odoo and OCA - does OCA aim at replicating functionality of odoo enterprise apps?

[kcleung]

I am now starting to learning odoo. It now appears that the app collection in the vanilla odoo community edition is pretty limited and many of the essential features are only available in apps that are exclusive for the enterprise edition. For example, it is only the accounting app that contains fully-fledged accounting functions but it is only available in the enterprise edition, whereas the invoicing app in the community edition is very very limited.

So is replacing functionality of odoo enterprise app one of the goals of OCA?

I can see that there are many accounting-related modules, and other modules on the OCA github thats seem to have the functionality of those enterprise apps.

If this is the case, where can I find the TODO list of which function in the enterprise app OCA wanna implement and which enterprise app is functionally replaced by which set of equivalent OCA apps (e.g. document, law firm industry etc etc)?

[antoniospneto]

I think the easiest way to explore this is by browsing through the OCA repositories. Each repository has a list of modules with a short description, and inside each module you can usually find a README file with more details.

You can also try out the functionality directly using Runboat, where an Odoo instance is automatically deployed with OCA modules for testing.

In practice, there isn’t a single “OCA vs. Enterprise replacement list.” You need to test each module yourself and see if it fits your business needs. In many cases you will find ready-to-use features, but not everything will match Enterprise one-to-one. Every company’s requirements are different, so you should be prepared to build your own modules, contribute back to OCA, or work with a service provider who can extend what’s missing.

[rvalyi]

Also bare un mind Odoo Enterprise is a moving target with new features every year. In fact there is kind of a race between Odoo SA and the OCA and the other ERPs and Odoo is evolving very fast. But usually, you tend to find OCA modules equivalent to the Odoo Enterprise ones 2 years later or so. So the OCA kind of lag behind Odoo Enterprise.

But this is no big deal when you consider most proprietary ERP systems don't get any significant update in 10 years or more.

And also the OCA has around 3000 modules for each version (with some migration delay), so it's a much larger and more complete codebase than Odoo Enterprise, with a lot of innovation coming from the OCA modules themselves. You can think about the OCA as the modules that get the job done for real without the gimmicks and the BS. Kind of the usual benefits from open source.

[vdewulf]

hello @kcleung
There are several webinars answering your questions, free for OCA Members. If you are a member already, you can access the recording of the past webinars.
There were 2 webinars about OCA Accounting and 1 webinar about the comparison EE / CE+OCA.

The list of future webinars are there: https://odoo-community.org/event.
There is also a new sort of event "support group for consultants" where the kind of questions you are asking could be of interest, and you could get answers from other experienced and new consultants in the OCA ecosystem. The fist occurence is on October the 7th.

And to become a member, it's here: https://odoo-community.org/get-involved/become-a-member
Hope you'll find this useful!

If you plan to come to the OCA Days or Odoo XP next week, come and find us at the OCA zone to discuss all that!