If you are searching for an Odoo alternative, the usual triggers are per-user cost and the Enterprise licence. Here is the alternative we build on, measured against a list you can hold us to, including what you give up.
If none of them applies to you, Odoo is probably fine where it is.
Odoo's Standard and Custom plans are priced per user per month. A firm that adds a storekeeper, two site engineers and a part-time accountant watches the subscription grow with the user count.
Odoo Community is LGPL v3 and can be downloaded and self-hosted. Odoo Enterprise is a separate licence that requires an active subscription covering your user count and forbids redistributing the code.
For the subscription product, Odoo's pricing page lists on-premise hosting, external API access and Studio on the Custom plan. Community can be downloaded and self-hosted at no licence cost.
Odoo lists Studio, its customisation tool, on the Custom plan. If shaping the subscription product to your business is part of the plan, check which plan carries the tools you will use.
Our list, stated before any product, so you can see where it is tilted. The last two items say so themselves.
The open-source ERP maintained by Frappe, against each item above.
ERPNext is released under the GNU GPL v3 as a single product, on the Frappe framework, which is MIT; there is no Enterprise edition and no paid edition to keep current. It carries no per-user licence fee; hosting on Frappe Cloud is priced by compute, and self-hosting is a path Frappe itself describes, with no plan upgrade attached. The framework generates a REST API for every record type out of the box. In our experience customisation is done by defining record types, fields and workflows as data and by installing a separate app beside the core, which is what keeps the build and the product apart. The data sits in your own database.
An alternative page that lists no trade-offs is an advertisement. These are ours, in our judgement.
We build business systems on ERPNext for firms that run on projects, materials and site work. What you get, every time.
How your business actually runs, written down to the standard that someone with no context can follow it, then wired so it executes.
Customers, jobs, quotes, materials, invoices in your own database on ERPNext, in an open schema.
Nobody on your payroll has to become the person who maintains software.
If you stop, your data leaves usable. That is a term, not a reassurance.
If your business is close to standard, or you already have a partner you trust on the platform you are on, we will say so on the call.
Including the ones where the answer is to stay where you are.
It depends on who will shape and run the system. For a firm whose headcount on the system will grow, whose process is specific, and who wants no paid edition to keep current, ERPNext is the open-source alternative we build on and the one we think fits that shape: GNU GPL v3 for the product, no per-user fee, self-hosting without a plan upgrade. In our view, for a firm that is close to standard and wants the biggest module catalogue, Odoo itself may still be the right answer.
A complete one. Frappe, which maintains it, lists accounting, sales, procurement, stock, manufacturing, projects, point of sale and support.
Odoo prices its Standard and Custom plans per user per month; its One App Free covers a single app for unlimited users on Odoo Online. ERPNext has no per-user licence fee; you pay for hosting, which Frappe Cloud prices by compute, and for whoever implements and runs it. The figures themselves change, so read both vendors' pricing pages rather than a number repeated here.
In our experience the answer depends entirely on how customised the Odoo instance is, and that cannot be known from the outside. Ask anyone quoting a migration to look at your data first.
Because the firms we build for put storekeepers, site engineers and crew leads on the system, their processes are specific, and in our view the per-user model fits that shape poorly. A single open-source edition, no per-user fee and a build kept apart from a standard core fit it. It is a fit decision for our trades; we do not claim ERPNext is better for everyone.
Tell us how your business actually runs and how many people need to touch the system. A conversation about whether an alternative is worth the move, and what the move would actually involve.
