Thoughts on Odoo?

Sveeno · August 10, 2023

Hi LTT Forum!

Has anyone had any experience with Odoo? They've recently reached out to us for a sponsorship opportunity, and we'd like to know your thoughts.

Any feedback, insight, or opinions would be welcome.

Thank you,

Bubb1K1ller · August 16, 2023

Hi there

I am an Odoo consultant by trade, so I do have some insight

Odoo is an ERP system, meant to cover as many business practices as possible such as Sales, Purchases and so on.

But my general experience in the field is, that the product itself is a "Jack of all trades, master of none" solution. So an Odoo webshop is still good, but can't beat a Shopify solution. And it generally covers 80-90% of the specific fields

One main draw is that when you have a license, you have full control of you database since it is open source. So you can make all the customizations you want. But the same as a general warranty, they won't cover any of this if it crashes your servers or causes any faults

This is just a pro/con general Idea of the product. Do let me know if you could use any more in depth info

surister · August 16, 2023

Don't know if it makes sense to compare Odoo with Shopify, Odoo has the e-commerce module and a million others, while shopify specifically specializes on the e-commerce part.

Mueller Machining · August 16, 2023

I've used Odoo for the past year in my business. It seems to be a great ERP solution with a ton of flexibility. However, you do need some technical know-how to use it to its full potential. Specifically, customization to the software, which is necessary to get a really professional ERP solution, seems to be mostly based on back-end coding instead of a UI-based customization solution. There's no doubt I dove into the deep end with their accounting, inventory, manufacturing, invoicing, and purchasing applications right from the get-go, so that's probably part of the reason I'm having some troubles, after nearly a year of using their software.

One thing I will say is the support is fairly quick to get back to me whenever I have a problem. Unfortunately, in my limited experience, the support personal have recited sections of the Odoo documentation back to me, without considering that I've already read the documentation and took the steps they suggested, and my problem wasn't solved. However, I never ended up having enough patience with them to really follow through and get that issue resolved. The support person did record a video for each of their responses, but it had no audio, just them waving their mouse at the screen, and it only showed the steps they recommended in their email.

Anyways, I've been relatively pleased with the service and the price just can't be beat for what they offer. Anyone with coding experience or a willingness and time to dive in and try things out will find that Odoo is really powerful but needs lots of customization to be perfect.

Alejandro Vidaurre · August 17, 2023

Odoo is an excellent ERP and it's great to centralize almost everything of a business, I maintain an instance for the company I work for and we do from the Employee Attendances, to the Customer Service Ticket System, Web Shop, Sales, Accounting, Inventory, Delivery, Marketing Automation, and many more, you name it.

What's great about it is it's flexibility, once you have all your data on the same place and you're able to work with it and create the relations you want is when you can see it's actual strength, I can point you in the right direction if you're interested in exploring it more in depth.

sageofredondo · August 18, 2023

I have never really used Odoo myself. I tried to get the source code to self host my own instance and found it so complicated to set up I gave up on it.

With that said. I think any open source vendor willing to advertise is a plus. The whole benefit of open source in this context is that if Odoo gets too greedy or anticonsumer, another vendor can take the source code and make their own offering with it. If you are able to export or scape the data out of it you can easily migrate.

Odoo has done nothing as far as I know in the shenanigans department to warrant a reputation risk to LMG.

Sant_HH · August 20, 2023

I've been testing out odoo for my family's businesses for a while now and it's a great product. Keeps all of the data in the same place and easily accessible. We haven't fully transitioned to it yet (due to the absolute mess of a file and database structure of our old proprietary WinXP based system, which I haven't fully figured out yet). Although, it isn't 100% open source (don't quote me on that)

BanjoJeff · August 27, 2023

Until a couple of years ago I worked as a software engineer building custom logistics and accounting solutions on Odoo for several years. I cannot recommend it to anyone as either a user or developer. There were significant performance and integrity issues in the core and numerous ways to get the database into a state that would require detailed technical knowledge and direct intervention in SQL to resolve. We pushed the system hard, and it did not behave well.

Additionally the Odoo "open source" messaging is, in my opinion, disingenuous. We attempted to engage with them on github to get performance, security and feature improvements incorporated by them but they were extremely resistant, going as far as to suggest they would rebuild our contributions in house so they would own them and could sell them which is ethically (and to my limited understanding and legally) questionable.

As you can tell, working with Odoo, both the software and company, was not a good experience and I would be wary of them. They meet the needs of some small businesses but from what I have seen of their code and on interactions with them I expect them to stifle growth and change in a business in the long term rather than growing with the business.

Sveeno · August 28, 2023

Hi everyone! It seems that general consensus of Odoo is mostly positive.

On 8/27/2023 at 4:26 AM, BanjoJeff said:

Until a couple of years ago I worked as a software engineer building custom logistics and accounting solutions on Odoo for several years. I cannot recommend it to anyone as either a user or developer. There were significant performance and integrity issues in the core and numerous ways to get the database into a state that would require detailed technical knowledge and direct intervention in SQL to resolve. We pushed the system hard, and it did not behave well.

Additionally the Odoo "open source" messaging is, in my opinion, disingenuous. We attempted to engage with them on github to get performance, security and feature improvements incorporated by them but they were extremely resistant, going as far as to suggest they would rebuild our contributions in house so they would own them and could sell them which is ethically (and to my limited understanding and legally) questionable.

As you can tell, working with Odoo, both the software and company, was not a good experience and I would be wary of them. They meet the needs of some small businesses but from what I have seen of their code and on interactions with them I expect them to stifle growth and change in a business in the long term rather than growing with the business.

@BanjoJeff, we will be looking into your concerns and asking for a comment before moving forward with the partnership

Going to lock this thread now. Thank you everyone for the help!