The story of IBE Barcode Studio
A commercial Windows program from 2004 to 2020, discontinued — and reborn in 2026 as two free, open-source applications.
2004–2020 — the commercial years
IBE Barcode Studio launched in 2004 as the easy-to-use program that let anyone generate great barcode images in seconds. It shipped in two editions:
- Standard Edition (US$19.99) — thirteen barcode formats, two user-definable fields, auto-increment, printing of up to 1000 sequential labels, zoom and rotation, export to BMP/GIF/JPG/TIF, and support for over a thousand paper label templates.
- Professional Edition (US$39.99) — everything in Standard plus a spreadsheet-like designer, mixed layouts on one sheet, and three more formats: Code 93, MSI Plessey and ISBN.
Customers paid online — PayPal checkout, electronic delivery — requested a registration code, and unlocked the full version. The last builds date from around 2010; the site stayed up for years afterward.
2026 — the free, open-source revival
The name comes back with a different deal: everything is free, everything is open source under the MIT license, and nothing needs a registration code. The product is now two applications whose sources live on GitHub:
- IBE Barcode Generator — the label maker, rebuilt from scratch for Windows, Linux, macOS and the browser, covering all 16 formats of the legacy Professional list plus QR Code, Data Matrix, PDF417 and Aztec.
- IBE Barcode Scanner — the reader, a new iOS/Android app that reads what the Generator prints, including MSI Plessey and USPS Postnet, which no mobile scanning SDK supports and which the app decodes itself.
The original Windows downloads and registration-code system are retired for good. Old links
to download.php, howtobuy.php and the trial downloads now lead here.