Odoo Community

Last reviewed Aug 26, 2026 · 951 words

The app called Accounting is not in Odoo Community. Since version 13 the free edition ships Invoicing, which issues and tracks invoices, while the general ledger, bank reconciliation, and financial statements live in Enterprise. The Odoo Community Association (OCA) publishes modules that restore most of that, and installing them is the first thing an experienced Odoo admin does, but you should know before you start whether you will run OCA accounting, keep the books elsewhere, or pay for Enterprise. Everything else you probably want (CRM, Sales, Purchase, Inventory, Manufacturing, Project, Website, eCommerce, Point of Sale, HR) is in Community, polished, and LGPL-3.0.

Community vs Enterprise is an app list, not a feature toggle

The catalogue's con, "best features in Enterprise", is true but vague. Here is the concrete split as I read it today, so you can check your own must-have list against it before committing an evening.

Two things are missing from that table because they are not apps. The upgrade service that carries a database from one major version to the next is Enterprise-only; Community users use OCA's OpenUpgrade project, which is community-maintained and lags each release. And Enterprise support is a contract; Community support is the forum. Both cost time rather than money.

PostgreSQL is not optional, and the filestore is not in it

Odoo stores structured data in PostgreSQL and attachments in a filestore on disk. That second fact is what makes people lose data: a pg_dump alone restores an instance with every invoice PDF and product photo missing. The compose layout below keeps both on bind mounts you can see.

services:
  db:
    image: postgres:16
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_USER=odoo
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=change-me
      - POSTGRES_DB=postgres
    volumes:
      - ./db:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    restart: unless-stopped
  odoo:
    image: odoo:18
    depends_on:
      - db
    ports:
      - "8069:8069"
      - "8072:8072"
    environment:
      - HOST=db
      - USER=odoo
      - PASSWORD=change-me
    volumes:
      - ./odoo-data:/var/lib/odoo
      - ./addons:/mnt/extra-addons
      - ./config:/etc/odoo
    restart: unless-stopped

Pin the image to a major version (odoo:18, not latest) because Odoo publishes a new major every autumn and a latest pull across that boundary is a database migration you did not schedule. ./addons is where OCA modules and anything custom go; ./odoo-data holds the filestore and sessions. Back up ./db via pg_dump and ./odoo-data via tar, on the same schedule, to the same off-box destination.

Set the master password before you create a database

Open http://server:8069 for the first time and Odoo shows the database manager, a page that can create, duplicate, back up, and drop databases for anyone who knows the master password. Set it yourself in ./config/odoo.conf rather than leaving it to a first-boot default, and once your database exists, hide the manager entirely:

[options]
admin_passwd = a-long-random-string
list_db = False
proxy_mode = True
workers = 4

workers = 0 (the default) runs Odoo single-threaded, which is fine for evaluation but leaves Discuss and live chat without their websocket, because those need the multi-process mode that workers turns on. Odoo's own sizing rule is two workers per CPU core plus one, at roughly 330 MB per worker under load; 4 workers plus PostgreSQL is why the catalogue's 2 GB minimum is a real minimum and 4 GB is where I would start.

Behind a reverse proxy, route two ports

Port 8069 is the web app; 8072 carries websocket traffic for chat and notifications, mounted under the /websocket path in recent versions. A Caddy site block that gets both right, with proxy_mode = True above so Odoo trusts the forwarded headers:

erp.example.com {
    reverse_proxy /websocket* odoo:8072
    reverse_proxy odoo:8069
}

Forget the second line and everything appears to work while the chat bubble spins forever, which is the most common "Odoo is broken" thread on the forum.

Upgrades are the maintenance cost, and they are yours

Within a major version, updates are safe: pull the new image, restart, and run docker compose run --rm odoo -d yourdb -u all --stop-after-init once so installed modules pick up code changes. Across majors, every third-party module must exist for the new version before you move, and OCA ports arrive over the months after each release rather than on day one. The realistic Community rhythm is to pick a major, live on it for two or three years while it is supported, then do one planned migration with OpenUpgrade on a copy of the database first. That planning burden is the "Hard" in the catalogue rating; day to day it is an ordinary Python app.

What I'd do

If you need CRM, sales, inventory, and invoicing for a small company, run the compose file above on a 4 GB box with the image pinned to the current major, add OCA's accounting modules if the books must live inside, and budget one weekend every two to three years for the version jump. If full accounting is the centre of your requirements, look at ERPNext first, where it ships complete; if you are a sole trader who wants invoices and a contact list, Dolibarr runs on a fraction of the resources. And if what you actually want is only the CRM, the Odoo vs Twenty comparison exists because that question comes up weekly.