ERPNext

What is it?

ERPNext is like getting the entire back office of a company in a single piece of software: customer tracking (CRM), quotes and invoices, accounting, inventory, projects, HR, and more. It’s open source and has been battle-tested for years by thousands of real businesses around the world — manufacturers, consultancies, retailers, nonprofits.

Instead of paying for five different subscriptions that barely talk to each other, you get one system where everything is connected: a quote becomes an invoice, an invoice hits your books, a sale updates your stock.

What does it replace?

Salesforce (from $25/user/month) and HubSpot (from $15/seat/month) for customer tracking — plus a good chunk of what you’d otherwise pay for separate invoicing, inventory, and project tools. It adds up to hundreds per month for even a small company.

What does it cost you?

Nothing. No per-user fees whether you have 3 employees or 300. It runs on your own machine or a cheap rented server, and your business data never sits on someone else’s computer.

Get it running

No technical knowledge needed: copy the text below and paste it into Claude (or Claude Code). It will install ERPNext on your machine step by step and ask you a few simple questions along the way. Grab a coffee — it takes around ten to fifteen minutes.

Set up a self-hosted ERPNext instance on this machine using Docker.

1. Clone https://github.com/frappe/frappe_docker — the official Docker setup for Frappe/ERPNext.
2. Follow its README: copy example.env to .env, set strong passwords for the DB and the ERPNext administrator account, then run `docker compose -f pwd.yml up -d`.
3. Wait for the `create-site` container to finish provisioning, then verify http://localhost:8080 loads the ERPNext login page and sign in as Administrator.
4. Enable the CRM module and show me where leads, opportunities, and the sales pipeline live.
5. Explain the routine for upgrading versions and taking database/backups of the site's volume data.