Concerns & Questions About the Future Direction of ERPNext and the Frappe Ecosystem

ERPNext
, , ,
1

Hi everyone,

I’m a system administrator and programmer with some experience in ERP systems—most notably Odoo—and I’ve been exploring ERPNext recently. I’ve always appreciated the original vision of ERPNext: having all essential business modules and apps under one unified, familiar interface. But lately, I’ve been feeling a bit uncertain about the direction the project is heading, and I’d really appreciate some insight from the community and core team.

Here are some of my concerns and questions:

  1. Fragmentation of Modules

It seems like many features that were once core parts of ERPNext are now being broken out into separate apps—like HRMS, CRM, and Helpdesk. While modularity is great for some use cases, it feels like we’re moving away from the “everything-in-one” experience that made ERPNext so appealing. Why is this happening? Is ERPNext moving toward becoming just another framework for building your own ERP, rather than being a ready-to-use ERP?

  1. Integration Issues

This fragmentation also brings integration challenges. For example, if I want to use Helpdesk or the new CRM, why aren’t they deeply integrated with ERPNext out of the box? Why do I need to install multiple apps and manage multiple interfaces or routes like /hrms separately?

  1. Desk UX and Usability

Why isn’t the Desk interface improving more rapidly? Navigation is confusing, and the overall user experience doesn’t feel modern or intuitive, especially compared to other ERPs like Odoo.

  1. Lack of Guidance and Learning Resources

Coming from Odoo, I found ERPNext’s documentation and learning resources lacking. There are limited video tutorials, and we spent hours figuring out how to use things like Frappe Website Builder, client scripts, and data scripts. This makes the onboarding process really difficult, especially for non-experts.

  1. Company Vision and Roadmap

I try to stay informed—I regularly read forum posts, GitHub issues, and blog updates—but I still find it hard to grasp the long-term vision. Is ERPNext here to stay as a full-featured ERP, or is the focus shifting more toward Frappe as a low-code platform?

I’m not trying to criticize for the sake of it. I want to invest my time, skills, and possibly business on top of ERPNext and Frappe. But I need confidence in where this project is heading.

Should we still have faith in ERPNext as a cohesive, community-driven ERP system?

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts, and thank you to everyone who’s contributing to this ecosystem.

1 Like
2

Thanks @mitexleo for the questions.

Managing ERPNext as a monolith was becoming a managerial problem. It was hard to manage a common issue tracker / PR list etc and that was slowing down development. Also the market views CRM, HRMS, Helpdesk as different categories so we split them into separate modules so each of them get their own attention and vision. (Conway’s Law). This is still WIP, but my guess is that the new CRM and Helpdesk are a lot better than the desk versions.

There was also the point of security. For example, we don’t want all our users to be part of our core ERP, so a separate helpdesk makes things clean and isolated (user and role management is much better)

We are aware on working on those. CRM is already integrated with ERPNext. We don’t see a lot of integration points with Helpdesk, but will try and address them as they go.

Our efforts went into Frappe UI and the next gen products. I accept your point that Desk needs an upgrade too.

Yes, Builder can have better documentation, specially related to scripting. cc @surajshetty

Our vision is to be a “full-stack” company - most of our products are driven by our own internal needs (example, we needed a better hosting platform, analytics, website, etc) and then we hope our engineering teams are good enough to make them industrial strength products.

ERPNext and Frappe HR will continue to be our Flagship products and there the most efforting is being done to refactor and make them solid and scalable. As an organisation we are also trying to identify and cover gaps systematically.

You should talk to other service providers and partners on their experience. From what we know, most of the mature (> 3 years) Frappe Partners are very profitable and growing. Unlike Odoo, we are not in a “hurry” and our hypothesis is that our growth will be driven by the ecosystem and the community and not Frappe (the company) alone!

4 Likes
3

Rushabh provided some really good answers, but I’ll add a few things from my perspective as a user. (Usual caveats that everything below reflects just my own experiences and opinions.)

Debates about this have become pretty common around here over the last few years, but I think an important point is usually missing.

  • Desk is Frappe’s UI-to-rule-them-all. It provides a uniform interface for all data structures. Sales Invoices look and work the same as Student Attendance records, and Holiday Schedules look and work the same as General Ledger Entries.
  • That uniformity is simultaneously the best thing and the worst thing about Desk. It is great for system administrators but sometimes confusing/inefficient for other types of users. You say that Desk is outdated in your post, and it’s true that it’s due for some structural updates (some of which come in v16). But, I’d argue the problem has less to do with technology and more to do with workflow specificity. These limitations can’t be overcome by improving desk alone.
  • In the last couple years, significant development has gone into new Frappe UI-based apps as an answer to this problem. Data might be uniform in structure, but workflows rarely are. What HR needs is different from what a sales team needs, and most real-world workflows involve the integration of data from multiple different doctypes simultaneously. The new apps are designed from the ground up to achieve this, visualizing workflows rather than data structures.

But, and this is the really important point: Desk hasn’t gone anywhere.

All that data that’s being generated by bespoke UIs is still 100% ordinary Frappe data. “Apps” are just a bundling tool for distribution. Once they’re installed, apps are irrelevant. All data can access all other data equally. Once it’s in your database, Frappe doesn’t really care which app a document belongs to. In that regard, the monolith never went anywhere.

Frappe has always been framework-first. In my opinionated view, it is the absolute best low-code framework on the planet. But, low-code should not be misunderstood as no-code. System implementers who come in expecting that they’ll never need to read or write a line of python are missing out on the vast majority of ERPNext’s power.

I don’t have much experience with Odoo, but what I’ve seen suggests to me that it’s a very different creature from Frappe/ERPNext. I’ve been around these forums for a long time now, and concerns that Frappe is in the process of abandoning itself to become something different have voiced continuously for a decade. I don’t see it. To me, Frappe is more Frappe than ever.

5 Likes