Odoo vs ERPNext

Odoo and ERPNext are the two open-source ERPs people actually shortlist. Both cover the same ground on paper — sales, purchasing, inventory, manufacturing, projects, a CRM — as modules that share one database, and both are Python web apps you can run on your own server. The difference that decides most self-hosting choices is not a feature list. It is how much of that list is open source, and what it takes to keep the thing running.

The license split is the decision

ERPNext is GPL-3.0, all of it. Its README calls it "100% Open-Source" and says it covers a business's day-to-day operations "for free". Frappe, the company behind it, sells managed hosting (Frappe Cloud) rather than a premium edition, and the framework underneath, Frappe, is MIT. HR and payroll moved out of ERPNext at version 14 into a separate app, Frappe HR — also GPL-3.0, also free, but a second app to install.

Odoo is two products. Odoo Community is LGPL-3.0 and is what the odoo repository and the official Docker image give you. Odoo Enterprise adds proprietary apps on top, under a paid subscription. Odoo's own edition comparison is the map, and several of the gated items are ones an ERP buyer tends to assume are included:

• Accounting. Community has Invoicing and Payments. The full Accounting app — general ledger, bank statement reconciliation, analytic accounting, budgets, consolidation, localizations and reports — is Enterprise-only.
• Payroll, Documents, Sign and Spreadsheet.
• Subscriptions, Rental, Barcode, PLM and Quality, plus the manufacturing Shopfloor, control panel and scheduling views.
• Helpdesk, Field Service, Planning, Appointments, Approvals, Knowledge, VoIP and IoT.
• Studio, the no-code customization tool, and the Android and iOS apps.

Community still ships a lot: CRM, Sales, Point of Sale, Inventory, Manufacturing, Purchase, Maintenance, Project and Timesheets, Employees, Recruitment and Time Off, Fleet, Website Builder, eCommerce, Email and SMS marketing, Events, eLearning and Discuss. If that is your business, Community may be all you need. If your plan was to run the books in it, it is not — and the upgrade is a subscription, not a download.

The same list read the other way is ERPNext's case: general ledger, bank reconciliation, budgets and manufacturing are in the free product, and payroll is one more free app.

Upgrades: the other thing Enterprise pays for

Odoo lists version upgrades as an Enterprise service, and its upgrade docs say that with Enterprise, moving a database to the latest version is free, including fixing discrepancies in the upgraded database. Community users do the migration themselves — the community project for this is the Odoo Community Association's OpenUpgrade. On-premise you may stay on a version indefinitely, but Odoo's docs are clear that the smaller the version gap, the easier the upgrade.

On a self-hosted ERPNext the upgrade is yours as well; Frappe Cloud only takes it over if you move to its managed hosting. The practical difference is that nothing in ERPNext's upgrade path depends on buying a licence.

Running them: two containers against a stack

Odoo runs as the official odoo image plus PostgreSQL — two containers, port 8069, and a login screen. For production, Odoo's deployment guide sizes the server by workers: roughly one worker per six concurrent users, (CPUs × 2)

• 1 as the ceiling, about 150 MB per light worker and about 1 GB per heavy one. Its worked example — 60 users on a 4-CPU box — comes to about 3 GB of RAM for Odoo alone, before PostgreSQL.

ERPNext runs on frappe_docker, the official container setup. The demo compose file alone defines MariaDB, two Redis instances (cache and queue), the backend, an nginx frontend, a websocket service, a scheduler, short and long queue workers, and one-shot containers that configure the bench and create the site. Upstream offers three routes and is explicit about which is which:

• pwd.yml — a single-file demo, "disposable", not for production.
• The Easy Install script from frappe/bench — production-ready; it installs Docker, deploys frappe_docker, requests a Let's Encrypt certificate and saves the generated passwords to $HOME/frappe-passwords.txt.
• compose.yaml plus overrides — the canonical manual production setup.

frappe_docker's single-server guide recommends 2 vCPU, 4 GB of RAM and 50 GB of SSD, and Frappe's database-tuning guide suggests starting a database server at 8 GB. One Docker-specific rule catches people out: apps are baked into the image, so adding Frappe HR — or any other app — later means rebuilding the image and redeploying, not running bench get-app in a container.

Odoo is the easier first install. ERPNext asks more of the operator up front, and gives it back in everything that sits outside Odoo Community's free list.

Which should you self-host?

Pick Odoo if…

• Your needs sit inside Community's free list — CRM, sales, inventory, purchasing, manufacturing, point of sale, website and eCommerce — and invoicing (not full accounting) is enough, or your accountant works in separate software.
• You expect to buy Odoo Enterprise at some point and want to start on the same platform, with its upgrade service and Studio waiting for you.
• You want the simplest install: one app container and PostgreSQL.

Pick ERPNext if…

• You want a full ERP — general ledger, bank reconciliation, budgets, manufacturing, asset management, and payroll through Frappe HR — without a licence fee for any module.
• You want every line of the ERP you run under a free licence, with no edition boundary to plan around.
• You can run a multi-service Docker stack, or you let the Easy Install script do it and treat the image as something you rebuild when you add apps.

Neither is the better ERP in the abstract. For a self-hoster who wants to keep the whole business on free software, ERPNext is the stronger fit, because the modules Odoo reserves for Enterprise — above all Accounting — are part of it. Odoo Community is the better pick when your needs fit inside its free list and you would rather run two containers than ten.

If you only need the sales pipeline, a full ERP is more than you need: the Frappe CRM page covers the standalone CRM from ERPNext's own ecosystem, and SuiteCRM vs EspoCRM compares two lighter CRMs. The full setups are on the Odoo and ERPNext pages.

Running either on a VPS

Size an ERP for the users who will be working in it at the same time, not the empty install. Start ERPNext at upstream's 4 GB recommendation and Odoo with headroom above our 2 GB catalog floor, and grow either by Odoo's worker rule or by watching ERPNext's database. The database is your company's books — back it up off the server on a schedule, and test a restore before you depend on it. The Easy Install script sets an on-server backup schedule by default (@every 6h); copy those backups off the box. For Odoo, plan the schedule yourself.