Open Source SAP Business One Alternatives

Rather than one monolithic system, Odoo is a suite of web-based open source business applications. Each covers a part of running a company, and because they are stand-alone applications, a team can adopt the single app it needs today instead of committing to everything at once.

The apps also integrate with one another, so installing several of them adds up to a full-featured open source ERP rather than a set of tools that happen to share a login. That is the path most deployments take over time.

The main apps span the usual departments.

• Sales and customers: CRM and Point of Sale for pipelines and in-person transactions.
• Finance: billing and accounting.
• Operations: warehouse management, manufacturing and project management.
• Web presence: a website builder and eCommerce.
• People and marketing: human resources and social marketing applications.

A standard installation follows the setup instructions in the official documentation. Learning the software is covered by Odoo eLearning and a business game for the operational side, while developers start from the developer tutorials. Nightly builds and a public runbot show the state of the master branch at any moment, and security issues have their own responsible disclosure process rather than the issue tracker.

Running a business means handling invoices, tracking stock, managing personnel and a long tail of daily operations, and the market usually sells a separate product for each task. ERPNext does all of it in one system and gives it away, which removes both the license bill and the integration work between half a dozen tools.

The system is built on Frappe Framework, a full-stack web framework written in Python and JavaScript that supplies the database abstraction layer, user authentication and a REST API. The interface uses Frappe UI, a Vue-based component library for single-page applications built on top of that framework.

Five areas make up the core of what ERPNext manages.

• Accounting: recording transactions through to summarizing and analyzing financial reports.
• Order management: inventory levels, stock replenishment, sales orders, customers, suppliers, shipments and fulfillment.
• Manufacturing: the production cycle, material consumption, capacity planning and subcontracting.
• Asset management: every asset from purchase to disposal, covering IT infrastructure and equipment across the organization.
• Projects: internal and external delivery tracked by task, timesheet and issue against budget and profitability.

Self-hosting runs through Docker, and a compose file raises an evaluation site in a couple of minutes, though the maintainers mark that environment as disposable and unfit for production. A bench install script handles a manual deployment with its dependencies including MariaDB, and Frappe Cloud offers managed hosting for teams that would rather not operate the stack.

Ever Gauzy bundles the back office systems a services company usually buys separately, an ERP, a CRM, an HRM, an applicant tracking system, project management and employee time tracking, into one platform aimed at collaborative, on-demand and sharing economy businesses.

Everything is exposed through headless APIs, so the Angular web client, the desktop timer apps for Windows, macOS and Linux, and anything else you build all talk to the same backend. The stack is TypeScript throughout, NestJS on the server, Nx and Lerna for the monorepo, and TypeORM, MikroORM or Knex for data access.

The feature list is long, and a few areas carry most of the weight.

• Time tracking: timesheets, activity tracking and productivity monitoring for employees and contractors.
• Financials: accounting, invoicing, estimates, billing, payments, and income and expense management.
• Sales and CRM: contacts, sales pipelines, proposals, and schedules for appointments and events.
• People operations: onboarding, candidate interviews, goals and key results, and time off approvals.
• Multiple organizations: departments, teams, clients and vendors managed across several organizations at once.

SQLite is the default for demos, while PostgreSQL or MySQL is recommended for production, and Docker Compose files are published for both. Because the ORM layer is pluggable, MariaDB, CockroachDB, Microsoft SQL, Oracle and others need only minor changes. The hosted SaaS edition is still in alpha by the maintainers' own admission, which makes self-hosting the steadier choice for real work.