As the title says, this post is definitely more of a rant than constructive feedback, and I don’t agree with every point. But it does touch on something important.
Frappe has grown beyond the stage where it can behave like an early startup that constantly pivots and throws new ideas at the wall. There are companies running critical operations on this stack and partners making long-term investments in it. With that come different expectations, and for me the most important one is simply stability and long-term support. Innovation is still important, but so is stewardship (especially with core apps like frappe, erpnext and to some extend hrms).
I think part of this comes down to something stated openly on their careers page: “Our team has complete freedom to choose their work goals, the projects that they want to work on, and how they want to work.” (Careers at Frappe). I actually like that about Frappe, I’m not a fan of heavy top-down management either. But with that freedom comes a need for transparent communication about strategic direction and priorities. From the outside it can sometimes feel like “what do I feel like building today?” — and the PostgreSQL support for ERPNext is a good example: genuinely useful, but it’s hard to know whether it was a strategic priority or just something someone wanted to work on.
Two things stand out for me. The first is finishing before rewriting. Rewrites feel like progress, but a half-finished replacement is usually worse than a known, hardened original, and you often end up maintaining both. The discipline that’s missing isn’t “don’t innovate,” it’s “harden and finish one thing before starting the next.” Polish what exists, close out the bugs, and only then consider replacing it. It’s not as exciting for developers. Especially younger ones who want to redo everything the modern way, but sometimes stable and proven is perfectly fine.
The second is the steady stream of new apps. Every few months there’s a new one, and while I understand the ambition to build a broad open-source ecosystem, some of these feel hard to justify. A Teams alternative, for instance, when solid open-source options already exist. Meanwhile existing apps still have gaps that matter for real usage. From the outside it’s difficult to tell which apps are strategic long-term products and which are more experimental. As the ecosystem matures, that distinction becomes increasingly important, partners need to know what they can safely build a business around. I made a similar point in the CRM discussion: Why does Frappe CRM feel underserved? - #10 by marc_centura.
Frappe is a powerhouse. But especially with the push toward agentic coding now in the mix, the stakes are higher. That direction can either bring the focus and consistency this ecosystem needs, or (if no organizational changes are made) accelerate the exact problems being raised here.