Maybe I'm missing it, but I don't see any links to any documentation beyond the surface level. The closest seems to be the technology page at https://openkoda.com/technology/ which seems to be aiming to sell to budget owners. Nothing wrong with marketing to budget owners, but if the selling point vs Odoo is 'it's easier to build your app on OpenKoda, then deep and detailed developer docs are a must.
Documentation is where a lot of the 'new' ERP efforts fall flat and the established players get right. As a purchasing manager, I want to be able to send the landing page to a lead dev and be able to ask them 'Do you think this will work better for upcoming new program XYZ?'. Without stellar documentation, the answer is inevitably going to be 'not sure'.
Thanks for the links. While they are great to get started with, it only highlights my point about comprehensive docs. The starter links are not enough to be able to answer any of the questions that need to be answered before making a bet on a new platform.
Not trying to be a downer, but I hope you're able to focus on improving docs in the near future.
We use Odoo and love it. It would take moving mountains to get us off of it (short of predatory sales/pricing/licensing shenanigans anyway). It is fantastic and truly one of my favorite pieces of software. But man, does Odoo have a convoluted ecosystem. There’s no one place to learn about the product and if you self-host then the documentation might as well not exist for the small number of aggravatingly undocumented adjustments you might need to implement to get it working. They have weird and officially undocumented design decisions that can end up wasting a lot of your time if you don’t have the benefit of having read sometimes years-old public Github issues.
It’s not just self-hosting either. Their documentation covers the basics of key modules, and their video training material is great for functional insight. But it’s clear they don’t have anyone who is able or willing to effectively foster a coherent product-wide strategy around documentation, training, and similar enablement must-haves. Ironically, I think the fact that they run so much of their infrastructure on Odoo itself is part of the problem in terms of implementing a better strategy. If you buy an EMR, you won’t use it for HR just because it’s geared toward managing data relating to humans.
So a CRM that replicates Salesforce APIs? Sales people don’t want a Salesforce FOSS version, that’s why they green light salesforce. It’s about trend not practical software. Only dev teams that have been implementing Salesforce for 5 years want a FOSS version.
Salesforce is a generic application platform today, and this is how see it. Openkoda is not a drop-in replacement for Salesforce CRM, it is a useful replacement when you want to build your core business application a) retaining full source code ownership and ability to get any Java/JS team to work on it and run anywhere you want, b) without becoming dependent on technology and commercial limitations of working with big S.
People don’t build applications on Salesforce because it’s a generic platform, they build on it because they need to integrate with the sales/crm process/data/etc.
Edit: To be clear, I’m not saying your idea isn’t good. There is tons of room for this stuff, but be careful in assuming the reason devs use Salesforce platform is because of the features. It’s usually not.
> Salesforce is a generic application platform today
Indeed. So, if one is going to customize the hell out of it anyway, with most of the functionality being extensions, then why not just use a free software core ? Vertical solutions providers might find profitable to serve their customers and not pay the Salesforce tax.
There are people building for decades on things like Ofbiz[0] because it's flexible and it's truly open source. There are open and closed projects built on top of it, because it's a flexible business system which allow you to quickly model and built anything. I know a few companies myself that replaced Salesforce with a custom Ofbiz implementations and local companies that do the implementations.
That looks very interesting. I'm on the lookout for software for a bootstrapped biz.
A problem I can see my mugg^H^H^H^Hcolleagues flinching at that UI and thinking "this can't be very good" just based on the UI; like it or not, looks matter.
The themes I saw are basically color schemes. Has anyone done a more "modern" UI/UX?
Hey! As a Odoo dev, it’s really cool to see Odoo mentioned here. I was thinking the same thing regarding its similarities. I’ve always regarded Odoo as the “batteries included” ERP framework.
Here in Australia, Odoo is finally starting to hit some strides. We’re seeing more jobs in the market requesting Odoo experience, at our work we’re onboarding more customers than we have before. All said, I’m definitely going to fire up OpenKoda and brush up on my Java :)
Odoo's quest for monetization from open source has been a bit off-putting. I stopped using it a few quarters back due to that. Community and Enterprise are becoming too disjointed.
Thank you for such an overwhelming reception, we truly appreciate your comments and been sharing your feedback back and forth on our Slack channels today.
If you have a strong enterprise use case, I would be super happy to schedule a quick Openkoda demo for you, including all the bells and whistles. Just share a short description and ping me at: mglomba@openkoda.com
We are still actively watching this thread and will try to address as many questions as possible.
When talking to our users (and clients - as we customize Openkoda for enterprise companies building their bespoke applications as well) so many of them are tired of Salesforce being: a) slow, b) limited, c) expensive (probably in this order).
Considering the tag line "Ready-to-use development platform that accelerates the process of building business applications and internal tools", I would think OpenKoda would compete with Retool more than Salesforce, no ?
Salesforce's biggest value proposition is the partner ecosystem, which Salesforce has cultivated for like 20+ years. Some platform companies (Shopify comes to mind) cannibalize their plugin ecosystem by adding similar functionality to the core platform, but Salesforce deliberately avoids competing with software/services in the partner ecosystem. It's such a safe bet to build on top of Salesforce, because there's basically 0 platform risk and the technology is ubiquitous.
What's your approach to plugins, add-ons, and service partners?
I am not sure I'd agree with that - at one point Salesforce tried to buy my company, which was a best-of-the-AppExchange partner, and their justification for their (very) low offer was "that's what it would cost us to copy you". We sold the company 2 years later for 10x their offer, without a ton in the way of new revenue (our AppExchange ranking mysteriously tanked after we turned down their offer).
We actively look for service/technology partners, so if you want to build an application or extension on top of Openkoda for you or your clients we would be more than happy.
Openkoda Core is released under MIT license, so we have no means to stop you!
> but Salesforce deliberately avoids competing with software/services in the partner ecosystem
It helps that Salesforce takes a huge slice from sales in the AppExchange.
This isn't entirely true, though. Salesforce does, at times, position itself against its own ecosystem. Their recent attempt at devops, no matter how feeble it is, directly competes against major players like Copado and Gearset. Mulesoft and some other ventures over the years should have theoretically relegated a huge multitude of sync apps to irrelevancy, if Salesforce had been able to execute better on them. They launched a payment system a couple of years ago that competes with some other top marketplace options. There are dozens of examples like this.
> Some platform companies (Shopify comes to mind) cannibalize their plugin ecosystem by adding similar functionality to the core platform, but Salesforce deliberately avoids competing with software/services in the partner ecosystem
When do you compete, and when do you cultivate?
Are some business sectors better at one versus the other?
Readit News
Documentation is where a lot of the 'new' ERP efforts fall flat and the established players get right. As a purchasing manager, I want to be able to send the landing page to a lead dev and be able to ask them 'Do you think this will work better for upcoming new program XYZ?'. Without stellar documentation, the answer is inevitably going to be 'not sure'.
You may want to share the following docs as a good starter:
Short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gob4j072Isg
5-min guide: https://github.com/openkoda/openkoda/blob/main/openkoda/doc/...
Installation: https://github.com/openkoda/openkoda/blob/main/openkoda/doc/...
Not trying to be a downer, but I hope you're able to focus on improving docs in the near future.
It’s not just self-hosting either. Their documentation covers the basics of key modules, and their video training material is great for functional insight. But it’s clear they don’t have anyone who is able or willing to effectively foster a coherent product-wide strategy around documentation, training, and similar enablement must-haves. Ironically, I think the fact that they run so much of their infrastructure on Odoo itself is part of the problem in terms of implementing a better strategy. If you buy an EMR, you won’t use it for HR just because it’s geared toward managing data relating to humans.
Edit: To be clear, I’m not saying your idea isn’t good. There is tons of room for this stuff, but be careful in assuming the reason devs use Salesforce platform is because of the features. It’s usually not.
Source: I ran dev tools at Salesforce.
Indeed. So, if one is going to customize the hell out of it anyway, with most of the functionality being extensions, then why not just use a free software core ? Vertical solutions providers might find profitable to serve their customers and not pay the Salesforce tax.
Not is standard. You need to train your costumer in this interface you can simply contract employees who knows Salesforce.
[0] https://github.com/apache/ofbiz-framework / https://ofbiz.apache.org/index.html
A problem I can see my mugg^H^H^H^Hcolleagues flinching at that UI and thinking "this can't be very good" just based on the UI; like it or not, looks matter.
The themes I saw are basically color schemes. Has anyone done a more "modern" UI/UX?
Odoo is doing quite well. It made Fabien Panckaers the youngest billionaire in Belgium.
Here in Australia, Odoo is finally starting to hit some strides. We’re seeing more jobs in the market requesting Odoo experience, at our work we’re onboarding more customers than we have before. All said, I’m definitely going to fire up OpenKoda and brush up on my Java :)
Also custom integrations
If you have a strong enterprise use case, I would be super happy to schedule a quick Openkoda demo for you, including all the bells and whistles. Just share a short description and ping me at: mglomba@openkoda.com
We are still actively watching this thread and will try to address as many questions as possible.
When talking to our users (and clients - as we customize Openkoda for enterprise companies building their bespoke applications as well) so many of them are tired of Salesforce being: a) slow, b) limited, c) expensive (probably in this order).
@dang, this person's spamming us with marketing links.
What's your approach to plugins, add-ons, and service partners?
This alone would be worth a blog post (assuming you don't have any non disparagements with CRM)
Openkoda Core is released under MIT license, so we have no means to stop you!
It helps that Salesforce takes a huge slice from sales in the AppExchange.
This isn't entirely true, though. Salesforce does, at times, position itself against its own ecosystem. Their recent attempt at devops, no matter how feeble it is, directly competes against major players like Copado and Gearset. Mulesoft and some other ventures over the years should have theoretically relegated a huge multitude of sync apps to irrelevancy, if Salesforce had been able to execute better on them. They launched a payment system a couple of years ago that competes with some other top marketplace options. There are dozens of examples like this.
When do you compete, and when do you cultivate?
Are some business sectors better at one versus the other?