Odoo Community vs Enterprise: what you actually get

The short version

Odoo Community Edition is the open-source core: the real Odoo, covering the operations most businesses run on. Odoo Enterprise is a commercial licence on top, adding certain apps and Odoo S.A.'s own hosting and support, priced per user per month. Community is free software — you pay only for someone to run it well (that's us) — while Enterprise scales in cost with headcount.

What Community includes (in full)

Everything most small businesses use daily: CRM and sales pipeline, quotations and invoicing, purchasing, inventory and warehousing, manufacturing, projects and timesheets, HR basics (employees, leave, recruitment), point of sale, email marketing, website and eCommerce, calendar and discuss. These aren't trials or cut-downs — they're the same modules, open source.

What Enterprise adds

• Studio — drag-and-drop customisation of screens and fields without code.
• Advanced accounting — localised full accounting reports, bank feeds and some automated reconciliation (Community includes invoicing and payments; many small businesses pair it with their existing accounting package or have us build the specific report they need).
• Certain vertical apps — e.g. field service, appointment scheduling, quality, PLM, and the mobile apps' full functionality.
• Odoo's official support and upgrade service.

The cost math, in AUD

Per-user pricing is fine at three users and painful at fifteen. Flat pricing inverts that: the bigger the team, the better Community hosting looks — provided Community's feature set covers you. (Enterprise figures are indicative of Odoo's published per-user rates at the time of writing; check odoo.com for current pricing.)

Who should genuinely choose Enterprise

You'll be happier on Odoo's own Enterprise offering if Studio-style no-code customisation is central to how you work, if you need the full localised accounting suite as your only ledger, or if one of the Enterprise-only vertical apps is your core workflow. We say this in our own sales chat too — a mis-sold customer is a churned customer.