What is Odoo


Odoo is a comprehensive suite of applications for managing different aspects of your business such as Sales, Purchase, Invoicing, Inventory, Manufacturing and more.

Editions

Community

Open-source and free
Lacks some apps from Enterprise
Self-install
No mobile app

Enterprise

Licensed and paid
Includes proprietary apps
Self-install, SaaS, or Odoo.sh
Has mobile app

Enterprise Hosting Options

On-premise

Customer provides the hosting of the server and the source code is accessible

SaaS

Odoo provides the hosting of the server but the source code is not accessible

Odoo.sh

Odoo provides the hosting of the server and the source code is accessible. It also allows deployment of staging servers.

You may check Odoo's website for a more detailed comparison of the 2 editions. To check how much Odoo costs, you can check their price calculator.

Apps

 Enterprise only     Youtube video link

Website apps

Website Builder 

Create modern and interactive websites quickly by just drag & dropping components to the page. Run multi-websites in one server to minimize cost and use multi-language to maximize your reach. Increase and monitor your traffic with the built-in SEO optimization tools and integration with Google Analytics.

Form Builder 

Add forms with various fields in your website and trigger different actions such as send an email, create a record in your database, and more.

eCommerce 

Sell your products online. Make it easy for your customers to search for products using various filters and categories. Highlight products by adding ribbons such as discount. Allow users to add to a virtual cart. Upon checkout, offer related products and different payment methods.

Blogs 

Create blogs that are flexible, modern, and pleasing to the eye. Add features such as quick share to social media, tags, comment section, and more.

Forum

Create an venue for your community to discuss. Get more insights and make your company appear more approachable. With the built-in points and reputation system, you can award different rights and rewards to your most helpful members.

eLearning

Offer various courses publicly or privately and paid or free. Divide your courses into multiple sections and provide different materials such as documents or videos. Get insights on how your course is performing through metrics such as attendees and views or by integrating your course with a forum.

Events 

Publish a list of your events. Design event pages to attract visitors and allow them to register directly. Manage registrations and tickets on the back-end.

Live Chat 

Prompt your website visitors for a quick chat. Ensure quality and speed of conversation using canned responses. Quickly create leads in your CRM pipeline using simple commands in chat.

Appointments  

Allow your website visitors to book appointments with your employees. No need to manage slots manually as Odoo will automatically block reserved slots. Create appointment types with configuration such as available employees, time slots, minimum days to book,  assignation method, reminders, and more.

Online Jobs

Attract more applicants by posting open positions in your website and allowing them to directly apply using a digital form. You can also add more questions to immediately gather more information and make the qualification process more efficient.

Sales apps

CRM 

Monitor the status of your company's opportunities through a comprehensive pipeline view. Quickly see who is assigned, what is the expected revenue, and what activities are planned. You can also optionally create an additional stage to qualify leads before they go to the pipeline. Additionally, assign each salesperson to a sales team and get detailed report of how each team is performing.

Sales 

Create and send quotations and convert them to sales orders once confirmed. Manage price lists and automatically detect the correct price list for a customer. Increase efficiency and avoid typos using quotation templates which auto fills up the order. Get suggestions on delivery date from configured product lead times or set it manually. Be notified if your stock levels are not enough to fulfill the sale. Automatically trigger a purchase or manufacture when an order is confirmed. Compare ordered, delivered, and invoiced quantity in one view.

Subscriptions  

Track subscriptions of customers and automatically create invoices. Get insights on how your subscription products are performing by reminding your employees to monitor customer satisfaction and tracking reasons for closures.

Rental  

Record rental orders. Create different prices depending on the duration of the rental. Give your shop a time to prepare by setting a minimum time before ordering. Automatically incur additional cost when the return is delayed.

Point of Sale 

Look high-tech and modern with Odoo's POS. Connect with other devices such as receipt printer, barcode scanner, weighing scale, and customer display for maximum efficiency. Every sale also updates your inventory so no need to manually encode or import. There is also a restaurant mode which adds features such as table/floor management and bill splitting.

Finance apps

Accounting  

All fundamental accounting features and reports plus custom reports. Reduce errors and save time as journal entries are generated automatically as you use other apps such as Sales, Purchase, and Inventory. Interactive reports that allow you to drill down up to the journal items. Manage and auto-create assets, depreciation, deferred revenues, and deferred expenses.

Invoicing 

Create customer invoices and vendor bills. Already contains the basic accounting features such as chart of accounts, journals, and reports. Configure payment terms, taxes, and fiscal positions (automatic account conversion) that can be predefined to customers and products to reduce the need for manual encoding. Use the automatic follow-up feature to avoid overdue payments and maintain a good relationship with your customers and vendors.

Expenses 

Save time and paper by providing your employees a way to record their expenses and request for reimbursement. Streamline and divide the workflow so that managers only have to approve and accountants only have to process payments and accounting entries will be auto-generated. And as everything is digitized, you can generate reports to gain more insight on your business.

Lunch 

Would you like to lessen time your employees take to find food and make sure that what they eat are healthy and safe? Lunch module allows you to create a menu and list of vendors and prices so they can order from their workstation. Time saved could be better spent hanging out with colleagues or relieving stress. Your employee can also track how much they owe to avoid angry vendors.

Operations apps

Purchase 

Create requests for quotation (RFQ) and convert them to purchase orders once confirmed. Manage vendor price lists so you can better estimate costs. Configure vendor lead times so you have an idea on when products will arrive helping you manage your inventory better. Require approvals for expensive products to avoid overspending. Manage call for tenders and blanket orders so you can get the best deals.

Inventory 

Segment your delivery or receipt process to better track the status and to divide the workload. See what operations are pending for each stage of the process at a glance using the dashboard.  Do all of these for multiple warehouses with multiple sub-locations allowing you to pin point the exact location of your products. Track your products either by Lot or Serial No. and get suggestions on what to pick based on your selected removal strategy (e.g. FIFO). Never run out of stocks using reordering rules that trigger purchases or manufacturing. Correct inventory levels using manual adjustments or scrapping in the middle of the process.

Project 

Create projects and tasks and monitor what stage they are in. Quickly see what is in the backlog and who is assigned for each using the kanban view. Opening a task shows the details such as description, history of updates, and logs of time spent. Projects can be made private or public within your company and you can even give portal access to your customers.

Timesheets  

Adds a more intuitive interface for recording time spent and ability for managers to validate the logs of their employees. This module also adds a feature of creating a project or task when a sales order is confirmed. Time spent on this tasks can be charge to the customer's sales order.

Planning  

Never miss a shift with Planning module. Create shifts and roles and assign them to your employees easily using an interactive gantt view. Your employees will get access on their schedule anytime anywhere and if you want, you can give them the autonomy to organize their own shifts for maximum efficiency.

Documents  

Reduce printing expenses and make searching for documents faster by going paperless. Create as much workspaces as you like to organize your documents and control access. Create an email alias that saves attachments sent to it or generate a link for a folder or file for external users to download or upload. Generate vendor bills, invoices, tasks, and more directly from a document and automatically extract info using Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

Helpdesk  

Give your customers a sense of security and ease by giving them a way to submit their concerns. Make sure that no concern is left unattended by creating teams and auto-assigning tickets to them and viewing their progress in a dashboard.

Field Service  

Manage onsite interventions with ease. Plan assignments, schedules, and routes in the most efficient way using the gantt view of employee schedules, map view of customer addresses, and integration with the time-off module. Create interventions from helpdesk tickets to shorten response time and allow service employees to create quotations to maximize sales.

Maintenance 

Know who is using your company's equipment and ensure their quality. Provide a way for your employees to report broken equipment and streamline the repair process by creating dedicated maintenance teams and tracking progress in stages or quickly find a replacement if available to further reduce turn-around.

Manufacturing apps

MRP 

Auto-generate manufacturing orders (MO) when a sales order is confirmed or stocks are below a certain level. Streamline the process and clarify the steps by dividing an MO to multiple work centers with worksheets. Create highly detailed and multi-level Bills of Materials and get real time inventory as components are automatically reserved and consumed when an MO is executed.

PLM  

Define a clear process for creating and applying changes to your products and Bills of Materials. Never leave a change order hanging by monitoring them in stages.

Quality  

Ensure that the products you manufacture comply to quality standards. Trigger quality checks in any point of the manufacturing order. Specify exactly what should be checked by setting the type of input required such as taking a picture, pass/fail, or measure. Assign a quality fault to a team for further investigation.

Human Resources apps

Recruitment 

Get a quick overview of how your recruitment is going such as what positions are vacant and how many slots are remaining. List of jobs are taken from actual positions used in the employee database so they are always consistent. Publish openings to your website in one-click and track applicant journeys and quickly convert their records to an employee record.

Employees 

Manage employee info such as work contact, department, position, company, and so on. Create digital resumes, track skills ratings, and manage multi-contracts containing info such as salary, benefits, and type. With Odoo's flexible data visualization, generate real time reports to gain insights on your workforce.

Attendance 

Record your employee's attendances through a kiosk or through their own devices. You can assign a barcode for each employee to make it faster to check-in using the kiosk mode and a PIN for security.

Time Off 

Request time-off or allocation and get approvals. Customize your time-off parameters such as allocation mode, validity, and unit of measure. See when your employees are not available to able to plan better.

Appraisal  

Create appraisal requests and manage appraisal schedules. Send email to all participants simultaneously and send reminders for appraisals based on a certain date such as arrival date or date of last appraisal.

Approvals  

Generic module for providing a venue for submitting and approving requests for processes in your business that require approval.

Referral  

Hire faster by creating job referral programs that incentivize your employees for referring other people. Give points to referees and provide rewards they can buy with their points.

Fleet 

Manage a list of vehicles used by the company. Specify info such as driver, odometer, license plate, location, and more. View history of drivers, contracts, costs, fuel, and odometer.

Payroll  

Generate payslips per employee or by batch based on their contract and allow them to view it online. Formulate highly flexible salary structures and rules for computing an employee's salary.

Communication apps

Discuss 

Chat with other users or send files. Create channels for group discussion that can be set to public or private. Star messages for easy searching.

Sign  

Create PDF templates that contain fields where to sign. Assign each field to a role. Send templates for signing. Track if documents were sent, signed, or cancelled.

Survey 

Create highly customizable questionnaires that can be used for survey, job interview, or scored quizzes. Add a time limit and send certificates of completion automatically through email. Limit access to public, logged in, or to anyone with a link. Visualize results through graphs.

Marketing apps

Marketing Automation  

Reduce marketing costs and improve efficiency by automating your marketing. Create marketing activities and organize them into workflows that trigger automatically such as when a lead is created. Activities include email, SMS, or anything you can imagine.

Email Marketing 

Create email templates and campaigns. View metrics for each campaign such as received, opened, replied, and bounce. Create mailing lists for grouping recipients.

SMS Marketing 

Create SMS templates and campaigns. View metrics for each campaign such as received, opened, replied, and bounce. Create mailing lists for grouping recipients.

Social Marketing  

View your social media streams such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn inside Odoo and get key metrics. Create posts and comment/react on them directly from Odoo. You can also schedule posts to the best time to maximize visibility and engagement.

Customization apps

Studio  

Rearrange layouts and design reports quickly via drag & drop. Add new fields, security rights, and automations for a model in a single view. Minimal to zero coding knowledge required.

Other apps

Contacts 

Manage a list of all your contacts such as customer, vendors, and employees. Partnered with Odoo's flexible visualizations and reports, you can generate graphs and tables to analyze your demographics.

Calendar

Unified calendar for all employees. Create an event and make it public or private and send reminders.

Notes

Create collaborative marked up notes. Categorize them, add tags and colors. You can also use it as a personal todo list that you can mark as done.

Dashboards

Get the information you need quickly by crafting your own unique dashboard. Each user can have his own dashboard that can take data from all other modules. Data can also be retrieved to a Google Spreadsheet which opens up more possibilities of visualizing your data.


As you can see, Odoo contains a lot of apps out-of-the-box. However, aside from the apps created by Odoo themselves, they also have an app store which contains as of writing more than 27k apps. These apps are made by 3rd party individuals or companies and are either free or paid. These further extend the capabilities of Odoo ranging from small modifications to completely new apps. Odoo also created the Odoo Community Association (OCA) to promote the widespread use of the platform. They are known for creating free high quality and robust modules. 

That's all for now. I hope you guys got an idea of what Odoo is. If you want to learn more about Odoo, you can visit their website at www.odoo.com. If you are interested in using Odoo for your business then contact us and we will help you decide whether it is for you. Thanks for reading!

How to Try Odoo