Most people searching for an erpnext demo end up on a dead page first. The old public sandbox at demo.erpnext.com no longer resolves, and a good share of the guides pointing to it were written before that changed. This piece covers what works right now: the live public instance, the 14-day free trial, and the self-hosted Docker route, what each one shows you and what it hides, and the one comparison between ERPNext and Odoo that neither vendor has much reason to write.
One thing up front: del.ai has a commercial interest here. We sell NetSuite-to-Odoo migrations, and we do not migrate anyone off ERPNext. Nothing below is a pitch aimed at ERPNext users. It's the guide we'd want a competitor to write about us.
del.ai does not migrate anyone off ERPNext, but here is what works. Sign up for Frappe Cloud's 14-day free trial, which provisions your own private ERPNext site in minutes, with no card required until the trial ends. The domain many search results still point to, demo.erpnext.com, returned a not-found page as of July 28, 2026; it appears to have been retired. Frappe also runs a shared public instance seeded with a sample company, but on the same date it sat behind a login screen rather than passing visitors straight through, so don't count on it as a one-click path. If you'd rather not create an account, Frappe's own frappe_docker project spins up a disposable local install in a few minutes once the container images finish downloading, though it starts completely empty, with no company data pre-loaded, so you build the test scenario yourself. A guided sales walkthrough exists too; scheduling isn't published anywhere.
Source: Frappe, "ERPNext Pricing," Frappe Technologies documentation, 2026. ↗ | Frappe, "frappe_docker README," GitHub repository, 2026. ↗
Three routes work today, and one used to.
The address that still ranks for a large share of "erpnext demo" searches, demo.erpnext.com, returned a not-found response when checked on July 28, 2026. It was a public sandbox Frappe operated in earlier years; nothing on Frappe's current site links to it anymore, and there's no sign it's coming back. Frappe controls that domain, not del.ai, so treat this as a snapshot rather than a permanent fact: dead today, and free to move, redirect, or reappear at Frappe's discretion tomorrow.
The Frappe Cloud trial doesn't hand you a shared "demo login" at all. Signing up provisions a private site with you as the administrator from the first screen, so there's no separate credential to hunt for. The shared public instance works differently: it's seeded with a sample company, and its homepage identifies it as "Nova Gadget House." But reaching the application itself, as of July 28, 2026, redirected to a standard login screen rather than dropping visitors straight into the workspace, and no published username or password makes that route self-serve. The disposable Docker install logs you in as a preset "Administrator" account, but only for that one local session. Of the three, only the trial gives you a persistent account of your own.
| Route | Cost | Time to access | Persistence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Frappe Cloud free trial | Free for 14 days; a card is requested only once the trial ends | A few minutes, browser only | Full private site; expires without a paid plan |
| Public live instance | Free | Minutes, if the login screen resolves for you | Shared with every other visitor, not a private environment |
| Disposable self-hosted Docker | Free, on your own machine | A few minutes for the site itself once images finish downloading (download time varies by connection) | Wiped on teardown; custom apps cannot be added |
| Persistent self-hosted install | Free software; you pay only hosting | Roughly half a day for someone comfortable running Linux servers | Fully yours, no vendor in the loop |
| Guided sales demo | Free | Not published; request it directly | One walkthrough, not self-serve |
If you want to enter real transactions and judge the product, the trial is the only route built for that. The other three exist to answer narrower questions fast.
Most people assume a "demo" means a business already built for them to click through. That's true for exactly one of the routes above, and false for the rest, which is worth knowing before you judge ERPNext on what you find inside it.
We built a disposable install from Frappe's own Docker setup and checked what it contained the moment it finished starting, on July 28, 2026: zero companies, zero items, zero warehouses, zero bills of material. The setup wizard hadn't run, and nothing had been pre-populated. That's not a broken install; it's how Frappe's quick-start is designed, and the same is almost certainly true of a fresh Frappe Cloud trial site until you complete onboarding yourself. The one exception is the shared public instance, which does carry a seeded company ("Nova Gadget House," per its own homepage), though the login gate in front of it, as of the same date, kept us from counting its records directly. Treat its exact contents as something to verify yourself, not something we can hand you secondhand.
The practical read: on the trial or a self-hosted install, you decide what a "multi-company setup" or a "manufacturing test" looks like, because nothing is loaded for you to inherit. That cuts against the instinct to treat any ERPNext demo as a finished sample business, and it's also why the checklist below asks you to build the test cases rather than browse what's there. A shared public instance that anyone can edit changes shape between visits anyway; a count taken today is not a promise about what you'll find next week.
del.ai does not migrate anyone off ERPNext, but the single highest-value test is building a second company and running consolidation, since that's where a thin evaluation falls apart first. Add a genuinely mismatched second entity (different currency, different chart of accounts) and run the Consolidated Financial Statement report against it. ERPNext merges subsidiary financials into one group view at no extra cost, and this is the fastest way to see whether that report matches how your finance team reports today. After that, build a tax template against your own jurisdiction rather than trusting a default one. Load real items and one real bill of materials before judging manufacturing routing — a demo with no bills of material shows nothing about production. Then check what your hosting tier restricts, since Frappe Cloud limits full offsite backup export to a paid tier. None of this takes more than an afternoon, and all of it beats browsing someone else's pre-built sample records.
Source: Frappe, "Company Setup" and "Accounting Reports," ERPNext user documentation, 2026. ↗ | ↗
| What to test | Why it matters | Where to check |
|---|---|---|
| Multi-company consolidation | Reveals real closing-process mismatches, not only software mismatches | Company setup, then the Consolidated Financial Statement report |
| Tax template | Default templates rarely match your actual jurisdiction's rules | Accounting reports and tax settings |
| Manufacturing depth | A demo with no bills of material can't validate routing or capacity planning | Manufacturing module, once real items exist |
| Export limits | Full offsite backup access is restricted by hosting plan tier | Frappe Cloud's backup settings |
Each row traces back to Frappe's own published documentation, not an internal test we ran. The point isn't to trust our read of it; it's to go verify it against your own numbers.
A demo, any demo, from any vendor, is a controlled environment, and controlled environments are built to demonstrate, not to stress-test. Four things sit outside what a short session in ERPNext, or Odoo, or anything else, can tell you.
Your real chart of accounts and your real exceptions don't exist in a demo. The mismatched invoice, the customer with three different payment terms, the vendor bill that needs three approval layers: none of it shows up until you load your own data, and by definition a demo never carries your own data.
Performance at your actual transaction volume is untestable in a short session. A handful of test records behave nothing like the general ledger of a company posting tens of thousands of lines a month, and no demo, however well built, runs at your real volume.
Migration itself doesn't exist in any demo, because a demo is built fresh for demonstration. Historical balances, a cutover weekend, a parallel run against your existing books: these are migration-specific problems, and a system that looks clean in a sandbox tells you nothing about how cleanly your own history moves into it.
Vendor and partner longevity, along with how well a system fits your audit and controls requirements, aren't properties of the software at all. They're properties of the company standing behind it, and no login screen can show you that.
None of this is a knock on ERPNext specifically. It's true of every vendor demo, ours included if we ever built one for Odoo. A good demo answers "does this look right" fast. A bad one wastes an afternoon. Neither answers "will this hold up," and that question is the one that decides whether a system swap goes well.
del.ai does not migrate anyone off ERPNext, and for a specific buyer it is the correct answer over Odoo. That buyer is a single-entity company that doesn't need group consolidation, is comfortable running or paying for its own hosting, and would rather pay nothing per seat than buy per-user software as headcount grows. ERPNext ships under the GPLv3 license with consolidated group reporting included at no cost. Odoo Community leaves that same reporting gated to the paid Enterprise tier. ERPNext also carries no per-user licensing fee; your cost is hosting plus optional implementation help, while Odoo prices every published plan by the seat. The one place this reverses: the moment you need multiple legal entities reporting together, Odoo's own documentation confirms that turning on multi-company support automatically upgrades a Standard-plan database to the pricier Custom plan. The software itself enforces the switch. For a company that stays single-entity, that trigger never fires, and ERPNext is the cheaper, equally open answer.
Source: Odoo, "Editions" and "Multi-Company," ↗ | ↗, 2026.
| ERPNext | Odoo Community | Odoo Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|---|
| License | GPLv3, open source for over a decade | LGPLv3, self-hosted only | Proprietary, subscription |
| Per-user pricing | None; you pay hosting, not seats | None (self-hosted) | $61.00-$76.20/user/month for the Custom plan, which multi-company requires (annual vs. monthly billing), as of July 29, 2026 |
| Group consolidation | Included, free | Not included | Included |
| Multi-company | Included, free | Supported at the framework level | Included, at the higher-priced tier |
| Self-hosting | Gets the complete product | Gets Community only, missing Enterprise-only modules | Same license and price whether self-hosted or hosted by Odoo |
If you're a single-entity business, unlikely to add a second legal entity soon, and you or someone on your team is willing to own a Linux box (or pay a partner to), ERPNext is a genuinely good, permanently free-to-license answer. That's not a hedge. It's the honest read of what these two products charge for and what they include.
To restate the scope plainly: del.ai does not migrate anyone off ERPNext, and if you read this far because ERPNext might be your answer, the section above already gave you that answer. Nothing below changes it.
What we do: migrate NetSuite customers to Odoo, for a migration fee of roughly $50k, with hosting after that running about $2k/month. We are pre-revenue, with no completed migrations yet. That's a plain fact about a company founded in 2026, not a track record dressed up as one.
The same lock-in question you already asked about ERPNext applies to us, with the same answer. We build on Odoo Community: LGPLv3, open source, exportable at any time. If del.ai shut down tomorrow, your data leaves in a standard database export, and your Odoo instance keeps running under any other Odoo partner, or under your own team, because nothing about the license changes based on who's hosting it.
On support: self-hosting either ERPNext or Odoo Community gets you the complete open-source product and no built-in support line, which is the tradeoff the open-source model always makes. Our hosting fee buys the support and SLA side of that tradeoff specifically on the Odoo side; it isn't a different safety net than the license itself, it's what you're paying for on top of it.
This piece is for one specific reader: a company currently spending $120k or more a year on NetSuite and evaluating Odoo as the destination, not a company choosing between ERPNext and NetSuite, and not the single-entity, ERPNext-fit buyer named two sections up. If that's you, tell us your actual stack.
30 minutes. Describe your NetSuite stack, and we model whether the Odoo migration math holds for your actual numbers, for qualifying migrations within the signed scope document. No pitch. You leave with a real number either way.
Sources
1. Frappe, "ERPNext Pricing," Frappe Technologies documentation, 2026. ↗
2. Frappe, "frappe_docker README," GitHub repository, 2026. ↗
3. Frappe, "Company Setup," ERPNext user documentation, 2026. ↗
4. Frappe, "Accounting Reports," ERPNext user documentation, 2026. ↗
5. Odoo, "Editions," ↗, 2026.
6. Odoo, "Pricing," 2026. ↗
7. Odoo, "Multi-Company," Odoo 19.0 documentation, 2026. ↗