Odoo, app by app.

Community or Enterprise

This is the first real decision and it is not about company size. Community is free and open source, and covers sales, CRM, purchasing, inventory, manufacturing, projects, website and POS perfectly well. Enterprise is a paid per-user subscription that adds Odoo Studio, an official mobile app, bank statement synchronisation, and apps like helpdesk, field service and subscriptions.

If nothing in that list is something you would genuinely use, Community is the sensible answer and the money is better spent on implementation. We wrote the full comparison rather than making you ask for it.

Starting with the right apps

Odoo's modularity is its strength and its trap. Installing another app takes one click, so businesses install a dozen, configure none properly, and conclude that Odoo is complicated.

A trading company usually needs sales, inventory, purchasing and accounting in month one — and nothing else. Apps can be added at any time, which is exactly why there is no reason to add them early.

Customisation, and when to resist it

Odoo can be customised extensively and every partner will happily do it. Custom code must be maintained and re-tested at every version upgrade, so heavily customised installations become expensive to move forward and eventually stop moving forward at all.

We configure rather than code wherever the process is habit rather than requirement. Where the requirement is real — bilingual documents, specific approval chains — we build it as a proper module rather than patching core files.