Is Odoo Free? Licences, Free Plans and Real Costs

Yes, Odoo can be free. It depends on which Odoo you mean.

Odoo Community: free and open source

Odoo Community is released under the LGPLv3 licence. You can download it from GitHub, install it on your own server and use it commercially with as many users as you want. There's no licence fee, no user limit and no expiry.

Community includes sales, CRM, purchasing, inventory, manufacturing, invoicing, website, eCommerce, point of sale and projects. That's enough to run a lot of small and mid-sized businesses.

The one-app-free plan

Odoo has offered a plan on Odoo Online where one app is free with unlimited users. It's a good way to get started with, say, CRM or invoicing alone. When you add a second app, you move to paid pricing.

Free plans change, so check Odoo's pricing page for the current details before you plan around it.

Odoo Enterprise: paid

Enterprise is licensed per user. It adds full accounting, barcode scanning, Studio, the mobile apps, more specialist apps and Odoo's hosting and upgrade services. See Odoo Community vs Enterprise for the full comparison.

What you pay for no matter which edition

The licence is only one part of the cost. Every Odoo deployment still needs:

• Hosting. A server for Community, or a subscription to Odoo Online or Odoo.sh.
• Setup. Configuring accounting, taxes, products, warehouses and users.
• Data migration. Moving customers, products, balances and open orders from your current system.
• Training. Especially for warehouse and shop-floor staff.
• Support and upgrades. Someone to call when something breaks, and a plan for moving to new versions.

You can do all of this yourself if you have the skills and time. Plenty of small businesses do. Most businesses with more than a handful of users bring in a partner for at least the initial setup.

So, is free Odoo a good idea?

It's a good idea when:

• Your needs are covered by Community apps, or by well-maintained OCA modules
• You or someone you trust can host and maintain it
• You'd rather invest in setup than in licences

It's a less good idea when:

• You need the Enterprise accounting or barcode apps and don't want to replace them
• Nobody is available to look after the server
• You need a vendor-backed upgrade path

Try it without risk

The quickest way to find out is to install Community locally and run a real order through it. Our Odoo Community installation guide takes about an hour to follow. If you'd like a working setup built properly for your business, we offer Odoo implementation on both editions.