General Purpose
Flexible barcodes for labels, tickets, and asset tags. Choose a format below to generate one for free — no sign-up required.
About general purpose
These are the barcodes with no registry behind them. Nobody issues you a Code 128 number and nobody has to — you decide what the symbol says, print it, and scan it back. That makes this the right family for anything that stays inside your own operation: asset tags, shelf locations, work orders, event tickets, job sheets, library cards.
Code 128 is the one to reach for by default. It encodes the full ASCII set, packs digits two to a symbol character, and carries a mandatory check character, so it is both the densest and the most reliably decoded of the four. Code 39 is older and looser — it needs no check digit, encodes a limited character set, and takes roughly 30% more width for the same data — but it is readable by very old equipment, which is the only real reason to still choose it. Code 93 is a denser reworking of Code 39, and Codabar survives mainly in libraries and blood banks, where the installed base is decades deep.
Because nothing validates the contents, the discipline has to come from you: fix a format for your identifiers before you print a thousand labels, and keep the length constant so a scanner reading a partial symbol produces an error rather than a plausible wrong answer.
General Purpose — frequently asked questions
Code 128, unless you are feeding equipment old enough to require Code 39. It is narrower for the same content, handles letters, digits and punctuation, and its check character catches misreads that Code 39 will pass through silently.