Enterprise resource planning systems that integrate core business processes including accounting, inventory, and operations. All available with one-click installation on 365i web hosting.
ERP means one database sitting behind purchasing, stock, production, sales and the accounts, rather than four spreadsheets and a filing cabinet that disagree with each other. Self-hosted, open-source ERP fills the space underneath the commercial market. Odoo lists its Standard plan at £23 per user per month on annual billing in the UK (£33.50 for Custom, more again month to month), SAP Business One and NetSuite are sold through implementation partners at figures a six-person company will not entertain, and Sage handles the ledgers well without ever really touching works orders or multi-warehouse stock. A self-hosted install has no per-seat meter at all, which changes the arithmetic once you are adding warehouse staff and part-time bookkeepers to the system.
Dolibarr is the application in this category, and it is worth being precise about what it is. It ships as a set of modules you switch on individually: products and services, stock and warehouses, purchase orders, supplier invoices, shipments, manufacturing orders with bills of materials, double-entry accounting, bank reconciliation, expense reports. You turn on the four you need and the rest of the menu stays hidden. That modularity is the reason it survives on shared hosting where a monolithic ERP would not, and it is also why two Dolibarr installs can look nothing like each other.
Version 24.0.0 landed on 20 August 2026, with 23.0.4 the same day and a 22.x line still receiving fixes. This is an actively developed project with a yearly major release, not an abandoned one.
Situations we see often. If one of these sounds like you, this category is worth a look.
A distributor holding a few thousand SKUs across a unit and an overflow container needs stock levels that survive someone picking an order at eight in the morning. Dolibarr's warehouse and shipment modules give per-location quantities and a movement history, which is the part a spreadsheet can never honestly reconstruct after the fact.
A workshop assembling finished goods from bought-in components wants a works order that consumes the right parts and tells them what to reorder. The manufacturing module handles bills of materials and production orders without the licence cost of a mid-market MRP system, which for a firm turning over under a million pounds is usually the deciding factor.
Once warehouse pickers, a bookkeeper and a part-time buyer all need logins, a per-seat ERP charge starts to price out the people who most need access to it. Self-hosting removes the seat count from the decision entirely, so the question becomes who should have access rather than who can be afforded.
A business buying containers from overseas suppliers needs purchase orders, goods-received records and supplier invoices to line up before anything is paid. Keeping that chain in one system, on hosting you control, also keeps the supporting documents in one place when the accountant asks for them nine months later.
What sets Dolibarr apart is its user-friendly design, making it accessible to both small and medium-sized businesses.
The useful reading here is about scale, not friendliness. Dolibarr is aimed squarely at businesses too small for a partner-led implementation, which is exactly the band that shared hosting suits. Above roughly twenty concurrent users the bottleneck stops being the software and starts being the server it sits on.
ERP and accounting applications are heavier than they look. The headline numbers (users, modules) hide the real cost: every invoice, journal, and stock movement is a database write, every monthly report is a heavy aggregation query. We size MySQL InnoDB buffer pool generously and we set PHP memory at 512MB minimum, with daily backups that include the database and the uploads directory together. For finance teams above roughly twenty users, a small managed cloud server is usually the right home.
Two install decisions cause most of the trouble. Dolibarr asks where to keep its documents directory during setup, and the answer is a path outside your web root. That folder holds generated PDF invoices, uploaded contracts and supplier documents, so if it sits inside the public directory then anyone who guesses a filename can download an invoice. The project's own installation guide recommends an external path. The second is the install lock: once setup finishes, create install.lock in the documents directory, or the installer stays reachable.
Beyond that it is an ordinary PHP application with two appetites. It wants at least 128 MB of PHP memory (PDF generation is the reason), and the scheduled jobs module needs a real cron entry calling scripts/cron/cron_run_jobs.php with its security key. Without cron, recurring invoices and stock alerts simply never fire, and nothing warns you. Our plans carry unlimited cron jobs and let you pick your PHP version, so both are settings not obstacles.
Where it stops being the right answer: UK VAT. Dolibarr does not file to HMRC, so a VAT-registered business needs bridging software to satisfy Making Tax Digital. And if twenty or more people are in the system all day with heavy PDF batches, move to a managed cloud server rather than fighting a shared node.
Common questions we hear from people running ERP applications on 365i hosting.
No, not on its own. HMRC requires VAT-registered businesses to keep digital records and file through compatible software, and Dolibarr does not submit to HMRC directly. The practical route is bridging software, which gov.uk explicitly recognises: it takes your figures and creates the digital link to HMRC systems. Plenty of UK businesses run Dolibarr for stock, purchasing and sales and use a small bridging tool for the nine boxes. Confirm the arrangement with your accountant before you commit.
A standard PHP and MySQL account with at least 128 MB of PHP memory, cron access and a directory you can put outside the web root. Our web hosting plans cover all of that, including unlimited cron jobs and per-package PHP version selection, and every package is backed up daily with 30 days of restore points. Once you are past roughly twenty people using it concurrently, or generating large PDF batches, dedicated resources on a managed cloud server are the better answer.
Odoo is more polished and more capable, and it charges for it: £23 per user per month on the Standard annual plan in the UK, rising with headcount. Odoo also has a free tier limited to one app with unlimited users, which suits a business that only needs Inventory or only needs Invoicing perfectly well. Dolibarr wins where you need several modules working together and cannot justify a per-seat bill for warehouse and admin staff. It is the less refined product and the cheaper one to grow into.
No, and you should not. Dolibarr ships everything disabled and you enable modules one at a time, which keeps menus short and the learning curve manageable. A wholesaler might run Products, Stock, Purchase Orders and Invoices and never touch Manufacturing or Expense Reports. You can enable more later without reinstalling. The common mistake is switching on twelve modules on day one, then abandoning the system because nobody can find anything.
Three things, in order of frequency. The documents directory gets left inside the web root, so generated invoices are publicly reachable. Cron never gets configured, so scheduled jobs silently do nothing for months. And major upgrades get skipped: Dolibarr issues a major version roughly yearly, most recently 24.0.0 in August 2026, and skipping several at once turns a routine database migration into a difficult one. Take a backup before every upgrade and step through versions rather than jumping.
No. Everything lives in your own MySQL or MariaDB database, which you can dump from the control panel or over SSH at any time, and Dolibarr has CSV and Excel exports on most record types. That is the practical advantage of self-hosting over a SaaS ERP: leaving is a database export rather than a support ticket and a wait. The migration effort into whatever comes next is still real, but the data itself is always in your hands.
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