How much does an ERP cost for a factory in Romania

Below we compare the costs of four of the ERPs most widely used by small and mid-sized companies: Odoo, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, SAP Business One and Oracle NetSuite. In the interest of transparency: we are an Odoo partner. To make the figures comparable, we calculated them for a concrete case, a manufacturing company in Romania with 15 users, and it wasn’t simple at all, because only two of the four platforms publish their prices. With the other two, you only find out what it costs once you’re in a conversation with a partner.

In short, licenses range from €2,600 to €22,000 a year, and implementation from €10,000 to €80,000, depending on the platform and how complex the project is. As you can see, the difference isn’t measured in percentages but in multiples.

We’ll say upfront that we don’t consider the prices unjustified on any of the platforms: they differ precisely because the solutions aren’t right for everyone. A system built for a corporation costs accordingly, but it also solves different problems than those of a 15-person factory. That’s why we wrote this article: so you can see clearly which of them fit your company’s budget and needs.

For licenses, things could be simple, because their price doesn’t depend on the partner. Odoo and Microsoft publish theirs; SAP and Oracle don’t, so there you usually end up at a “request a custom quote” form. For implementation, it’s natural that no price is displayed, because every partner works differently and every factory has different processes.

License prices for a factory with 15 users

The scenario: 8 people in the office who need full access (manufacturing, inventory, purchasing, sales), and 7 on the shop floor who report production and scan in the warehouse. Annual amounts, licenses only.

The difference is on the shop floor, not in the office

Look at where the difference actually shows up. With Odoo, the 7 people in production cost €412 a year. With Business Central, the same people cost €3,276, eight times more, because shop floor reporting requires a device license.

It matters more than it seems. The people on the shop floor are precisely the ones who need to be in the system for you to have real data on consumption, scrap and order status. Many factories give up on shop floor reporting because of the per-license cost, then wonder why their ERP doesn’t show real consumption. If your office has 8 people and your shop floor 30, the difference multiplies accordingly.

Where the figures come from

¹ Odoo. Official prices for Romania. The Light User license, introduced in Odoo 20, covers exactly the shop floor roles: reporting in Manufacturing Shop Floor, barcode scanning in the warehouse, time tracking, time off and expenses. Two conditions: you need version 20 and a newly signed contract. Without both, all users are billed at the full rate. Calculation: (8 × 22.90 × 12) + (7 × 4.90 × 12) = €2,610.

² Business Central. Prices from Microsoft’s official licensing guide, September 2026: $110 for Premium and $45 for the device license, billed annually. Manufacturing is limited in Essentials and complete in Premium, so a factory needs Premium. For the shop floor we used the device license, because the much cheaper Team Member license doesn’t cover production reporting. Calculation: (8 × 96 × 12) + (7 × 39 × 12) = €12,492. Business Central can also be installed on your own server, but since April 2025 new customers can only license it by subscription, not with a perpetual license.

³ SAP Business One. The European price list of an SAP partner, September 2026: €91 for Professional and €47 for Limited per month, in the cloud. Calculation: (8 × 91 × 12) + (7 × 47 × 12) = €12,684. As a perpetual license: €2,700 for Professional and €1,400 for Limited, one-off, about €31,400 for this scenario, plus annual maintenance of 18–22%.

⁴ NetSuite. Oracle doesn’t publish a price list; everything is negotiated. The figures come from guides published by partners: a platform fee of $999–5,000 a month, $129–199 per full user and $10–25 per self-service user.

⁵ NetSuite total. We calculated the absolute minimum: platform €10,440, plus 8 full users at the lowest rate (€10,752), plus 7 self-service users, also at the minimum rate (€756). In practice, a factory needs a platform tier above the minimum and the manufacturing module, which is paid for separately, so a realistic budget is significantly higher.

Currency conversion. Microsoft and Oracle publish their prices in US dollars; we converted them at €1 = $1.15, as of 16 September 2026. Odoo and SAP are already in euros.

Note. The Odoo price is the official one for Romania. The Microsoft, SAP and Oracle prices are international lists and may differ through local partners, especially after negotiation. Ask for concrete offers before you set your budget.

All amounts exclude VAT.

How much implementation costs

Even if the licenses seem acceptably priced, bear in mind that these are enterprise products, and implementation usually costs 2–4 times the annual license cost. It’s something too rarely mentioned until you receive an offer.

With Odoo, the ratio comes out higher, 4 to 8 times, but not because implementation is expensive: in absolute terms it’s the cheapest in the table. The ratio is higher only because the licenses start from a much smaller base. That’s why you should compare the amounts in euros, not the multipliers.

The difference doesn’t come only from the number of hours, but also from the rate. An Odoo consultant in Romania usually charges €50–75 an hour, while an SAP or NetSuite consultant often charges two to three times that. It’s also worth noting that projects on bigger systems generally take more hours, because every deviation from the standard means extra configuration. The two multiply, which is why the final difference is much larger than the difference in licenses.

The Odoo range is an estimate based on our experience. Odoo also publishes its own estimator, which shows that 80% of projects of this size go live in 200 hours or less, which at the rates above means €10,000–15,000. With us, a manufacturing project doesn’t go below €5,000 in labor, regardless of size.

The ranges for the other three are estimates, built from list prices, the multipliers published by vendors and the rates charged in the market. Ask for concrete offers before you set your budget.

What drives the bill up

The same factory can receive very different offers. Usually for these reasons:

How many people use the system. Not just the office. If you want operators to report from the shop floor, you need to count them too. Business Central has a device license, about €39 a month, designed exactly for shop floor and warehouse stations. With Odoo, the portal for customers and suppliers is free.

How complex your manufacturing is. Multi-level bills of materials, operations across several machines, toll manufacturing, lot traceability. Each one adds configuration hours.

The state of your data. The same implementation can take 3 months with clean data and 6 months if products and stock have to be sorted out first. It’s the most common cause of budget overruns, and the only one you can prepare for in advance.

What it integrates with. Online store, bank, couriers, machines. Each connector is quoted separately.

What you customize. Every “we do it differently here” requirement means hours. Sometimes it’s worth it, often it isn’t. It’s important to know when it’s worth building new modules from scratch and when it’s better to look at a different platform.

The cost nobody puts in the offer

Your people’s time. They take part in the analysis, check the migrated data, learn the system and test it, all on top of their day-to-day work. In a factory, that also means hours taken away from the shop floor.

It doesn’t appear in any offer, but it’s real. Put it in the budget.

How to compare offers fairly

Calculate over 3 years, not just the first. Licenses and support are paid monthly, so an offer can look cheap in the first year and expensive in the long run.

Ask for an itemized offer, with estimated hours for each phase: analysis, configuration, migration, training, support. Very cheap offers usually leave out data migration or training, and the difference comes back later as extras.

Too big or too small, both cost you

Consider both whether the system is too big and expensive for you and whether it can keep up with your growth. An oversized system eats your budget on features you don’t use. One that’s too small forces you to start over in two years, and the second implementation costs more than the first.

For what else matters when choosing, beyond price, see “How to choose an ERP for a manufacturing company”.