It is one of the most frequently asked questions on forums and in intro calls: should I go for Odoo Community or Enterprise? The honest answer is "it depends", but that gets you nowhere. So here is the comparison as we make it ourselves: what does it cost, what do you miss, and when is which version the right choice?
The difference in brief
Odoo Community is the open-source version: free to download and use, with no licence costs, for an unlimited number of users. Odoo Enterprise is the paid version with extra modules, official support and the upgrade service from Odoo itself. Enterprise costs (depending on your contract and region) roughly €25 per user per month for the Standard subscription and around €37.50 for Custom, where Standard only runs on Odoo Online and Custom may also run on Odoo.sh or your own server.
Free sounds attractive, but licence costs are rarely the biggest item in an ERP project. Implementation, hosting and maintenance weigh more heavily. So look above all at what you need functionally.
What do you miss in Community?
The core modules (CRM, sales, purchase, inventory, manufacturing, website) are in both versions. But a few pain points around what is missing keep coming up in practice:
- Accounting with Dutch localisation: Community only has basic invoicing. Full accounting with VAT returns, EU sales listings (ICP) and Dutch charts of accounts is Enterprise. Many Community users therefore connect an external accounting package, with all the synchronisation misery that brings.
- Studio: adapt fields, views and reports without code. In Community you do that with development work.
- Helpdesk and Planning: not available in Community. There are community alternatives (OCA modules), but you have to maintain those yourself.
- Upgrade service: Enterprise customers get their database migrated to new versions. With Community you handle upgrades entirely yourself, and that is serious work.
Hosting: who manages your system?
Community only runs on your own server or with a hosting provider; you (or your partner) are responsible for updates, backups and security. Enterprise additionally gives you the choice of Odoo Online (fully managed) and Odoo.sh (managed platform with room for custom development). For self-hosting, count on server costs from a few tens of euros per month, plus the hours of someone who really knows what they are doing. People tend to forget those hours in the comparison.
When is Community perfectly fine?
Community is an excellent choice if you:
- have technical knowledge in-house (or a partner who handles the maintenance);
- mainly want to support logistics processes and run your accounting elsewhere;
- work with many users so that licence costs weigh heavily, for example in a warehouse;
- consciously choose open source and want to use OCA modules.
Choose Enterprise if you want to run your accounting in Odoo, have no appetite for managing your own servers, or are going to use Studio, Helpdesk and the upgrade service. For most Dutch SMEs that want their entire administration in one system, Enterprise comes out the winner. Not because Community is bad, but because the missing accounting functionality otherwise ends up costing money through workarounds anyway.
Praktische tip
Don't make the comparison on licence costs, but on total costs over three years: licences, hosting, maintenance hours and upgrades. Put those side by side in a simple spreadsheet; the answer usually becomes clear by itself. And start with your processes, not with the price list.
Still not sure? Contact DAADit Group for honest advice on which version suits your situation, even if that advice is "Community".