ERPNext vs Zoho Invoice: both are free, and the free is not the decision — the decision is a 500-invoice ceiling against a whole ERP

A published zero, and the vendor says so in its own words rather than leaving it to be inferred. The ERPNext pricing page's FAQ answers the question directly: 'If ERPNext is free and open-source, how do you make money?' with 'ERPNext is a free and open-source software and always will remain so. You can install this software locally and host it on your server and pay us absolutely nothing for running it and managing it on your own.' The page's own structured data carries a price of 0 in INR and a licence of 'Open Source', and the self-hosting option on the page is described as 'Deploy on your own server using our installation scripts. Great for companies with a tech team. AGPL-3.0 licensed.' A second FAQ answer adds 'No. Unlike other companies that mislead customers with open-source claims and eventually require payment for enterprise features, we are 100% open-source. Our source code has been open source since 2009.' There is no billing cycle on the software price, because there is no charge. What costs money is hosting, and the vendor says that too: the page opens by stating 'Your cost will include two components - Hosting and Implementation.'

Per month, per site, not per user, and Frappe says so explicitly. The ERPNext pricing page tells you to 'pay only for what you use, and not per user!'. Site plans are published as $5 onwards /mo and INR 410 onwards /mo for 'a single site with multiple apps on shared servers'. The word 'onwards' matters and we keep it: these are entry prices, not a fixed ladder, and they are the floor of a compute-based plan rather than a named tier. The second family is Servers, a virtual machine to host multiple sites and benches. Here the two Frappe pages disagree with each other and we print both rather than picking one. The ERPNext pricing page publishes Servers at $20 onwards /mo and INR 1,800 onwards /mo, and a second server block at $125 onwards /mo and INR 5,400 onwards /mo for a dedicated instance with 'Superior Dedicated Server isolation' and 'Stronger reliability guarantees'. The Frappe Cloud pricing page publishes Servers at $40 onwards /mo and INR 3,600 onwards /mo for the same family. Both pages also gate named features behind higher starting prices, in tooltips: 'Available on AWS and OCI in plans starting $25/mo or INR 2050/mo, and on Hetzner in plans starting $5/mo or INR 410/mo', and for the server Product Warranty line, 'Available only for AWS and OCI in plans starting $50/mo or INR 4100/mo'. Every figure there is monthly, and Frappe's own payment note says 'The Invoice amount will be deducted directly from your card at the end of the month'.

Not by default, and this is the single most important line on this page. Frappe's own FAQ says 'No, Frappe does not provide any implementation services directly. Instead, we work with a global network of certified partners who handle implementation, customisation, migration, and more.' On the support side, the distinction is between a product warranty and functional help: 'Product Warranty is support from Frappe engineers for fixing bugs in Frappe Apps (e.g. ERPNext, Frappe HR, Frappe Framework) and Frappe Cloud. You can raise tickets from the support portal and our engineers will respond in a stipulated response time. Note that this does not include functional support.' There is a Priority SLA above it, linked by Frappe to its own Service Level Agreement, and no response-time figure is published on the pricing page. If a published response time is deciding your purchase, ask for it in writing.

That is the implementation cost, and Frappe publishes a price list for it. The ERPNext Starter Pack is a one-time fee, not a subscription, and it is published in rupees: Core ERPNext INR 80,000, Manufacturing INR 1,40,000, All in One INR 2,00,000, and Frappe HR INR 60,000. The same page publishes total hours and validity beside those costs: 40, 70, 100 and 30 hours, with validity of 30, 60, 90 and 30 days. A second table on the same page carries the same four packs in dollars, reading 'Implementation cost' $1800, $2500, $3500 and $1800, with rows labelled 'Implementation Hours' 60, 80, 120 and 60 and 'Timeline' 2, 2, 3 and 2 months. The page states the eligibility limit plainly: 'Only available for Small businesses with <50 users', for 'Standard implementations with no customisations'. One caveat we are not resolving for you, because the page does not: it labels its own four columns two different ways. The pack tabs read Core ERPNext, Manufacturing, All in One and Frappe HR, while the Modules row under those same four columns reads Finance + Sales + Purchase + Inventory, Core ERPNext + Manufacturing, Core ERPNext + Manufacturing + Frappe HR, and Frappe HR. We print both label sets rather than guess which is which.

A published zero, with the catch written down on the same page. Zoho Invoice's pricing page is titled 'Zoho Invoice is free for all Indian businesses, forever' and carries one rupee figure, INR 0. We counted one price on that page: a search of the served document for rupee figures returns exactly one match, and the page's structured data carries a price of 0 with the category 'free'. There is no billing cycle and no pricing unit, because there is no charge. The caps are the catch, and Zoho states all three: 'Add up to two users', 'Create a maximum of three projects' and 'Send up to 500 invoices per year'. A separate answer on the same page states 'you can have up to two organizations under the same Zoho Invoice account'. Support is 'Access 24/5 free email support from anywhere'. And there is one condition worth reading twice: 'if a user is inactive for over 180 days, their associated data will be deleted in the following 20 days'. Note that Zoho Invoice is not Zoho Books, and the two carry different pricing models; Zoho Books is published per organisation per month on this site's other pages.

Usually neither, because they are answering different questions, and we would rather say that than manufacture a winner. Zoho Invoice is a hosted invoicing tool capped at 500 invoices a year and two users. ERPNext is a full open-source ERP with an invoicing module inside it, no licence fee, and a hosting or implementation cost attached instead. If invoicing is genuinely the whole job, Zoho Invoice is the better buy on the evidence on this page, because it costs nothing, it needs no one to install it, and its limits are published. If invoicing is one module in a wider operation, ERPNext is the better buy, because Zoho Invoice's 500-invoice and two-user ceilings are the wrong shape for that business. Between those two sits a third option we will not pretend away: self-hosting ERPNext yourself, which is genuinely free in money and paid for in whoever on your team is on call when the upgrade fails.

No. NoxOrigin makes neither ERPNext nor Zoho Invoice. ERPNext is Frappe Technologies' open-source ERP and Zoho Invoice is Zoho Corp's free invoicing product, and we are not going to present our platform as the answer to a published zero. We also do not claim to match a full open-source ERP: a hosted operating record is not a general ledger with stock, manufacturing and a chart of accounts, and we will not describe it as one. There are maturity boundaries we state rather than smooth over. An invoice and a payment are different records, because conflating them is how money goes missing quietly. There is no change-request, milestone or deliverable record, no contract editor and no e-signature, so a scope change is a new quote rather than a tracked variation. There is no timesheet record and no payroll. Expenses live in Nox-Billings only and purchasing lives in Commerce, both scoped custom deployments. Merge policy is a setup decision, where detection flags candidates and a human reviews them. Shift close and day-end reconciliation are assisted-setup maturity rather than a self-serve switch. We make no compliance or certification claim of any kind, and we do not file GST returns. Our published platform pricing is Starter at INR 800 per month for three users, Growth at INR 1,600 for ten and Agency at INR 5,000 for twenty-five across three workspaces, and that is the platform only; NoxCRM, Nox-Billings and Nox-Tickets are scoped custom deployments with no list price and none of them carries the platform price.