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Is there genuinely free production planning software?
Yes, several fully fledged open-source suites can be used free of charge permanently: Odoo Community Edition includes a manufacturing module with multi-level bills of materials, routings, shop-floor orders and simple MRP logic, and ERPNext is freely available under the GPL-3.0 licence with all manufacturing functions. What is free are the software licences, but not implementation, hosting, customisation and training, which make up the bulk of the project costs. Those looking for pure finite scheduling with bottleneck optimisation will additionally find frePPLe (Community Edition under the MIT licence since version 8, previously AGPL), a specialised open-source APS that calculates finite material and capacity plans.
Which free PPS is suitable for machinery manufacturing?
For small machinery manufacturers, Odoo Community is the most broadly applicable open-source solution, as it covers bills of materials, routings and simple MRP functions free of charge. For serious variant manufacturing and engineer-to-order, however, free editions reach their limits, because a rule-based configurator and simulation-capable detailed scheduling are missing or reserved for paid editions. In practice, many businesses therefore combine an open-source foundation with a later move to a commercial solution once complexity increases — details on our page ERP for machinery.
Is a free PPS enough for my trades business?
With 1 to 5 employees in the workshop, a free solution — sometimes even a well-maintained Excel or Google Sheets template — is sufficient in many cases, as long as jobs are largely processed one after the other. As soon as several jobs run in parallel, several machines need to be coordinated or material comes together from different supply chains, spreadsheets become error-prone and opaque. At that point at the latest, a switch to a genuine industry or PPS solution is recommended — see ERP for trades. In practice, the exact threshold varies depending on manufacturing depth and existing IT expertise.
How exactly do free open-source PPS and paid editions differ?
The free community versions cover the basic functions — bill of materials maintenance, order creation, manual machine allocation and simple material requirements planning — but lack higher-value features. With Odoo, for example, quality checks on manufacturing orders and the forward-looking production planner (Master Production Schedule) are reserved for the Enterprise edition, and there is no official vendor support for the Community version. Anyone who needs simulation-based APS, rule-based variant configuration, EDI certification or professional reporting usually cannot avoid a paid edition or a specialised tool.
Which licence terms apply to free PPS software?
The licensing models differ and should be reviewed before productive use: ERPNext is licensed under the GPL-3.0, frePPLe's Community Edition under the permissive MIT licence since version 8, and the Odoo Community core under the LGPLv3 since version 9 (2015). Importantly, add-on modules from the Odoo Community Association (OCA) remain under the AGPLv3, which can trigger more far-reaching source code disclosure obligations when the software is provided over a network. With your own extensions, it is therefore worth taking a close look at which licence the modules you use actually carry, ideally with a legal review.
What does the commercial variant typically cost?
Commercial PPS solutions for mid-sized companies typically run at around EUR 50 to 250 per user per month in the cloud, plus implementation costs ranging from about EUR 30,000 to over 250,000 depending on size and complexity. Pure licence fees typically account for only about 15 to 25 percent of total project costs, while the majority goes to implementation, customising, training and data migration. Cloud models lower the initial investment but shift the costs permanently into ongoing operating expenses — a structure you should factor in from the outset during ERP selection.