Our Top and Ongoing Woes with Odoo

We've been using Odoo back in the OpenERP days, but still struggle with some core problems in the design of this platform. It meets our needs for our various small companies, but there is significant pain associated. Unfortunately we haven't found a better fit over all these years to the feature set we need. Here is a list of the challenges/problems we keep running into spanning Odoo versions 11 through 15 and ongoing...

We are self-hosting 2 major Odoo instances.

One for the non-profit 501(c)3 RPG Research www.rpgresearch.com

One for the for-profit RPG Therapeutics LLC / RPG.LLC www.rpg.llc

We were on Odoo 13 a few years ago but it was too bloody unstable, so we started over with Odoo 12.

That is much more stable, but we have so many foundational problems with Odoo's design, it has been an ongoing plague of problems that have really handicapped our growth.

Number one problem, no good support for CI/CD type pipelines pushing updates across multiple release environments, for example from DEV to TST, to STG, to PRD. It is an ugly manual process. Surely there is a better way?

Number two problem, even with clean setups, there is no elegant upgrade method between versions, it is always an unpleasant cluster.

We use the Community Editions (CE) so we have to jump through more hoops to get all the "Enterprise Edition" (EE) features enabled in the CE version. It is totally do-able, just a manual process of replacing the modules.

The Web WYSIWIG is wonky and does weird things a lot.

Odoo's database and configuration structure is FRAGILE. One wrong module install and your whole setup can be ruined permanently.

No UNDO feature like the wonderful Plone Undo. This is sooooo helpful in community settings.

It is also looking like each edition of Odoo is getting more and more mercenary, and making the Community Edition (CE) less and less functional trying to push everyone to the cloud and/or Enterprise Edition. If this trend continues we're going to have to find another opensource alternative.