The PDQ pair are sold side by side, demoed together and usually wanted together — but budgets rarely approve everything at once. This page gives the buying order straight: it depends on which pain is costing you more today, the hours spent installing, or the questions you cannot answer.
One line frames the whole decision: Inventory sees, Deploy changes. If your week disappears into walking software from desk to desk, you are missing the changing half. If audits, refresh planning and “which PCs still run that old version” questions ambush you monthly, you are missing the seeing half. Below, both orders argued honestly — including the case for waiting and trialling properly.
If the fleet is small enough that you roughly know it — a few dozen PCs, standard software, one office — and your recurring pain is the install tour, Deploy pays back first. The Package Library alone removes the weekly browser-and-reader rounds, and every hour saved funds the argument for Inventory later. Offices that start here typically add Inventory when the question shifts from doing the work to proving and targeting it.
If the honest answer to "how many PCs run the old accounting version" is a shrug, Deploy would be pushing software at a fleet you cannot describe. Inventory first builds the facts — hardware, software, versions, updates — and its collections then make every later Deploy purchase sharper, because targeting by live data is the pair's best trick. Audit pressure, licence questions and refresh budgeting are all Inventory-shaped pains.
Both products offer a 14-day trial — run them together on the same console, linked, even if the budget will only buy one. The linked pair is the real product experience: scan, build a collection, deploy to it, rescan. That fortnight tells you which half your office reaches for daily, and it costs nothing but the setup time. The video's trial walkthrough for Deploy, and the companion video for Inventory, are enough to get both running in an afternoon.
PDQ has historically licensed per admin — per technician using the console — rather than per PC managed, which is why a two-person IT team can cover hundreds of PCs without the per-endpoint maths that makes other platforms swell. Editions and packaging change though: schedules, auto deployment and heartbeat sit in the paid tiers, and the exact split moves over time. Read the current page on pdq.com, price the edition that holds the features you trialled, and ignore any older blog's rupee-or-dollar figure — including ours.
If your fleet is five PCs in one room, both tools are pleasures you do not need; a shared folder of installers and a spreadsheet serve honestly at that size. The pair earns its money when repetition or blindness starts costing hours every month. Buying at the right moment — when the pain is measured, not imagined — is also a legitimate outcome of a good trial.
Watch both tutorials — Deploy here, Inventory in its companion video — then run the linked trial before spending anything.
▶️ Watch Full VideoYes, completely — targets can be typed in, pulled from Active Directory or imported from lists. What you give up is live targeting: collections that update themselves from scan data, plus heartbeat triggers, which need Inventory's online tracking. Deploy alone is a strong tool; the pair is a system.
For most small offices: schedules. They convert deployment from an attended chore into a background rhythm, and they sit below the top tier. Auto deployment and heartbeat are genuine luxuries that earn their upgrade later, once the basics have been running for a few months.
The agentless design scales well across LAN and VPN fleets into the hundreds of PCs comfortably. The strain shows with fleets that live off-network — laptops that rarely touch the LAN or VPN. That is the scenario PDQ Connect, the vendor's cloud product, was built for, and it is an architecture change, not a failure of the pair.