In short
- A manufacturer's footprint is mostly purchased goods and energy, and the source data is the ERP.
- Two different obligations pull in different directions: customer questionnaires want a company number, CBAM wants goods-level data.
- Buy for the obligation you actually have, because the tool that answers one rarely answers both.
A factory footprint is dominated by purchased goods and energy, with process emissions on top where the chemistry demands it. That means the winning tool is the one that reads your ERP purchase data cleanly and holds your meter readings beside it, not the one with the prettiest dashboard. Two separate obligations are driving purchases in 2027: customers in CSRD scope asking their suppliers for value chain data, and the CBAM regime for named import sectors. They want different artefacts. This page sorts the options by which of the two you are answering.
Disclosure up front: we make one of the platforms discussed here, and it is listed with the same evidence and the same caveats as everyone else.
Why does a manufacturer end up buying this at all?
Almost never because a regulator wrote to you. Two triggers do the work.
A customer asks. Companies in CSRD scope have to report on their value chain, so they push data requests down to their suppliers. Your customers are in scope even when you are not, and the request arrives as a spreadsheet with a deadline on it. That is the single most common reason a manufacturing sustainability manager starts shortlisting tools.
CBAM lands, above a threshold. The definitive regime started on 1 January 2026. Certificate sales open on 1 February 2027 for 2026 imports, and the first report and surrender fall on 30 September 2027. It applies to six sectors: cement, iron and steel, aluminium, fertilisers, electricity and hydrogen. For iron and steel, aluminium, fertilisers and cement, a 50-tonne-a-year de minimis threshold exempts roughly 90% of importers while keeping about 99% of embedded emissions in scope; electricity and hydrogen carry no threshold at all. Weigh your annual tonnage before you assume this applies to you. Above the threshold, it is a dated obligation with a number attached rather than a questionnaire you can answer approximately. We set out the mechanics in what you need to know about CBAM.
Those two triggers want different things, which is why so many manufacturers end up disappointed by a tool that was perfectly good at the other job.
What kind of tool does each obligation need?
| What you have been asked for | Where the data actually lives | What kind of tool handles it |
|---|---|---|
| Company footprint for a customer questionnaire | ERP purchase ledger, energy meters, fuel | Organisational carbon accounting platform |
| Scope 3 category 1 broken down by supplier | Purchase data coded by supplier and category | Carbon platform with supplier-specific factor overrides |
| A carbon number per product or per part | Bill of materials, plant energy, supplier certificates | Product footprinting or LCA, which is a different discipline |
| CBAM embedded emissions on imported goods | Goods data, supplier declarations, customs codes | Goods-level data handling, often a dedicated workflow |
| A full ESG and due diligence report | Everywhere, including HR and procurement policy | Broad ESG suite, not a carbon tool |
The rows are not interchangeable. A platform that produces a clean company inventory will not, on its own, give an automotive customer a footprint per part, and no amount of configuration changes that. We wrote up the general version of this confusion in ESG reporting software versus carbon accounting.
Which vendors are worth a shortlist slot?
All figures below were read on 27 August 2026 from the named G2 profile or the vendor pricing page. Open the profile before you rely on a number, because ratings move.
Greenly is the most visible general platform in the category, rated 4.7 from 27 reviews, with EU mid-market positioning. No published price.
Watershed is aimed at large organisations with complex operations, rated 4.5 from 25 reviews. Quote only. If you run many plants across several countries, this is the tier of product that expects that.
Coolset is a broad ESG and compliance platform for European mid-market companies with unusual regulation depth, rated 4.7 from 18 reviews. Of 725 English pages on their site on 27 August 2026, 197 were regulation content, the largest regulation library we measured. No published price.
Persefoni is enterprise and financial services oriented, rated 4.8 from 11 reviews. Free tier, quote-only paid plans.
EcoHedge targets UK SMEs and publishes numbers: a free Lite tier and Express Growth at GBP 990 per year, read from their pricing page on 27 August 2026. They also publish native Xero, QuickBooks and Sage integration, which is a real advantage if your emissions data is mostly transactional rather than metered.
Hedgehog builds the organisational inventory with an AI guide through the GHG Protocol, publishes a free account with no sales call, and Pro from EUR 1,200 per year, rated 4.7 from 9 reviews. Ours is the smallest evidence base of the established names on this page, and that is worth weighing.
Beyond the general platforms, our internal census of 26 competitor domains, read on 27 August 2026, records specialist product-data vendors whose sites are built almost entirely around product-level and LCA content rather than company inventories. If your requirement is a number per part, that is the category to look in.
Does your ERP decide the answer?
Largely, yes, and it is the question buyers most often skip.
The useful manufacturing datasets are the ERP purchase ledger, energy meters, production volumes and the bill of materials. If your purchase data is coded consistently by material and supplier, spend-based and activity-based factors will both work, and the first inventory is a matter of weeks rather than quarters. If the coding is inconsistent, no platform fixes that for you, and every vendor demo that looked effortless was running on clean data.
So test with your data, not theirs. Export three months of purchase lines and one year of meter readings, and ask each shortlisted vendor to load them during the evaluation. The tool that handles a messy real extract beats the tool that handles a tidy sample.
One consequence worth naming: a plant that has measured its own supplier emissions does not want a generic average silently replacing that figure. Ask whether you can override a factor with your own supplier-specific data and still see which entries used it.
What does Hedgehog actually cover here?
The platform guides GHG Protocol setup, data collection planning, upload and reporting, with human GHG experts reachable in the product. It carries over 20,000 spend-based and activity-based factors and lets you add organisation-specific or supplier-specific CO2 data. Reporting outputs cover the GHG Protocol, PPN 006 and the CO2-Prestatieladder, and the platform page names CSRD, SECR and SB253 under legislation, plus SBTi, B-Corp and EcoVadis workflows. Multi-entity management covers locations and sites, which matters once you have more than one plant.
Where does Hedgehog fall short on a plant floor?
Three limits, each from a paying customer on our public G2 profile.
Traceability of applied factors is not complete. A mid-market reviewer wrote in July 2026 that they could not see the conversion factor or distance calculation applied between their input file and the platform entry, and wanted a link to the source. In a manufacturing setting where an auditor will ask exactly that question, take it seriously and ask us to show you the current state.
There are few integrations with other software today. A mid-market reviewer asked for more of them in June 2026. Practically, ERP data arrives as an export, not a connector.
We are not a broad ESG platform. A mid-market reviewer rated us 3.5 out of 5 on G2 in June 2026 and said the platform is less complete for wider ESG and CSRD reporting, with no data source management and no decarbonisation target monitoring. That is accurate, and if your obligation is the full report rather than the emissions figure, buy accordingly.
What is the first move?
Decide which row of the table above you are actually in, because that decision eliminates most of the market before you speak to anyone. Then take one real ERP extract to two vendors from the matching row and make them load it live.
If the pressure is coming from customer questionnaires rather than a regulator, the fastest useful step is a first company inventory, and scope 3 support is the part that usually needs help. You can open a free account on the platform without a sales call, or book a meeting if you would rather scope it with someone first.
Sources: Hedgehog platform, Hedgehog on G2, Coolset on G2, Greenly on G2, Watershed on G2, Persefoni on G2, EcoHedge pricing, and an internal census of 26 competitor domains. All read 27 August 2026.
Facts on this page were last verified on 2026-09-17.
