What do users of Odoo ERP really have to say about Odoo? In this article, we will go over some negative but honest Odoo reviews and talk about them a little bit.
It is also good to note that, this article uses information sourced from various places, such as Trust Pilot and Google reviews.
Before we get started, a disclaimer, I work for Ahadi Software Africa, the company that runs ahadisoft.com. Ahadi Software Africa is an ERP implementation company and among the various ERP systems it implements is Odoo. So there could be a bias leaning towards Odoo, but I will try to stay as objective as possible.
Let us get started.
As of 3rd of March 2024 Odoo had 239 total reviews on Trust Pilot, and as you can tell from the image above, it receives as much hate as it does love. Slightly over half are positive reviews with the rest being negative (below 3 star) reviews. The fact that it has no middle ground is quite interesting.
1st Negative Review: Still waiting for refund after 6 months
| Name of person who left review | Nina Havemann |
| Stars Awarded | One Star |
| Link To Review | Find the review here |
Nina’s experience with Odoo turned out to be a complete disaster, especially when it came to getting her money back. She said Odoo was slow and frustrating in handling her refund request.
Right from the start, Nina felt like Odoo didn’t care about what she needed. Even though she realized their product wasn’t right for her, getting her money back was like banging her head against a wall. They kept saying they’d fix it quickly, but months went by with no progress, just more frustration.
What really ticked Nina off was that Odoo wouldn’t own up to their mistakes. Instead of admitting they messed up and fixing things, they acted like her concerns didn’t matter and wouldn’t even talk about fixing it. It was like they didn’t care about making customers happy at all.
In an industry where treating customers right should be super important, Nina thought Odoo’s behavior was just plain awful. They wouldn’t do what they said they would and didn’t seem to care about doing the right thing.
So, according to Nina, her time dealing with Odoo was a total mess. She wanted people to know that before they decided to work with Odoo, they should really think twice and check out other options. And for Nina, she was just hoping she would eventually get her money back, but at that moment, she felt like she couldn’t trust Odoo at all.
My opinion
In business, we believe the customer is always right. And as such, I will give my opinion based on the assumption that Nina was being truthful. Let us begin.
In this situation Odoo made a grave mistake or several. Either their accounting/refund department was super slow or they failed at properly educating their users on the proper refund policy, hence the frustration felt by Nina. Regardless of which they dropped the ball.
To make it worse, it seems their customer support were not of much help, because and I feel constant communication and reassurance to Nina would have helped out to keep her calm and not feel frustrated.
For information purposes, Odoo offers a 15 day money back guarantee for its software subscriptions (as of writing this), however. There are several catches.
Customers will not receive a refund if any of the following situations apply:
- The complaint is about a new feature that wasn’t mentioned in the module’s description or in communication with the vendor.
- The module had a bug that the publisher fixed after the complaint was made.
- The module functions correctly but doesn’t meet the customer’s particular requirements.
- The customer’s database is hosted on an Odoo online instance.
- The customer bought the wrong version of the application for their database.
Should you still choose Odoo, be on the safe side and have a look at their refund policy here.
2nd Negative Review: Odoo makes it up as they go along
Review Date: February 01, 2024
| Name of person who left review | Seth |
| Stars Awarded | One Star |
| Link To Review | Find the review here |
Seth’s experience with them was pretty rough. From his perspective, it seemed like the people running the show didn’t really have a clear sense of right and wrong. The rules kept changing, and it felt like they didn’t understand how his business operated, or worse, didn’t care to learn.
My Opinion
Seth’s feelings are indeed valid and I can feel his frustration from here. The worst feeling in business had to be that feeling when you have a problem and no one seems to care or really bother to understand.
Seth is one of the reasons that I always advise people, when implementing an ERP solution, it is good to bring an expert on board.
I say this not because people like Seth aren’t smart enough to figure it out, but rather, most “solutions” out there aren’t perfect. The thing is, someone would never understand your business before you tell that person about it. As such, most software tools out there are pretty general, their goal is to appeal to as many businesses as possible
So you do need an expert to customize and align the software solution to your specific business problem
3rd Negative Review: Terrible experience. Use a more reputable company
Date of Review: Feb 23, 2024
Ah yes, the old bait and switch. Claim that you offer a “free” product, but when someone signs up, they find out they have been taken for a spin.
This is an interesting review, because personally, I have set up lots of websites on Odoo and I haven’t had this specific issue. Could be it was an outage during that specific time Mike was setting up the website. And the fact that DNS and propagation could take a while, I understand it was a frustrating several days for Mike.
My opinion
I don’t think it was necessarily a bait and switch, could have been an outage. But regardless, again, communication from Odoo would have been reassuring. So Mike essentially had to navigate in this issue by himself.
4th Negative Review: Full of bugs and they milk you for money
Date of review: Feb 14, 2024
| Name of person who left review | Al |
| Stars Awarded | One Star |
| Link To Review | Find the review here |
Al’s valentines day for the year 2024 seems to have started off with frustration after frustration.
I understand Al, because I have been in that situation myself. And I am sure you have too. How many times does a business advertise great offers, and too good to be true deals? Then after you receive the product, you feel underwhelmed.
My Opinion
The thing is though, businesses have to make money. And they do, sometimes in very shady ways, but they have to. But in this case, I don’t think there was anything nefarious the guys at Odoo did.
In this case, Odoo could have been more transparent about their pricing so that people like Al, myself and you the reader aren’t taken by surprise after purchase.
5th Negative Review: The worst customer support.
Date of review: Dec 5, 2023
| Name of person who left review | Balram |
| Stars Awarded | One Star |
| Link To Review | Find the review here |
Again, we have another outage issue and to make it worse, customer support drops the ball, again.
This review highlights a significant issue with the customer support provided by the company. The fact that the website crashed due to a system issue, particularly involving a module error that couldn’t be uninstalled or reinstalled, is a serious problem. The delay in resolving the issue, even after 24 hours with no action taken on the ticket opened, underscores the inefficiency and lack of urgency in the support team’s response.
For a paid customer with a multi-company plan, this level of customer support is undoubtedly disappointing and falls far short of expectations. It’s clear from this review that there is a need for improvement in the company’s support processes to ensure timely and effective resolution of such critical issues.
Where Odoo can improve on;
First of all thank you for reading all that, now let us talk about some improvements Odoo could make, hopefully, one of their guys will stumble on this article and hopefully learn something from here.
Given the severity of the situations described in the review, here are some recommendations for Odoo to improve their customer support:
- Priority Response: Implement a system for prioritizing and addressing critical issues promptly. This could involve establishing specific response times for different types of issues, ensuring that urgent problems like website crashes are addressed with the highest priority.
- Enhanced Communication: Improve communication with customers by providing regular updates on the status of their support tickets. Even if a solution is not yet available, keeping customers informed about the progress of their case can help manage expectations and reduce frustration.
- Technical Expertise: Ensure that the support team has the necessary technical expertise to troubleshoot and resolve complex issues effectively. This may involve providing ongoing training and development opportunities to keep the team up-to-date with the latest technology and troubleshooting techniques.
- Proactive Monitoring: Implement proactive monitoring systems to detect and address potential issues before they escalate into major problems. This could involve regularly monitoring system performance, identifying potential vulnerabilities, and taking preemptive action to mitigate risks.
- Customer Feedback Mechanism: Establish a feedback mechanism to gather input from customers about their support experiences. This could include surveys, feedback forms, or follow-up calls to identify areas for improvement and gather suggestions for enhancing the support process.
- SLA Review: Review and revise the company’s Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to ensure they align with customer expectations and provide clear guidelines for response times and issue resolution.