of whatever you left. That is worth it when the software is genuinely failing you, and it is a bad trade when the actual complaint is that your invoice says a different word than it used to.
The reasons operators do leave Cin7 are a different subject, and they are not about branding. I went through every Cin7 mention across our recorded calls and wrote them up in what Cin7 switchers actually choose. They cluster into sync you can’t trust, support you can’t reach, onboarding that collapses, accounting that drops marketplace fees, and workflows the platform won’t bend to. If one of those is your week, that is a real conversation. “They renamed it” is not.
Who should look at something else
If you are under about $1M on a single sales channel, both Cin7 Core and SKU.io are more system than your operation needs. Zoho Inventory or inFlow will cost less and annoy you less. If your requirements start with SOC 2 and a big-firm implementation program, neither of us is your lane today.
Where the comparison gets real is the shape that breaks simple tools: several thousand SKUs, Shopify plus Amazon plus a marketplace or two, bundles and kits, FBA alongside a 3PL, wholesale running next to DTC, and a finance person who needs the marketplace fees to land in the right place.
Where to go from here
If you landed here searching a name that no longer exists, the short version is: the software is fine, it is called Cin7 Core, and it has been called that since January 9, 2023.
If you are evaluating rather than just identifying, what Cin7 switchers actually choose is built from recorded operator calls, Cin7 API vs SKU.io API is the technical read, and inventory management API: what to check first is the six-check list I’d run on any vendor including us.
And if you want to see the difference rather than read about it, I’ll do the demo myself and pull up the ledger behind a stock number on your own catalog. Book a demo.