Odoo Light User: what it is and how much it costs

Odoo started out as free software, built together with a community of developers, and since then every version has brought changes that are felt directly in the budgets of the companies using it. Odoo 20, released on 24 September 2026, introduced Odoo Light User, a license that costs €4.90 a month in Romania, compared with the €22.90 a user on the Custom plan costs in the first year. It is designed for employees and contractors who use Odoo only for limited tasks: reporting production, scanning barcodes in the warehouse, logging hours worked or requesting time off.

For manufacturing, logistics, retail and service companies, the change cuts license costs considerably. Until now, a shop floor operator cost as much as a director, so many companies chose to leave their operators out of the system. But without them the ERP never finds out how much material was actually used and how many good parts came out, and that is where the differences between the stock in the software and the stock in the warehouse come from.

What a Light User can do

A Light User has access to what a person needs for their own work, not to running the company. They can report production in Manufacturing Shop Floor, the screen operators use on the shop floor, scan barcodes as a warehouse operator and work the till in Point of Sale. On the HR side, they can see their payslips, request time off, submit their expenses and attendance, and see their planning and appraisals. They also have access to Field Service, for technicians in the field, and can read the internal documentation in Knowledge.

What they cannot do is everything else: they don’t create sales orders, don’t make purchases, don’t work in accounting and don’t configure anything. For those, they need a full license.

How much you save, in a concrete example

Take a factory with 8 people in the office and 30 on the shop floor. If all 30 had a full license, it would cost €687 a month. As Light Users, they cost €147 a month. The difference, €540 a month, comes to more than €6,400 a year, money that until now made shop floor reporting look like a luxury.

We compared these costs with Business Central, SAP Business One and NetSuite in the article How much does an ERP cost for a factory in Romania. With the competition, the same shop floor seat costs several times more.

The conditions you have to meet

The Light User license does not apply automatically. You need Odoo 20, because the features for these users did not exist in version 19, and you have to sign a new contract with Odoo. If you don’t meet both conditions, all users are billed at the full rate.

There is one more detail that few people notice. Odoo counts as a Light User not only an account explicitly marked as such, but also any active employee in the HR app who does not have a regular user account. If you keep records of all your employees in Odoo, for payroll or attendance for example, check exactly how many are active before you do the math, because each of them can end up on the invoice.

What else changed in the pricing

Along with Light User, Odoo also changed its prices, starting 24 September 2026. The Standard plan and the free one-app offer stayed the same, while the Custom plan went up by 20%, the first increase in four years. For existing customers, users already under contract go up at renewal by at most 7% a year, depending on the version of the contract, and the new price applies only to users added from now on.