One system for the
whole company. Yours.
ERPNext is a complete, 100% open-source ERP: accounting, sales, purchasing, stock, manufacturing, projects and HR in one database. No per-user licence fees, no vendor that can switch you off. Hosted in the EU or the UK, GDPR-ready, with VAT and e-invoicing set up for the countries you trade in.
| Order | Customer | Value | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| SO-2418 | Delta Sp. z o.o. | €18,400 | To deliver |
| SO-2419 | Nordic Parts AB | €7,250 | To bill |
| SO-2420 | Harwell Ltd | £27,400 | Awaiting stock |
The open-source ERP that
grown-up companies run on.
ERPNext has been in development since 2008 and is maintained by Frappe, a company that lives from its hosting and support, not from licences. It is one of the most widely deployed open-source ERP systems in the world.
Most mid-sized companies run on a patchwork: an accounting package here, a CRM there, a warehouse tool, production in spreadsheets, HR in a folder. Every hand-over between them is a manual step, a re-typed number, a delay.
ERPNext replaces the patchwork with one system and one database. A quote becomes a sales order, the order reserves stock and triggers a work order, the delivery note becomes an invoice, the invoice posts to the ledger, and the margin shows up on the dashboard. Nobody re-types anything.
It is built on the Frappe Framework, a full-stack Python web framework with roles and permissions, workflows, a REST API, audit trail and a low-code layer. That is what makes ERPNext adaptable: new fields, forms, reports and automations are configured, not programmed, and whatever does need code is written in plain Python and shipped as a separate app that survives upgrades.
And it is genuinely open source, under the GPL-3.0 licence. You can read the code, change it, host it anywhere, and leave any partner, including us, with the system intact.
In continuous development since. Current major release: v16.
Companies running ERPNext worldwide, according to Frappe.
Software licence. Forever, for any number of users.
Open-source licence. The code is yours to run, read and change.
Core modules in one database, plus Frappe CRM, Helpdesk and HR apps.
Every record reachable via REST. Integrations are the norm, not a project.
Almost everything you need.
Switched on as you need it.
All modules share one data model. You can start with two and add the rest later without a migration.
Accounting & finance
General ledger, receivables and payables, multi-currency, multi-company, bank reconciliation, budgets, cost centres, financial statements in real time.
Sales & CRM
Leads, opportunities, quotations, sales orders, pricing rules, customer portal. Frappe CRM adds a modern pipeline view on the same data.
Purchasing
Material requests, RFQs, supplier quotations, purchase orders, receipts, supplier scorecards and three-way matching against invoices.
Stock & warehouse
Multi-warehouse inventory, batches and serial numbers, barcodes, valuation (FIFO, moving average), reorder levels, stock reconciliation.
Manufacturing
Multi-level bills of materials, work orders and job cards, routing and workstations, capacity planning, subcontracting, production costing.
Projects
Projects, tasks, timesheets, milestones and Gantt views, with costs and billing tied straight to the accounts. Built for service and engineering firms.
HR & payroll
Employee records, leave and attendance, expense claims, appraisals, recruitment and payroll structures, via the Frappe HR app.
Assets
Fixed-asset register, depreciation schedules, maintenance and repairs, asset movement and disposal, posted automatically to the ledger.
Quality
Inspection templates and results at receipt, in production and before dispatch; non-conformances, corrective actions, quality goals and reviews.
Support & helpdesk
Issues, SLAs, warranty claims and maintenance visits. Frappe Helpdesk adds a ticketing UI, knowledge base and customer portal.
Point of sale
Touch POS for shops and counters, works offline, syncs to stock and accounting; loyalty programmes, gift cards, returns.
Website, portal & e-commerce
Customer and supplier portals out of the box; a simple web shop fed from the item catalogue, or connectors to Shopify, WooCommerce and marketplaces.
Also built in: dashboards and report builder, document workflows and approvals, e-mail and calendar integration, document attachments, print formats, and a complete audit trail on every record. Anything missing is a Frappe app away.
The ERP economics,
turned around.
Classic ERP vendors earn on licences, so every user, module and year costs more. ERPNext removes that line entirely, and most of what follows from it.
No per-user, per-module fees
Give an account to every warehouse worker, every subcontractor, every accountant. Switch on manufacturing or HR when you are ready. The price does not move.
Nobody can switch you off
You own the installation and the data. No licence audit, no forced cloud migration, no end-of-life notice, no partner holding the keys. Change partners or take it in-house at any time.
Fits your process, not the other way round
Custom fields, forms, workflows and reports are configuration. Real customisations are plain Python in a separate app, which upgrades cleanly instead of freezing you on an old version.
Hosted where you decide
Your own servers, a private cloud in the EU or the UK that we manage, or Frappe Cloud (ISO 27001 certified). Same software in each case, with GDPR and UK GDPR data residency under your control.
| Compared on | Classic ERP (SAP B1, Dynamics 365, Sage, NetSuite, Odoo Enterprise) | ERPNext |
|---|---|---|
| Software licence | Per user, per module, per year; rises with headcount | None. GPL-3.0, unlimited users |
| What you pay for | Licences plus implementation plus mandatory maintenance | Implementation, optional hosting and support |
| Source code | Closed; customisations through the vendor's toolkit | Open; Python and JavaScript, readable by any developer |
| Hosting | Increasingly cloud-only, vendor's region | Your infrastructure, EU or UK private cloud, or Frappe Cloud |
| Exit | Data export, licence ends, system goes dark | Keep running the system as-is, with or without us |
| Typical time to go-live | 6 to 18 months | 8 to 16 weeks for a core scope |
Open source does not mean free of work. It means the money goes into your processes, data and people, instead of into licences.
Best fit: 10 to 500 people,
outgrowing their tools.
ERPNext scales from a five-person workshop to groups with many companies and currencies. These are the situations where it pays off fastest:
Make-to-order & batch production
Machinery, furniture, food, electronics, metal, plastics. BOMs, work orders, subcontracting and quality in the same system as stock and invoicing.
- Live material availability per order
- Real production cost per unit
- Batch and serial traceability
Wholesale, import & e-commerce
Many SKUs, many warehouses, many price lists. Purchasing, landed costs, stock and sales channels reconciled in one place.
- Reorder automation and supplier lead times
- Channel integrations (Shopify, WooCommerce, marketplaces, EDI)
- Margin per customer, product and channel
Project & service companies
Engineering, agencies, installers, consultancies. Projects, timesheets, billing and profitability without a separate PSA tool.
- Time and expenses straight to invoices
- Project margin in real time
- Service contracts and SLAs
Replacing spreadsheets or a legacy ERP
Multi-entity groups, companies after an acquisition, or firms whose current ERP is end-of-life, cloud-forced or simply too expensive for the next 50 users.
- Multi-company, multi-currency consolidation
- Structured migration from the old system
- No licence cliff when you grow
Everything between
"interesting" and "it runs".
Mobinea is an EU-based IT consultancy working with clients across the European Union and the United Kingdom. We implement ERPNext end to end and stay after go-live.
- Fit assessment & discoveryWe map your processes, data and integrations, then tell you honestly whether ERPNext is the right tool and what the scope should be.
- Implementation & configurationChart of accounts, item master, warehouses, workflows, print formats, roles and permissions, set up around how you actually work.
- Data migrationCustomers, suppliers, items, open balances, open orders and history, cleaned and reconciled from spreadsheets, Sage, Xero, QuickBooks, Dynamics NAV / Business Central, SAP B1 or any other source.
- Customisation & integrationsCustom Frappe apps, REST and webhook integrations with e-commerce, banks, EDI, couriers, BI tools and whatever you already run.
- Localisation & complianceCountry charts of accounts, VAT and reverse charge, EU OSS, UK Making Tax Digital, Intrastat, and e-invoicing (Peppol and national mandates) for every entity in the group.
- Hosting & operationsOn your servers, in a managed private cloud in the EU or the UK, or on Frappe Cloud. Backups, monitoring, upgrades and security patches handled.
- Training & supportRole-based training for your team, documentation in your language, and an SLA-backed support line after go-live.
- AI on top of your ERPAssistants that answer questions about your data, draft documents and automate routine steps, running on your infrastructure under GDPR, UK GDPR and the EU AI Act.
Weeks, not quarters.
Live data from week three.
Fit-check call
A short conversation about your processes, systems and pain points. You leave with a clear yes, no, or "yes, but".
30 minutes · freeDiscovery & scope
Workshops with your key users. Process map, data inventory, integration list, and a fixed-scope offer with a timeline.
1–2 weeksPilot on your data
A working system with your items, customers and a real end-to-end flow. Your team clicks through it and we adjust.
2–4 weeksBuild, migrate, train
Remaining modules, customisations and integrations. Data migration rehearsed twice. Role-based training for every team.
4–8 weeksGo-live & support
Cut-over on a date you choose, hyper-care in the first weeks, then ongoing support, upgrades and improvements.
Then: ongoingTypical core scope (accounting, sales, purchasing, stock) goes live in 8 to 12 weeks. Manufacturing or multi-company set-ups usually land between 12 and 16 weeks. Larger migrations are phased so that each phase delivers something your team uses.
Four lines on the budget.
One of them is zero.
We quote fixed-scope implementations after discovery, so the number you sign is the number you pay. The structure is always the same:
Software licence
ERPNext, Frappe Framework, Frappe CRM, HR and Helpdesk are all open source. No per-user, per-module or annual fee, ever.
Implementation
Discovery, configuration, migration, integrations and training. Fixed price per agreed scope; phased for larger projects.
Hosting
Your own infrastructure (no cost from us), a managed private cloud in the EU or the UK, or Frappe Cloud. Sized to your users and data, not per seat.
Support & development
An SLA-backed support retainer with a monthly block of consultant and developer hours for changes, upgrades and new modules.
Over five years, companies moving from a per-user ERP typically save the equivalent of the whole implementation in licence fees alone. We will show you the comparison for your headcount on the first call.
The questions your CFO
and IT lead will ask.
Is the software really free? Where is the catch?
Yes, the licence is free. ERPNext is published under GPL-3.0 and the Frappe Framework under MIT. Frappe, the company behind it, earns from its hosting (Frappe Cloud) and from enterprise support, which is why the project is well funded and actively maintained.
The costs that remain are the same as with any ERP: the work of configuring it to your business, migrating your data, integrating it, hosting it and supporting it. That is the part we do. There is simply no licence line on top.
How secure is it, and where does our data live?
Wherever you decide: on your own servers, in a private cloud in the EU or the UK that we operate for you, or on Frappe Cloud, which is ISO 27001 certified. Data residency stays inside the jurisdiction you choose, for GDPR and UK GDPR alike. In every case the data is in a database you control and can export in full at any time.
The platform has role- and field-level permissions, two-factor authentication, single sign-on (LDAP, OAuth, SAML), a full audit trail on every document and encrypted backups. Because the code is open, it is reviewed by thousands of developers and security researchers, not just one vendor.
Does it handle UK and EU accounting, VAT and e-invoicing?
Yes, with localisation. ERPNext ships with country charts of accounts, VAT templates and tax rules, multi-currency and multi-company. We configure them per entity: UK GAAP accounts and VAT returns under Making Tax Digital for a UK company; EU VAT with reverse charge, OSS and Intrastat for EU entities; and e-invoicing where it is mandatory (Peppol, Italy's SDI, Poland's KSeF, the German and Belgian B2B mandates). A group with companies in several countries runs them all in one installation, with consolidated reporting on top.
Many of our clients also keep an external accounting office; in that case ERPNext runs operations and issues the documents, and the ledger is exported or synchronised to the office's system.
We already have an ERP. Is migrating worth the disruption?
It depends on what the current system costs you in licences, in workarounds and in things it will not let you do. That is exactly what the fit-check call is for. If the answer is "stay", we will say so.
When migration does make sense, we run it in phases, rehearse the data cut-over at least twice on a copy of your data, and keep the old system read-only in parallel until the numbers reconcile. Your team is never without a working system.
How long does it take, and how much of our team's time?
A core scope of accounting, sales, purchasing and stock typically goes live in 8 to 12 weeks; manufacturing or multi-company set-ups in 12 to 16 weeks. Longer programmes are split into phases that each deliver something usable.
From your side we need one decision-maker, one key user per area for a few hours a week during discovery and testing, and someone who knows where the data is. We do the rest.
What if Mobinea disappears, or we want to change partner?
Nothing happens to your system. You own the installation, the database and every line of customisation, which we deliver as a documented Frappe app in your own repository. Any Frappe partner or in-house Python developer can take over, and the worldwide community and Frappe itself remain available for support.
That is the whole point of choosing an open platform, and we would rather earn your business every year than lock it in.
Can we host it ourselves?
Yes. ERPNext runs on standard Linux servers or Kubernetes, on-premise or in any cloud. We hand over the deployment, backup and upgrade procedures and can train your IT team, or keep operating it for you under an SLA. Many clients start with our managed hosting and move in-house later, or the other way round.
How does ERPNext compare with Odoo?
Both are open-source ERPs with similar breadth. The practical difference is the business model: Odoo keeps many useful modules in a paid Enterprise edition licensed per user, while ERPNext has one edition with everything in it, under GPL. ERPNext's accounting and manufacturing are also widely regarded as more complete out of the box. If your case leans towards Odoo, we will tell you.
Tell us what you run today.
We'll tell you if ERPNext fits.
A 30-minute fit-check call: your processes, your current systems, your numbers. No slides, no commitment. If it is not a match, you will hear it from us first.
- We reply within one business day
- A live demo on a real system, on request
- Licence-cost comparison for your headcount, free