I bumbed by change to Odoo website and started to look their offering. At first clance Odoo seems to target to enterprise market by aiming to be an alternative to Oracle and Salesforce as a business management software. But once I started to look a bit deeper I noticed that you can use the system for any size of businesses.
Odoo has a composable “apps” concept where you first you have the Odoo foundation and then you choose which apps you want use.
Company
Odoo founded in 2005 is a Belgium-based provider of open-source-based business software that ranges from inventory management and ERP to human resources and CRM software, marketing tools and more. Odoo has raised a total of $439.5M in funding over 5 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Jun 8, 2022 from a Private Equity round. They have around 2000 employees growing ~50% per year. Odoo’s estimated annual revenue is currently $234.6M per year.
Technology
Odoo is typical multitenant, three-tier architecture written in JavaScript and Python. Data storage is PostgreSQL.
Odoo in 90 seconds
Customers
Used by over 5.000. 000 users worldwide ranging from startup companies (1 user) to large enterprises (300,000+ users). About 90% of Odoo’s customer base takes the free tier, he said, with only 10% taking the paid, proprietary tier. But with 7 million users, that is enough to run the business at a profit big enough that it can continue investing in growth without giving away more equity.
Pricing
Odoo Community edition is available for free but of course you need to put price on hosting and operations. Their SaaS offering, Odoo Enterprise edition costs $20/user/month (annual billing) or $25/user/month (monthly billing). On top of that you can add different Apps that raises the price.
Summary
Is it better than Salesforce, SAP, Dynamics, etc.? Probably not. Is it good enough given the price point and flexibility, for smaller businesses? Looks like yes.