Open Source ERP Current Releases
Software projects are on a constant cycle of development, testing, releasing and fixing. open source ERP projects are not different.
I would like to update on the latest released version of the different solutions and elaborate a little about the projects’ development roadmaps.
Openbravo
Openbravo latest release is R2.35 maintenance pack 1 which was released back in early January 2008. It contains mainly bug fixes, focusing on improving stability – no new functionality was added. Openbravo have been lately releasing an impressive amount of localizations for countries such as south Africa, Romania, Venezuela, Malaysia, Singapore, The Netherlands, Argentina, Poland and France. Localization for ERP software is so important because without it, it’s almost impossible to use the software due to language differences and local accounting regulations.
Latest functionality enhancements to Openbravo were released under version 2.33 – ability to create UI skins,calender tab, enhanced accounting reporting capabilities and improved user messages.
In parallel to its current development activity, Openbravo is working on a completely new underlying platform, code named ‘Green’. Green will not be released until 2009, but I see Green as an attempt by Openbravo to disconnect from its Compiere root as much as possible. I will post about Green in a future post.
Compiere
Compiere’s latest major release was Compiere 3.0, released December 2007. Major changes to the free,open source (community) version include returns management,financial reporting, improvements is the swing UI,search and security,easier access to the data dictionary and easier installer. Obviously, Compiere 3.0 includes many bug fixes.
As for Compiere’s roadmap, that’s a big question mark for me. I couldn’t find any information about the ‘technical’ roadmap of the Compiere product. I believe that the reason is that unlike many other open source projects, the Compiere roadmap is not decided by its contributing community but rather by its commercial partners and paying customers. If that is good or bad I can’t say, but I believe that is the situation.
The roadmap issue was one of the triggers that eventually led to the birth of the Adempiere project – another open source ERP project that was initiated by several former Compiere developers.The renegade developers believed Compiere departed from its contributing community and did not involve them enough in the roadmap discussion, not developing features requested by the non-commercial user community.
Adempiere
Adempiere’s last stable release (and first stable release independently from Compiere) was Adempiere 3.2 – MayDay Edition,released on May 2007. As expected,it includes many bug fixed and performance improvements, but it is also an attempt to resolve product dependencies on proprietary or closed source components. It also included integration with openXpertYa POS and ability to serve PDF documents.
The current version available for download is 331. In my opinion,the most important feature that Adempiere is working on is integration with Libero – an open source ERP manufacturing module. An integrated manufacturing module would give Adempiere an important advantage over open source ERP solutions who do not provide decent support for manufacturing activities.
OFBiz
Current OFBiz release is 4.0. For Jan-Feb 2008,the roadmap included mainly UI improvements, but I am yet to try them out. The roadmap includes enhancements to the accounting module, further development of project management and of the BI module and improvements to the content management component and to catalog manager usability.
TinyERP
Latest TinyERP release is 4.2.2, released just a couple of weeks ago (Feb. 2008). It includes many bug fixes. The latest feature-addition release was 4.2.0, released October 2007, adding several modules and making some improvements to the TinyERP kernel.
Summery
Amongst all open source ERP projects covered here, Openbravo does the best job as far as transparency of current offering and future development roadmap is concerned. Their Wiki pages include a relevant,clear summery of current features by version and short term and long term roadmap (Green).
As always, I would be very happy to get feedback from active community members who can elaborate about their project long-term roadmap and current development focus.
When I was analysing OpenBravo I was impressed – They certainly have the flashiest marketing of any open source ERP and the product appears strong. However I found that it was rather heavy on resources (okay we can get around that if the customer has new equipment) and I just couldn’t work out an easy way to customise it (bigger issue, maybe I just needed more time). So I decided to focus on TinyERP.
However I recently found a potential client who was interested in using OpenBravo instead so I went back to look at it and see that they now they have gone the route of a community version and a network version (which is 5,000 € (5 users) / year + 500 € / user / year). They then claim that the community version is just for developers and non-critical environments.
Now this is the type of model I don’t like – many of the smaller systems I put in cost about that including customisation and support. With OpenBravo I would have to double my quote to put in the network version because the client will say “Well my business is a critical environments” and quite right too – In todays environment it’s ok to sell open source products but only as long as you sell it as “as good as commercial software”.
I’m following this site with great joy, since I’m an opensource advocate with long experience from commercial ERP systems.
I’ve got most impressed by openbravo so far, but turned to adempiere instead. The reason is that I got no contact at all with the openbravo “community”. No answers in irc and very little info from the guys answering my mails.
Adempiere is such a difference in all those aspects, helpful people indeed. That matters, but in a case of deploying an installation to a paying customer (which I haven’t done with any opensource ERP at all so far) it will demand a lot more from me if I go Adempiere. If I choose Compiere or Openbravo the client will pay for licenses and there will be support to get.
Tough choice
I’m worried about the comment of Rob. This policy of OpenBravo is, in my opinion, a bomb against the philosophy of Open Source. I can understand the service provided is different depending if you pay a fee or not, but what cannot be different is the software itself – then it is not Open Source!
Rob, could you provide more details please?
I am the Chief Products Officer at Openbravo and I would like to clarify Rob’s comment above and reassure Luis that we completely share his point of view.
It appears that we have some incorrect and conflicting statements on our different sites (our main site, uses the same wording as Rob and our wiki, http://wiki.openbravo.com/wiki/Openbravo_Releases, does not mention Openbravo Network). We will rectify this mistake very shortly.
In reality, Openbravo has three editions:
* Developer’s Edition, based on our development trunk and intended for developers.
* Community Edition, which is free and released with an 100% open source license, which is stable and intended for production usage.
* Openbravo Network, which is a commercial virtual appliance that contains:
1) Openbravo Community Edition (the same software)
2) All the tech stack required to run it
3) Services for automated installation and maintenance
4) Support and warranties
I apologize for the confusion that our site might have created. We will rectify it as soon as possible.
Paolo
Hi Rob,
Thank you for raising this issue. I was un-aware and surprised to here that kind of message coming out of Openbravo. I always thought Openbravo did a decent job in keeping the balance between maintain its open source nature while continuing to evolve on the commercial side and making its investors happy.
From the open source ERP solutions I currently cover, Adempiere is by far the most ‘true open source’-the project is a group of dedicated developers who’s main focus is to provide a great piece of ERP. Their community is also very active and responsive and they should be credited for that.
Which ERP solution should you choose? There are so many variables to consider and the ‘true open sourceness’ of the project is one of them, although the level of support you get from the community around a project is a very important variable to consider.
Luis – couldn’t agree more, I was surprised to hear that about Openbravo.
It also gives me an idea for future posts – I will contact all projects and ask some question like Rob did and compare the different replies I got from each project. It would be valuable to see how the solutions fair on these issues.
Hi Paolo,
It’s a pleasure to have you on our site!
I am always happy to get feedback from the different projects team members as they know better than anyone what is really going on internally and they can provide a lot of insight.
I was worried with the comment Rob post, as he suggested that the answer he got from Openbravo made him understand that the ‘Communiy Edition’ is not meant for production.
I have no problems with the commercial model of bundling a free,open source software together with support and maintenance and selling that to customers, as long as the software itself can be downloaded and used for free. This model proved itself and I believe it is important for the evolution of open source ERP as a mainstream ERP solution.
What I don’t like is situations such as the one Rob described, where the projects says “this is not for production use, you need to pay for that to be in production” – what we end with is a bunch of people doing QA for the project that cannot go into production and that is detrimental.
I was pleased to see Paolo’s response and the way he has worded it seems reasonable. Unfortunately this still isn’t reflected on their website at present (16th March) – see openbravo product comparision
Hi osserpguru!
It’s great to see that someone it’s trying to give a little be of logic and objetive “reviewing” of all ERP/CRM systems offered in the net.
I am an IT consultant and have done mainly CRM Implementations for many customers; Some of them, need to go the extra mile and install an ERP to fullfill al their needs, but the problem I am facing, it’s that all the big players of the “open source” ERP implementations, does not offer a true email integration (or at leaxt it’s what I am seeing…).
All of my customers are used to have all emails comming in and out of the office being tracked for every individual user from the crm;
Do you know any ERP implementation that can handle this requeriment?
what I see in most of the ERP’s, (except for one called OPENTAPS http://www.opentaps.org) it that they use the “tracker” approach, for one or few “department” group email.
Any help regarding this, will be reaaalllly aprecited.
Regards,
Diego LG.
It’s May 11, there website is still kept as saying the community version as for “non-ciritical environment”.
I was trying openbravo for the last couple of weeks. After seeing this post, I think Adempiere should be a better choice for me.