ERPNext and Odoo for a Japanese subsidiary in Vietnam

This article compares ERPNext and Odoo for a Japanese company looking for an open-source ERP for its base in Vietnam. ERPNext is open source; Odoo has an open-source Community edition and an Enterprise edition under its own licence, so “open source” does not mean the same thing to users of the two. This article states only what each vendor’s official pages say, as viewed on 2026-11-12; prices and features may change after that date.

M&C ERP is built on ERPNext, so we are not a neutral party. That is why every point below has a source at the end of the article for you to check yourself.

Licences: one edition or two

• ERPNext is licensed under GPL version 3. Frappe’s ERPNext page says: “We don’t have any features hidden behind expensive paywalls.” The ERPNext pricing page calls it “free and open-source”.
• Odoo has two editions. Odoo Community is licensed under LGPL version 3. Odoo Enterprise uses Odoo’s own licence and needs a valid Enterprise subscription (the licence page also mentions a partnership agreement, limited to testing or development environments).

What only Odoo’s paid edition has

According to the comparison table on Odoo’s Editions page, Invoicing, Payments, CRM, Sales, Point of Sale, Inventory, Purchase, Manufacturing and eCommerce are in both editions. The following are Enterprise only, among others:

• full Accounting (general ledger, bank statement reconciliation, analytic accounting, budgets, localisations, reports);
• barcode in Inventory; Quality; Studio; Helpdesk; Approvals;
• the mobile app, hosting, version upgrades and support.

For a subsidiary that needs full accounting, this means full accounting sits in Odoo’s paid edition.

How each charges

• Odoo charges per user per month, and has a free plan limited to one app. When we opened Odoo’s pricing page from Vietnam on 2026-11-12, prices were shown in US$; we have not seen the prices shown for Japan, so this article gives no figures. Open the pricing page from your own country.
• ERPNext: the ERPNext pricing page calls it “free and open-source” and says the cost has “two components - Hosting and Implementation”. If you use Frappe’s own hosting (Frappe Cloud), the Frappe Cloud pricing page shows sites from “$5 onwards /mo”, and the ERPNext pricing page says: “pay only for what you use, and not per user!”

Japanese

Frappe and ERPNext screen translations are “primarily contributed by various users” through a translation portal; Odoo has a documentation page on how users change their display language. We did not find a “percentage translated” figure for Japanese on either vendor’s official pages (viewed 2026-11-12), so the surest check is to open a trial in Japanese and look at the screens your company needs.

In M&C ERP the display language is set per account: Japanese, Vietnamese or English (ERPNext’s per-user language setting; see sources); a few labels are still untranslated.

Vietnamese localisation

• Odoo lists two modules for Vietnam: “Vietnam - Accounting” (the page calls it the “default fiscal localization package”) and “Vietnam - E-invoicing” (“integration with SInvoice”). The page also has a separate section on “Vietnamese QR banking”.
• ERPNext ships a “Vietnam Tax” template (VAT 10 %) in its setup data (the file country_wise_tax.json in its source code, see sources); the official Regional documentation does not list Vietnam.
• M&C ERP: the current demo does not support Vietnamese e-invoicing.

Questions to ask before choosing

1. Which functions does the company need (full accounting, stock, import, warranty)? In Odoo, which edition are they in?
2. How many users today, and in 3 years? Does per-user or usage-based charging fit better?
3. Will Vietnamese e-invoicing come from an existing module, separate software, or extra development?
4. Which screens do the Japanese-side users need in Japanese? Open exactly those screens and check.
5. If you later change implementer or run it yourself, does the licence allow it?