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Odoo: Open-Source ERP
- claytongulick 9mo agoI remember when this was OpenERP. Been through the source code, interesting ideas in it.
- toastal 9mo agoWhy not Dolibarr?
- ofrzeta 9mo agoBecause no one knows it. Are you using it?
- LaurentD_Eldy 9mo agoDolibarr is used by 1 million of users (so not as much as Odoo with 16m users). Similar to Odoo in a lot of point but full opensource, more affordable than Odoo and easier to use and customize. Has less external addons (1200 vs 40000) than Odoo but external addons are rarely required. Odoo would be a better choice if you have a very large company with an internal team of developper, Dolibarr will be easier and cheaper if you have less than 5000 employees. Disclaimer: i'm on old Odoo integrator, now Dolibarr developer.
- toastal 9mo agoThat is very good insight. Thank you. I recently added H2O+PostgreSQL support for the NixOS module & it has been running fine for me. I had a bit of a hard time assessing the open source options but Dolibarr using PHP meant it was probably going to perform consistently & better than Python or Node.js-based ones rather than trying to contrast their featuresets, not having much domain knowledge about ERP/CRMs.
- foundart 9mo agolooks interesting https://www.dolibarr.org/ https://www.dolibarr.org/ https://github.com/Dolibarr/dolibarr https://github.com/Dolibarr/dolibarr
- john61 9mo agoThis is open core. An old free fork: https://tryton.org https://tryton.org
- unmole 9mo agoI don't have anything against Odoo but it's more accurately desribed as open core. ERPNext on the other hand is fairly mature and fully open source: https://frappe.io/erpnext https://frappe.io/erpnext
- infogulch 9mo agoERPNext has a very peculiar home-grown deployment system that is required to host it yourself. I didn't much like it when I looked into it a while back.
- LaurentD_Eldy 9mo ago[dead]
- infogulch 9mo agoI've been looking into switching our manufacturing business over to Odoo, replacing Dynamics GP + another mfg software. My impression is that it's very customizable, but may require some specialized expertise to implement correctly for one's environment. Enterprise would probably net save us money on just support contracts compared to our current setup. "Open-Source" is a bit of a misnomer. The majority of the important modules are enterprise only. That said even enterprise is source-available for paying customers which is a breath of fresh air compared to the competition.
- thatoleg 9mo agoHaving enterprise as open source gives additional freedom and cost savings in terms of technology roadmap. When you need something now, you can build in-house quickly or via external help. No fees to be just able to contribute to the roadmap and wait for 1-2 update cycles (typically 6-12 months) for other ERP systems.
- firekvz 9mo agoOpen core, not open source, only for the Community edition, wait till you notice that you will need enterprise license since most powerfull features/addons are enterprise only and you end up paying more money for "open source" ERP than normal ERP
- esperent 9mo agoIt is at least "source available". Once you pay for an enterprise subscription (or just search around) you get the source.
- pinky07 9mo agoYes, you get access to the github repo if you pay Odoo Enterprise
- rekttrader 9mo agoIt’s an awesome start to a stack, you’re right though a typical seat based install runs average enterprises 25+k usd per year. I wish that someone would just make open oodo compatible plugins, because the big fundamental win is a unified data model built on open technologies.
- pinky07 9mo ago> you end up paying more money for "open source" ERP than normal ERP That's not what I see on the market. Even the paying version of Odoo is way more affordable than traditional ERP: - licenses are 5x lower than competition: https://www.odoo.com/pricing https://www.odoo.com/pricing (avg 25€/user/month vs 180€ for Netsuite - Odoo has a "no-extra" / transparent pricing policy) - On implementation service fees, Odoo is usually from 30% to 75% cheaper: more capabilities and easier to implement or customize. As a result of capabilities + affordable, Odoo became the most used ERP in the world: 16m users (incl free ones), 200k+ clients. (Netsuite is 43k clients, Dynamics BC is 40k clients) Disclaimer: I am the founder of Odoo.
- esperent 9mo ago> licenses are 5x lower than competition The competition licenses include support (like that netsuite €180 license). Odoo doesn't. When you factor in finding another company to provide support them Odoo becomes easily equal in cost to other options. Or you have to do it yourself which is also very expensive (in time rather than money). Also for some weird reason the Odoo forum is incredibly locked down. After a year of using it, I hadn't even earned enough trust to comment, let alone ask a question.
- robot-wrangler 9mo agoThese guys have the dubious distinction of absolutely blasting tons of podcasts with the stupidest commercials I've ever heard. Basically at the level of "grondo has what plants crave", Odoo has what businesses need.
- fragmede 9mo agoAnd yet you're here, mentioning the advertisement, so it seems like it worked!
- edsammy 9mo ago[dead]
- KellyCriterion 9mo agoInteresting to see them on HN! They are running a massive out-of-home media campaign in my city, they billboard even busstops in home-districts with lowered traffic speed in the suburbs :-))
- aorth 9mo agoHuge billboards all over Nairobi, Kenya for several years now as well.
- KellyCriterion 9mo agoWow, do they have already that reach? Honestly, before they started their ad campaign here, I had never heard of them. Though the product looks very mature. Could be a "small SAP" competitor.
- big_man_ting 9mo agoalso i'm seeing a bunch of youtubers i follow doing ads for them.
- gnabgib 9mo agoPreviously: (did not deserve SCP) 2019 Story of Odoo: Open-Sourced Competitor to Oracle, SAP (195 points, 74 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21865699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21865699 2014 Odoo: The new OpenERP (44 points, 44 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7750020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7750020
- hbarka 9mo agoOh to be unchained from the $250k/year Oracle Netsuite ERP SaaS handcuff.
- elric 9mo agoI've built a couple of Odoo integrations for clients. For the longest time, they only offered XML-RPC as an external API. At some point they also added JSON-RPC, which is the same kind of suckage. But now they're suddenly planning to remove both in the next major version (to replace them with something different) with very little advance notice. Their API documentation is virtually nonexistent. You have to basically reverse engineer their poorly documented models to get anything done, and those can change between releases. I suspect they deliberately under-document their changes in order to force people to pay them more money. At least I hope their official partners get access to better documentation. Beware putting all of your eggs into this particular basket.
- Piisamirotta 9mo agoDamn. Just finished an integration with their XML-RPC. It was quite bad experience, the API documentation is horrible as you mentioned.
- pinky07 9mo agoUse the /doc url on your database. To test: https://demo.odoo.com/doc https://demo.odoo.com/doc
- nicornk 9mo agoIn that sense all popular ERP vendors seems to be the same.
- jve 9mo agoDunno if Odoo is more ERP or CRM but... if you speak about Microsoft Dataverse/Dynamics 365 Sales/Customer Engagement and such, the documentation, the tools the API the underlying foundation are just excellent.
- cdurth 9mo agoYup, came here to offer the same sentiment on the SMB ERP systems I've worked with.
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- khoda1222 9mo ago[dead]
- gmarcon 9mo agoWe have been using Odoo for some specific processes in the company in the past. There are some bright ideas based on strong fundamentals. Regarding the strong fundamentals: - A clever, extremely flexible, roles/permissions system. It is based on giving CRUD permissions to user roles, allowing to define access rules based on the fields (for instance a READ access with a record rule [('user_id', '=', user.id)] would allow to read only own records). In most of the software permissions are expressed in the code, in Odoo they are abstracted and enforced at ORM level. - The custom ORM system is very strong and allows to create objects and fields at runtime. You can create a model and its fields and start using it right away without restarting the server. Some of the smaller bright ideas: - Records navigation is rather smart: the pagination system allows to manually define the records range to be seen avoiding the usual "records per page" dropdown; standard filters can be defined using the same domain syntax from access rules above (the filter for "My records" would be [('user_id', '=', user.id)]). - Many views use kanban, I find them extremely practical to get a good overview, in particular for CRM opportunities and candidates screening processes.
- esperent 9mo agoI tried to get Odoo adopted at my company for about a year but eventually gave up in favor of a paid solution. The thing is that what you really need to get something like this working is support (by phone, screen sharing etc.), and it came down to two options: either I permanently become Odoo support for everyone else, or we pay someone else to do it. All the companies offering Odoo support are very expensive, so any financial benefits to using Odoo are gone several times over. It was much cheaper to just switch to a paid solution that includes support in the monthly fee. Besides that, the source code is a mess, so when I tried adding some basic customs functions it was a total headache even for very basic things. For some reason they've built their own front end framework which is clearly inspired by a very old version of React.
- grepfru_it 9mo agoMy experience as well. In 2018 we used odoo at a startup to avoid using systems like Monday and Jira. By 2019 we were back on those systems. My experience was so sour, that I heard an odoo ad on npr the other day and I didn’t even go back to see what has changed.
- pinky07 9mo agoI am the founder of Odoo: ask me anything. Happy to see Odoo on HN.
- number6 9mo agoHow close is Odoo to the Django Stack? In my mind, since both are python, I always thought it was some kind of Django fork,l. I bet I am wrong. So how came Odoo into being?
- pinky07 9mo agoIt's not a fork of Django, even thought the stack has similarities: Python, ORM on top of Postgresql, Modules. We use werkzeug (it's been a long time I checked Django, not sure they are on it too), but the rest of the stack is Odoo's own framework: ORM, Templating (QWeb), API, etc. But it's not comparable to Django: - Odoo is built for management application: think CRM, Accounting, Project Management, ... a strong backend - Django is often used as a framework, Odoo for end-users apps (even though our framework is super advanced) - Odoo has a CMS (website builder) too but with a focus on being end-user friendly, like Wix, or Squarespace but for businesses (eCommerce, Jobs, Events, ...) - the javascript client of Odoo is huge whereas Django is minimal - Odoo has it's own ORM optimized for speed and complexity of an ERP - templating engine based on XML rather than inline python instructions Here is a 2 minutes overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbso3NVz3p8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbso3NVz3p8
- abysmal 9mo agoIf you were building Odoo for the first time today would you still choose python? Would you use it the same way?
- ttoinou 9mo agoBy having every services inside one tool, what are the new possibilities that Odoo can do easily that is hard to do with others suite of tools (where you’d need to connect together multiple independent services) ?
- NicoJuicy 9mo agoOdoo ( OpenERP before) became almost the default ERP option in Belgium as far as I'm aware ( they are from Belgium as well). Nice to see them here! I played a bit with customizing V7. Was a pretty unique experience to see how it works internally Everything could be changed. Which is basically an advantage and a disadvantage. Please try to adjust to the system if possible :)
- abiwankenobi55 9mo agoif you go with Odoo, my best advice is to use Odoo Community and hire a good freelance developer or integrator. In my experience, the Enterprise version is poor value: support is often absent or slow, and most of the “Enterprise-only” features are not magical—they can be developed or replaced with custom modules at a lower total cost if you know what you’re doing. Odoo’s real strength is the unified data model and extensible core. If you control your stack and invest in competent development instead of licenses, Community can be a solid ERP foundation. If you expect a polished SaaS with strong vendor support, Enterprise will likely disappoint relative to its price.
- thatoleg 9mo agoI can echo this experience as well. Running Odoo in a fully isolated environment within a factory, in some less popular locations - is a very frequent request. And the Community edition does check the boxes. Pair Community edition with some in-house/custom-built Replenishment solution, and you have a very decent solution for a Distributor or Retailer. Enterprise modules are a good value too, as long as business processes and geography do match the regions it is developed for.
- orwin 9mo agoWhat's the value over say, ERP5, for solo devs'?
- carolynmichael 9mo ago[dead]
- maltris 9mo agoOpenERP/Odoo specifically mentioned: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/when-free-depends-on-nonfree.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/when-free-depends-on-nonfree....
- thatoleg 9mo agoThere is a current state of Odoo, but also the important thing is the trajectory it is on. Two of its technology bets - Python and Postgres paid off very very well. As main Cloud Providers invested tens of billions to improve both Python and Postgres over the past decade, it really boosted the Odoo tech foundation.