Discover Odoo
Odoo's licence is the smallest part of what an Odoo system costs. This page lays out every layer, the plan names as Odoo publishes them, and what actually moves the number, so you can size a project before you talk to anyone. We implement Community and Enterprise and have no edition to sell.
Reviewed by Atul Makwana, CEO & Co-Founder, Heliconia Solutions · Odoo 16 Functional Certification · Odoo Partner · Updated
Businesses that run on what we built
The short answer
Odoo Community is free to license and runs on your own server. Odoo Enterprise is a per-user subscription from Odoo S.A., sold as Standard (all apps, hosted on Odoo Online) or Custom (all apps, plus Odoo.sh or on-premise hosting, Studio and multi-company). On top of the licence sit hosting, implementation, customisation and support, and on most projects those four cost more than the licence does.
Odoo publishes its subscription prices per user per month and bills yearly or monthly, with price lists that differ by country. A single app on Odoo Online is free for unlimited users under the One App Free plan. Everything else on this page is about the costs that are not on that price list.
We work on both editions, so this page doesn't push you toward the licensed one. On the projects on this site, the licence has been the smallest line, the implementation the largest, and hosting the one most often forgotten until go-live.
Odoo's plans
Names and inclusions as listed on odoo.com/pricing. Prices change and vary by country, so the current figure is always the one on Odoo's page, never a number copied here.
| Plan | What's included | Hosting | Who it fits |
|---|---|---|---|
| One App Free | One Odoo app, unlimited users, free | Odoo Online only | Trying one app (CRM, Invoicing, eCommerce) with no customisation |
| Standard | All Odoo apps, per user per month | Odoo Online only | Businesses that run standard Odoo with no custom modules |
| Custom | All apps plus Studio, multi-company and the external API | Odoo Online, Odoo.sh or on-premise | Anyone with custom modules, more than one company, or their own server |
| Community (open source) | Core apps under LGPL v3, no licence fee | Self-hosted, or partner-managed | Businesses that want no per-user fee and can run their own system, or have a partner run it |
If you want custom modules, you need the Custom plan on Enterprise, or Community. Standard and One App Free cannot run custom code. That single fact decides the plan for most of the businesses we work with.
Total cost
A licence quote is not a project quote. These are the layers every Odoo system carries, in the order you'll pay for them.
| Layer | Community | Enterprise | What moves it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Licence | None | Per user per month, Standard or Custom plan | User count, plan, billing period, country |
| Hosting | Your cloud or on-premise, or partner-managed | Included on Odoo Online, extra on Odoo.sh, your own on-premise | Users, data volume, uptime needs, staging environments |
| Implementation | Same on both editions | Same | Apps, companies, countries, data to migrate, integrations |
| Customisation and development | Often more, to cover Enterprise-only features with OCA or custom modules | Less where an Enterprise app covers the need | How far your process is from standard Odoo |
| Support and upgrades | Partner retainer, partner-run upgrades every one to two years | Odoo S.A. support in the subscription, upgrade service for the standard database, partner for custom code | Custom-module count, release cadence, response time you need |
Add the layers for your user count and a three-year horizon. That is the number to compare, not the licence line. The Community vs Enterprise page costs the two editions side by side, and the hosting page compares the four places Odoo can run.
What moves the number
We quote project work against a defined scope after discovery, never from a rate card. These six things decide the scope.
Sales, purchase and invoicing are quick. Manufacturing with quality, maintenance and traceability, or POS across fiscal regimes, is not. The count matters less than the depth.
Each legal entity adds a chart of accounts, taxes, payroll rules and reports. Jo Ann's ran four island entities with four payroll laws on one Odoo 16 database.
Every workflow Odoo doesn't do out of the box becomes configuration, an OCA module or custom code, in that order of cost. Hi-Tech Alloys needed heat-number traceability that no standard module provides.
Clean master data from one system is days. Ten years of transactions from three systems with no shared product codes is weeks. The data decides, not the tool.
Payment gateways and shipping carriers with maintained connectors are cheap. A marketplace, a legacy ERP or a bespoke API is real engineering.
Twenty users in one office need a day of training. Two hundred across shifts and warehouses need a rollout plan, and it costs like one.
Choosing
Read the stages in order. The first one that fits is your plan.
Step 01
You need exactly one app, on Odoo Online, with no custom code, and can live with its defaults. Common for a CRM or an invoicing tool at a small firm.
Step 02
You'll run several standard apps, want Odoo to host them, and have no custom modules or multi-company. Configuration only, no OCA.
Step 03
You have custom modules, more than one company, need Studio or the API, or want Odoo.sh or your own server. Most implementations with a partner land here.
Step 04
You'd rather own the system than rent it, you have (or will hire) a partner to run it, and the Enterprise-only apps are not on your list or can be covered by OCA. Hi-Tech Alloys and the Community projects on this site run this way.
From the projects
The licence has never been the biggest line on a project on this site. Implementation and customisation are, and the ratio grows with how far the business is from standard Odoo.
Hosting gets priced last and paid first. Flintu chose self-hosted AWS to own the environment. That is a monthly cloud bill plus the time to run it, budgeted before go-live, not after.
Community is free to license, not free to run. Someone has to host, patch, back up and upgrade it. If that someone is a partner, that is the line that replaces the licence.
User count is the cheapest thing to get wrong. Enterprise bills per internal user. Customers and vendors who only log in to the portal are a different group, and Odoo prices them differently. Model the two groups separately.
Multi-company multiplies configuration, not licences. Jo Ann's four entities shared one database and one user base. The cost was in fiscal setup and per-island customisation, not seats.
An estimate that arrives before discovery is a guess with a currency sign. We do a short discovery first so the number is for the system you actually need.
Evidence
A Community manufacturer with no licence, an Enterprise retailer across four entities, and an Enterprise company that chose to host itself.
Alloy casting & foundry manufacturing
Multi-stage alloy casting (molding, pouring, heat treatment, NDT, machining) on Odoo 16 Community, with furnace heat numbers traced to every dispatched part, a metallurgy lab module and Material Test Reports generated in seconds.
Retail & wholesale, duty-free
Four Caribbean island entities (each with its own payroll law, currency, fiscal rules and eCommerce site) unified on one Odoo 16 Enterprise platform with a shared core and per-island customization packages.
Consumer electronics
A consumer-electronics company took full control of its ERP: Odoo 18 Enterprise on AWS EC2 with RDS PostgreSQL, separate development and production environments, GitHub repositories for Community, Enterprise and custom add-ons, a controlled release workflow and the documentation to run it independently, with hourly expert support on call.
Estimate
Prefer a number before you talk to anyone? The scope calculator turns ten answers into an effort range with the whole model published. For a scoped estimate, tell us your apps, users, companies, integrations and the systems you're leaving. You get a cost breakdown by layer, the plan we'd budget for and why, and a phased scope, with no obligation. The form has a budget range field: pick one, it helps us phase the scope.
What clients say
Heliconia's Odoo Enterprise implementation, along with third-party system integration, has optimized our processes. Their expertise has been a game-changer.
Vladimir VukovicCEO, Mevalon ProdukteHeliconia delivered an impeccable Odoo Enterprise implementation with seamless integration. Their expertise has revolutionized our operations.
Kartson KrayChairman, TIMmunity GmbHQuestions
Odoo Community is free to license: open source under LGPL v3, no per-user fee, ever. Running it is not free. You pay for hosting, implementation, and someone to maintain and upgrade it.
Odoo's One App Free plan is also free, for one app on Odoo Online with unlimited users.
Per user, per month, billed yearly or monthly, on the Standard or Custom plan. Odoo S.A. sets the price and publishes it on odoo.com, with different price lists by country. Internal users are billed. Portal users, the customers and vendors who log in to see their own documents, are not counted the same way, so model them separately.
Standard is all apps on Odoo Online with no custom code. Custom adds Odoo Studio, multi-company, the external API, and the right to host on Odoo.sh or your own server, which is what you need for any custom module.
If a partner is building anything for you, budget for Custom.
No. The subscription is the software. Odoo sells implementation hours separately, and partners like us quote implementation against a scope. Implementation is usually the largest layer of an Odoo budget.
On the Standard and Custom plans, Odoo Online hosting is included. Odoo.sh is charged on top, by workers, staging branches and storage. Self-hosting means your own cloud bill and the time to run it.
The hosting page compares the four options on control, custom code, cost model and who operates it.
On licence, always. On total cost, it depends on how many Enterprise-only apps you'd have to replace with OCA or custom work, and whether you have someone to run the system.
For a ten-user business with heavy customisation, Community usually wins. For a hundred users on Subscriptions, advanced Accounting and Odoo.sh, Enterprise usually does.
No. We quote project work against a defined scope after a short discovery, and dedicated engineers on a monthly basis. A price before discovery is a guess, and a guess is what makes ERP projects overrun.
The estimate on this page is free and comes with the scope it's based on.
Yes, on either edition. On Enterprise the Standard and Custom plans include every app, so adding one is configuration, not a new subscription. On Community you install modules as you go.
We usually phase a first go-live around the workflows that hurt most and add the rest on a roadmap.
Next step
Send us your apps, users, companies and integrations. You'll get a layer-by-layer estimate, the plan we'd budget for, and a phased scope. No edition to sell, no rate card.