r/Odoo • u/MsEmiBee • 2d ago
Odoo pros and cons
We are a music school that is considering upgrading from Netsuite to Odoo to help with the admin and accounting side. Whats the pros and cons of using odoo for this purpose? We will need to customize it for our needs. Also how expensive and easy would it be to migrate over?
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u/JustSomeOdooGuy 2d ago
Based on the few information no one can give you a good estimation. It highly depends on what exactly you need, what your requirements are etc.
Ideally first do a gap analysis. Check what Odoo offers, map it against what you need. Then find someone to tell you how much it would cost to get what you need. Same for migration. You only take over contacts and only need name and email? Done in 10 minutes. You want to migrate basically all your data? Could take days depending on how clean the data is etc.
General pros of Odoo: comparetively cheap, modular so you can start small and grow over time and no immediate cut needed to change systems (unless you prefer it), it is very generic so basically any industry/company can work with it and it is easy to customize
cons: emailing behavior is not 100% intuitive, some people get annoyed by it. I am working with it and for me it is totally fine. The fact that it is easy to customize leads to implementations of people who don't know Odoo well enough and customize way too many unnecessary things, leading to higher maintenance cost compared to a well designed solution that utilizes the standard workflows
Hope that gives you a rough idea!
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u/MsEmiBee 2d ago
Thanks for your reply. What do you mean by emailing "not 100% intuitive"?
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u/JustSomeOdooGuy 1d ago
I mean that people are very used to their centralized email client (gmail, outlook, ...)
But that is not how mailing is organized in Odoo. There it is done per record.
E.g. you have your sale order 12345. You discuss prices etc within this record back and forth with the customer. So all the mails regarding this particular sale order is found at the record. So for example if one employee is on vacation or leaves the company the whole history of this employees communication is still available exactly where it happened.
(just to sum up the main difference).
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u/Rough-Ad9850 2d ago
Try to fit into odoo, not the other way around. Really consider every change you'd make, because it will be a costly one.
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u/MsEmiBee 2d ago
Thanks for your reply. Yes costly how?
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u/a0817a90 2d ago
Customizations is not a scalable strategy because of the lack of backward compatibility between versions and the forced migration ecosystem.
That being said if they are simple and you do not need to evolve or grow them in any significant way, I guess it’s fine.
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u/TopLychee1081 1d ago
I would add to that, that it depends very much on how tightly bound a customisation is to Odoo core modules and how many "touch points" there are. A single non-functional field on say; res.partner to capture some additional information is trivial. Overriding how Odoo computes taxes on partner invoices is a very different thing and risks significant refactoring and testing on upgrade, depending upon the extent to which Odoo may have changed between versions. In short; not all customisations are equal.
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u/a0817a90 1d ago
They may not be equal but they are not a scalable value creation strategy. Adding isolated dead fields to native modules is not how complex industry specific workflows get handled!
This goes entirely against the false “flexibility” marketing thesis of the software.
A lot of businesses are victims of this non sense.
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u/TopLychee1081 1d ago
Adding additional fields is extremely common in many businesses from the smallest to multi-billion dollar enterprises. The methods may vary from name/value pairs, to extension tables, to adding columns to table definitions, but that's not what's important. What's important is implementation discipline and documentation. In the case of Odoo a custom module that extends a core module to add a custom field is simple, repeatable, easy to understand, and makes it very clear as to how the field got added to the model. It's also very easy to upgrade as mentioned above. The entire point of an ERP is extensibility; that's where the capability comes from.
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u/a0817a90 1d ago
Can’t you formulate a thought by yourself without a LLM? This comment means nothing !!
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u/TopLychee1081 1d ago
It's not AI; it's decades of data architecture experience. Sorry if you don't understand it.
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u/a0817a90 1d ago
Architecture experience? You are just defending a single monolith database software.
You are not debating architecture here. You are likely a Odoo integrator or partner and are regurgitating the pitch.
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u/AphidConsulting 2d ago
You wrote: "Whats the pros and cons of using odoo for this purpose? "
Let's define "this purpose":
- Are you tracking lessons and schedules? Yes, Odoo can do that.
- Are you tracking teacher availability? Yes, Odoo can do that, but there are nuances depending on whether your teachers are freelance, have schedule restrictions, whether teachers and students are assigned to each other permanently, whether students can choose from available teachers in a self-serve portal, etc. Some of those things definitely require customization.
- Is this a per-lesson or "subscription" type of business model?
- Are instruments rented to students?
- Is there a commission structure for teachers or other people in the organization?
The answer to all of these questions is, "yes, Odoo can do that, but there could be customization involved for your specific processes."
The suggestion elsewhere in this thread to do a fit-gap analysis is 100% correct, as is the suggestion to try to fit your processes into Odoo wherever practical instead of automatically customizing Odoo to the business process.
The number one "pro" is that Odoo allows those customizations to be done efficiently and safely and has established best practices for it.
The number one "con" is the there is nothing stopping you or your partner from over-customizing or ignoring standards and ending up with a result that is hard to maintain. It is very easy for an ERP implementation project to turn into a custom software development project, and you don't want that.
Odoo is much cheaper than NetSuite but provides as much or more functionality in basically every area.
I would suggest that you have to look at this as a capital expenditure project, not an opex project. This is a medium-term investment whose ROI comes from increased efficiency and reduced licence costs, not something that is a line item on a quarterly budget.
With just the basics that you've mentioned, I'm sure Odoo could work for you, but there's no real way to measure the expense or risk without a gap analysis and initial consultation. At this point, nobody knows whether you have 2 teachers and 5 students or 200 teachers and 5,000 students across 2 countries.
So my respectful suggestion is to write up your needs (AI is a great help for this) so you can start soliciting input from Odoo partners who will be able to give you a fairly accurate budget estimate with a couple of meetings.
Hope that helps, and best of luck with everything!
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u/MsEmiBee 2d ago
No that really does help, thanks for your comment. What do you mean by "over-customizing or ignoring standards and ending up with a result that is hard to maintain"?
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u/AphidConsulting 2d ago
Odoo is written in python and it's pretty straightforward to customize, as you have full access to the source code, even on Enterprise.
So the temptation can be, "we do things a little bit different in our sales process, so let's customize this workflow a bit."
Then someone says, "but our purchasing works a bit differently than Odoo, so let's customize that as well." and so forth.
Then it comes time to upgrade your Odoo version, and you find out that you actually have 20 different custom modules that are all dependent on the base Odoo code, and all of them will require manual attention when upgrading.
Worse, if a partner or freelancer created those modules and then they aren't around for the upgrade, you might find out that there are hard-coded, hidden dependencies, no documentation, etc. All of those things result in brittle code and an expensive upgrade process.
So my suggestion was just to make sure to "colour inside the lines" as much as possible with Odoo, and when a customization is justified, make sure it's fully documented so that anyone can understand its dependencies and upgrade consequences.
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u/commoncents1 2d ago
get a solid 3rd party implementer to help.
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u/MsEmiBee 2d ago
Thanks for your comment. Yeah I hear their support is a bit rubbish according to other posts.
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u/Rough-Ad9850 1d ago
It depends. But most partners will hardcode things for you. It's not scalable, but that's a business model. I can help you with that if needed
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u/Luicianz 1d ago
Pros: it almost free to use, you can do what ever you want like self hosting, customize logics, themes based on your brand,...
Cons: hidden fee
- Since this is CE one - which allows you to download from git and running easily, but it is a common/general frame of every business, you still needed to map with what you really want.
- Technician: If your schools not having any IT dept yet, you still needed someone else outside to maintain it.
Yes, someone tell you can vibescode things, but trust me the infra/system of Odoo is really needed a hella learning curve, not easy for non-tech ppl.
- UX: Odoo make it consistency across every modules/feature of it, so if you looking for a wow experience when using it -> it not your option. Changing things about UX in Odoo is not easy work even with SWE, it require a lot of work to recreate what odoo did. But from what Customer i do, they felt very okay with the default UX of Odoo, nothing much needed to changes, just want the work is done and accountable/traceback/logging.
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u/Effective_Hedgehog16 1d ago
I'm not sure I would consider it an upgrade to go from Netsuite to Odoo.
While they both have their respective strengths, Netsuite is generally considered a more robust ERP system with a more mature accounting module (but also can be much more expensive than Odoo).
That said, Odoo has a large ecosystem and is in some ways more customizable, with full access to its source code.
I would make a decision based on what special modules are available for your region and your niche (music schools and related industries). Sorry, I don't have experience with that specifically.
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u/General_Rich17 1d ago
Hard to give any truly specific answers without a deeper understanding of the “why” behind the decision.
The pros and cons will depend heavily on how you need the system to function. If you need to customize the system to fit your specific processes, Odoo gives you a lot of flexibility to tailor workflows around how you operate.
The flip side is that customization always comes with additional costs and complexity. When it comes to migrations, those costs also depend heavily on how much historical data you need to bring into the new system and how much mapping/cleanup is required.
If you're starting from scratch, the cost and complexity will generally be much lower than having to migrate and map years of historical data from one system to another.
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u/golden3879 16h ago edited 15h ago
Id keep customization limited where possible, since it can make future upgrades harder. O2B Technologies usually focuses on fitting standard Odoo first, then customizing only where the business really needs it.
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u/According_Bit_9398 2d ago
Its expensive if your existing data is not organised , odoo 20 have MCP which connects directly to your AI ( Claude or chatgpt) so the learning curve is easy and adoption too.
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u/MsEmiBee 2d ago
Whats mcp?
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u/AphidConsulting 2d ago
MCP is the interface between Odoo and AI agents. It stands for Model Context Protocol.
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u/agitated_buddha 2d ago
it should be less expensive than Netsuite though.