Hello Readers, We wish you a very happy new year! As 2017 just clocks in, every ERP comes up with new plans and attract to more customers, in order to serve good to the world. SerpentCS has already been serving Odoo Community since 10 years and it is a great pleasure to work around Odoo, the best opensource ERP in the world by far. However, there is always a competition which brings quality and life to the ERP. ERPNext, is another player in opensource ERPs, which is fully opensource and for sure has been a promising future, building good apps for business and with clean usability, even though less feature-rich. SerpentCS has started ERPNext services too. Let's give time some time, things will grow and customer will win ultimately. On the eve of the first Monday of 2017, the Director of ERPNext has sent an Open Letter inviting Odoo community to test and give a spin to ERPNext. The summary is as follows:
Why does ERPNext Matter?
As you all know, Odoo is currently by far the biggest open source ERP product and community in the world today and is doing an aggressive job of growing both the product and community. ERPNext has been quietly building its own community and has been pushing the barrier in usability and quality and often ideas in Odoo are picked up from ERPNext. We also know that given no competition, Odoo is likely to go down the closed path. Monopolies are bad for the user and most of us have lived through the bad old days of Mircosoft. Innovation thrives when there is strong competition in the market. Whether is Android v/s iOS or Windows v/s Linux or RedHat v/s Debian. Like professional sport, healthy competition brings out the best in us. The most recent example is GitLab v/s GitHub. For many years, the GitHub product had become stagnant and they stopped rolling out new features because it was the clear winner of the open source developer market. But as a strong competitor GitLab came into the picture, it brought out the best in GitHub, and we as users got the benefit. We believe that ERPNext is already affecting Odoo by pushing it to build better user experience and keeping more stuff open source. Without a strong ERPNext, there will be no competition to Odoo and it will keep making more and more closed modules and stop innovating the product. By backing ERPNext, you ensure that as a community we get the best of everything.
How ERPNext is Different?
Though they might seem similar, ERPNext and Odoo has some fundamental differences:
- There are no closed modules in ERPNext. ERPNext is 100% open source and will continue to be so.
- Upgrades are free. You don't have to buy an enterprise license to update / upgrade your ERPNext instance for new versions that have more features, better performance and security
- There are no paid apps in ERPNext. Unlike Odoo, ERPNext comes with battries included so most of the features you need are already built into the product out of the box.
- ERPNext is built by the community. ERPNext is backed by two organizations, a SAAS service run by Frappé Technologies and a Foundations (established recently) and is run with feedback and contributions from the community.
How Can You Get Started?
ERPNext is really easy to install on a VM with the bench utility and it comes with a fully multi-tenant production ready setup. The easiest way to try is to sign up for the SAAS at erpnext.com and explore the features. The community hangs out at the forum https://discuss.erpnext.com or on Gitter at https://gitter.im/frappe/erpnext. Do give ERPNext a spin if you already have not, we promise you that people who have tried both, usually love ERPNext! Our fight is not versus Odoo but Microsoft, Sage and Netsuite. Having two strong products is the best way to accelerate the growth of open source. ERPNext is the only product in the open source space that can pose a serious challenge to Odoo and ensure that Odoo remains faithful to you, the community!
We wish every ERP a great year ahead, turning into the benefit to the end users. Thank you.
