Choosing a FiveM Inventory Script (Without the Marketing)

• On QBCore — you use qb-inventory. It is what QBCore's own official txAdmin recipe deploys, alongside qb-target, qb-banking and about seventy other resources. It is GPL-3.0 and actively maintained. Fighting this is possible and rarely worth it.
• On Qbox — you use ox_inventory. Qbox is built around the ox stack: ox_lib, oxmysql and ox_inventory are listed as its dependencies, and its official recipe installs them for you. This is the happy path.
• On ESX — you have a genuine choice. ESX now ships its own first-party esx_inventory inside the esx_core monorepo, and ox_inventory supports ESX through its esx bridge. Both are real options.

So the interesting decision only really exists on ESX. Everywhere else, picking a fight with your framework's default inventory means rewriting every resource that touches items.

Compare on facts, not on benchmarks

You will see posts claiming one inventory is "0.02ms" and another is "0.15ms". Ignore them. Resource timings depend on your player count, your other scripts, your hardware and what the players are doing — a number from someone else's server tells you nothing about yours, and nobody publishes their methodology. If performance matters to you, profile it yourself on your own server (our performance guide explains exactly how).

Here is what you can actually check, and what it means.

Framework support (the one that ends careers)

Verify it in the repository, not in a blog post. ox_inventory: ox_core, ESX, Qbox, ND Core. qb-inventory: qb-core. If a script's README does not name your framework, assume it does not support it.

Licence (nobody reads this, and they should)

The ox stack is not uniformly licensed, and the differences matter if you are building anything commercial:

• ox_inventory — GPL-3.0. Strong copyleft.
• ox_lib — LGPL-3.0. Weaker copyleft.
• oxmysql — LGPL-3.0.
• ox_target — MIT. Permissive.
• qb-inventory — GPL-3.0, like the rest of QBCore.

If you are running a normal community server, none of this will ever trouble you. If you are packaging a modified inventory into a paid server bundle or a "starter pack" you sell, GPL-3.0 has real obligations and you should understand them rather than discovering them in a takedown request.

Maintenance (the slow risk)

An abandoned inventory is not an immediate problem — it is a problem in eighteen months when the framework moves and nothing updates. Check the commit history yourself, not the marketing.

At the time of writing, ox_inventory was the most actively developed of the group, at release v2.47.9 with commits landing the same day we looked. qb-inventory is maintained, but on a slower cadence. Both are alive. Activity is not the same as quality — a stable, finished script does not need daily commits — but a repository with no commits in a year on a fast-moving platform is a liability.

Slot-based vs weight-based

This is the actual gameplay decision, and it is a design choice rather than a technical one.

ox_inventory describes itself as a slot-based inventory with metadata. Metadata is the part worth understanding: it lets an item instance carry its own data — durability, a serial number, a registration, who owns it. That is what makes weapon serials, ID cards and quality-degrading items possible without inventing a parallel system. If your server's roleplay leans on items being specific rather than generic, metadata support is the feature that matters most, and it is easy to overlook while you are comparing screenshots of the UI.

The feature surface that actually matters

Once compatibility is settled, the things worth comparing are the ones that other resources will need to hook into. An inventory is not really a UI — it is an API that a hundred other scripts call, and the question is whether it exposes the concepts your server depends on.

• Stashes. Persistent, shared storage. Every gang hideout, every business back room, every police evidence locker is a stash. If your inventory's stash implementation is weak, a surprising number of roleplay ideas quietly become impossible.
• Trunk and glovebox. Per-vehicle storage keyed to the vehicle, not the player. This underpins most drug, delivery and heist scripts, and it has to survive the vehicle being stored and retrieved from a garage.
• Shops. Nearly every job script assumes it can define a shop and have the inventory render it.
• Crafting. Recipe definitions that consume items and produce items, with metadata carried across if you want quality to mean anything.
• Item images. Mundane, and the single most common source of "why does my inventory look broken" — every item needs an image file, and adding a hundred items means adding a hundred images.

The reason to think about these before you install anything is that the inventory is the dependency other scripts declare. A job script does not just "work with QBCore" — it works with QBCore and whatever inventory that job script's author was using. Two servers on the same framework with different inventories are not the same platform, and a script written for one may need real work on the other.

The support question nobody asks

One more line from ox_inventory's own repository, worth quoting because it sets expectations honestly: it states that it does not guarantee compatibility or support for third-party resources.

That is not a criticism — it is a reasonable position for a free, open-source project, and it is more honest than most. But absorb what it means for you. When a paid script you bought does not work with your inventory, that is your problem to solve, and the answer is not going to arrive from either author. Budget time for it, and prefer resources that explicitly name your inventory in their requirements rather than ones that vaguely claim broad compatibility.

How to actually choose

1. Pick your framework first. It very nearly picks your inventory for you. If you have not chosen, our framework comparison built on live server data covers what the fleet actually runs.
2. Take your framework's default unless you have a specific reason not to. On QBCore that is qb-inventory; on Qbox that is ox_inventory; on ESX, either.
3. Check the supported-framework list in the repository yourself. Not in a blog post. Not in a store description. Assume everything you have read is out of date.
4. Check the licence if you are selling anything.
5. Then look at the UI, which is the thing everyone starts with and is genuinely the least important item on this list.

And decide early. The inventory is load-bearing: every job, shop and crafting script on your server is written against it, so changing your mind after launch means touching all of them. You can browse inventory scripts and their declared framework support on the FiveM scripts marketplace, where every listing states the framework it targets.

Researched and drafted with AI assistance. How ViceHub guides are made