Odoo and Cin7 sit on opposite sides of a line most growing Australian businesses cross eventually. Cin7 — sold today as Cin7 Core (the former DEAR Inventory) and the larger Cin7 Omni — is dedicated inventory and order-management software that bolts onto your accounting package. Odoo is a modular ERP that puts inventory, accounting, sales, purchasing, manufacturing and CRM in one database, with an Australian localisation for GST, BAS and STP Phase 2. The honest choice comes down to whether you need a sharper inventory tool, or one system that ends the reconciliation between several.
We worked with a Perth homewares importer last year who had outgrown exactly this question. Eight staff, Cin7 Core for stock across two third-party warehouses, Xero for the books, a Shopify storefront and an Amazon AU listing out the front, and a spreadsheet stitching the gaps. Each tool did its job. The problem was the seams: every Cin7-to-Xero sync needed checking, the landed-cost duty on imported containers never quite matched the BAS, and nobody could answer “what did this product actually cost to land and sell” without three logins and a coffee. They didn’t need a better inventory tool. They needed the seams gone.
Odoo vs Cin7 at a glance
| Dimension | Cin7 (Core / Omni) | Odoo |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Inventory and order management | Full modular ERP |
| Origin | DEAR Inventory (Melbourne); now Cin7 (Auckland) | Odoo SA, Belgium, open-source |
| Best-fit user count | Small product teams | 5–500+ across all departments |
| Indicative cost (AUD) | ~$500/mo (Core) plus accounting on top | ~$34 per user per month, all apps |
| Accounting included | ✗ — needs Xero, MYOB or QuickBooks | ✓ — native, GST and BAS built in |
| GST, BAS, STP Phase 2 | Via the accounting tool it connects to | ✓ Native Australian localisation |
| Peppol e-invoicing | ✗ Not native | ✓ Via a registered Access Point |
| Inventory and warehousing | ✓ Strong — its core strength | ✓ Strong — barcode, lots, landed costs |
| Manufacturing (MRP) | Light assembly and BOMs | ✓ Full BOMs, routings, subcontracting |
| CRM, projects, field service | ✗ Separate tools | ✓ First-class native modules |
| eCommerce and marketplaces | Connectors to Shopify, Amazon, eBay | ✓ Native website plus connectors |
| Customisation ceiling | Templates and API | Studio, Python, full open source |
Rule of thumb: if your whole business is buying, storing and shipping product and your accountant is happy in Xero, Cin7 Core does that job well. Once three or more systems are pretending to be one business, Odoo replaces the stack.
What Cin7 is and who it suits
Cin7 Core began life as DEAR Inventory, built in Melbourne and a genuine Australian success story before Auckland-based Cin7 acquired it in 2021 and rebranded it. That heritage matters: Cin7 Core was designed around the way Australian product businesses actually trade — multi-warehouse stock, batch and serial tracking, landed costs on imported goods, and tight two-way sync with Xero, MYOB and QuickBooks Online. It is inventory and order management done properly, not an accounting package wearing a stock module.
The typical Cin7 customer is a product business: an importer, a wholesaler, a distributor, or a multi-channel retailer selling through Shopify, Amazon AU, eBay and a wholesale price list at once. Cin7 handles the purchase order to the supplier, the stock arriving into a warehouse or 3PL, the pick-pack-ship through Starshipit or a courier, and the sales order from each channel — then pushes the financial summary into your accounting tool. For a business whose entire operation is moving product, that focus is a strength. You are buying one job done well rather than ten jobs done adequately.
Cin7 Omni is the heavier, custom-quoted product aimed at higher-volume operations with built-in EDI and B2B portals. Both share the same boundary, though: Cin7 stops at the edge of inventory and orders. Your books, your CRM, your projects, your payroll and your field jobs live somewhere else.
Where Cin7 hits the ceiling: signals you’ve outgrown it
Cin7 doesn’t fail loudly. The ceiling shows up as a slow accumulation of friction — reconciliation hours, sync errors and questions that take three systems to answer. These are the signals we see most often when an Australian business asks us to scope a move.
The reconciliation tax
Every connector between Cin7 and Xero is a place where numbers can drift. Rounding on multi-currency purchase orders, landed-cost duty that posts to the wrong period, a sync that silently fails over a long weekend — none of these are dramatic on their own, but they turn BAS preparation into a reconciliation hunt. The Perth importer above lost roughly half a day each quarter to chasing where Cin7 and Xero disagreed. That recurring cost is the clearest sign the two-system model is straining.
The “stack” keeps growing
Cin7 plus Xero rarely stays at two tools. A growing business adds a CRM, then a field-service app, then a separate reporting tool, then payroll software beyond what Xero covers. Each subscription is modest; together they’re a stack of six or seven systems, each with its own login, its own data, and its own monthly invoice. When new staff need three tools to do one job, you’ve outgrown the model rather than the software.
Operations the inventory model can’t see
Cin7 has no real concept of a project, a billable hour, a manufacturing work order with routings, or a service job scheduled to a technician. If your business is starting to assemble or manufacture product, run installations, or bill for time as well as goods, Cin7 simply has no home for that data. That’s the point where a dedicated inventory tool starts holding the business back instead of running it.
How Odoo compares: one system versus a stack
The cleanest way to frame Odoo against Cin7 isn’t feature by feature. It’s one database versus a connected stack. In Odoo, the purchase order, the stock receipt, the landed cost, the sales order from each channel, the customer invoice, the GST coding and the BAS line are all the same data, touched once. There is no sync to check because there is nothing to sync — the warehouse and the ledger are the same system.
That single-database design is why Odoo’s inventory for Australian warehouses carries the same depth Cin7 customers expect — barcode picking, lots and serials, multi-warehouse routing, landed costs on imported containers, and integrations to Australia Post, StarTrack and Starshipit — while also handling the jobs Cin7 hands off. Manufacturing gets full bills of materials, routings and subcontracting. Sales gets a real CRM where the quote becomes the order becomes the invoice without re-keying. Projects, field service, purchasing and eCommerce all read and write the same product and customer records.
The quotable difference: with Cin7 you integrate, with Odoo you consolidate. Integration is cheaper to start and faster to break; consolidation costs more to set up and stops costing you reconciliation hours forever after. Which is right depends entirely on how many of those seams you’re paying for today.
Pricing and total cost of ownership
Sticker price is where Cin7 looks cheaper and usually isn’t, because the comparison people make is the wrong one.
What each actually costs
Cin7 Core lists from roughly $500 AUD per month for a small team, scaling with order volume and modules. Cin7 Omni is custom-quoted and commonly lands well above that on an annual contract. Critically, neither figure includes accounting — you still pay for Xero or MYOB on top, plus every other tool in the stack. Odoo Enterprise is roughly $34 AUD per user per month for all apps, so a ten-user business sits around $340 a month with accounting, inventory, CRM and the rest already inside.
The real comparison is stack versus stack
For a true picture, add Cin7 Core’s ~$500, Xero at $70–$90, a CRM, a field or reporting tool, and payroll software, and the monthly total often clears what Odoo costs for the same headcount — before counting the finance hours lost to reconciliation. We lay out worked AUD scenarios in our guide to Odoo implementation cost in Australia.
Implementation is the line item that matters
Cin7 is faster to stand up because it does less. Odoo’s larger scope means a more considered implementation, and that setup cost is real. The honest framing: Cin7 is cheaper to start and Odoo is cheaper to run once the stack it replaces is three tools or more.
Australian compliance: GST, BAS, STP Phase 2 and Peppol
This is where the comparison stops being about features and starts being about who carries the compliance weight. Cin7 doesn’t lodge a BAS or report payroll — it can’t, because it isn’t your accounting system. Compliance lives in whatever tool Cin7 connects to, which means GST coding, the BAS, and STP Phase 2 are only ever as clean as the sync between Cin7 and Xero or MYOB. When that sync drifts, your compliance numbers drift with it.
Odoo carries the compliance natively. The Australian localisation ships GST tax codes mapped to BAS Types A, C and D, a BAS report you can reconcile inside the system, STP Phase 2 payroll, and ABA file generation for batch supplier and wage payments through ANZ, NAB, CBA and Westpac. It also ships native Peppol e-invoicing under BIS Billing 3.0, the ATO-backed standard Cin7 has no answer for. Because invoices, stock movements and GST all live in one ledger, the BAS reflects what actually happened in the warehouse — not a summary that crossed a connector. Our deeper walkthrough of Odoo BAS and GST reporting shows how that single source of truth changes quarter-end. The rule of thumb: with Cin7 your compliance is downstream of a sync; with Odoo it’s a by-product of the work.
Replacing the Xero plus Cin7 stack with one Odoo database
Most Australian Cin7 customers don’t run Cin7 alone — they run Xero plus Cin7, and often a CRM and a field tool beside them. That combination is the real incumbent, and it’s worth comparing on its own terms. Xero plus Cin7 is a deliberately good pairing: best-in-class small-business accounting joined to best-in-class inventory. For many businesses it’s the right answer for years.
It breaks at the seam. The two systems share a connector, not a database, so every order, refund and stock adjustment has to be reconciled across the boundary, and any question that spans both — true product margin after landed cost, cash tied up in slow stock, profitability by sales channel — needs data pulled from two places and reassembled. Odoo collapses that into one record. The same trade-off, framed from the accounting side, runs through our Odoo vs Xero comparison for businesses weighing the move.
The decision isn’t “is Xero plus Cin7 bad” — it isn’t. It’s whether you’ve reached the point where maintaining two systems costs more than running one. For the Perth importer, the tipping point was the container that took four hours to cost correctly across both tools. One database would have made it four minutes.
Migrating from Cin7 to Odoo: data, timeline and cutover
Moving off Cin7 is less daunting than it sounds, because Cin7’s data is well-structured and exportable. The work is mapping it cleanly, not rescuing it. We approach a Cin7-to-Odoo move in three parts.
What data moves
Products, variants, suppliers, customers, price lists, bills of materials and current stock-on-hand export from Cin7 as CSV and import into Odoo’s matching models. Open purchase orders and sales orders carry across as in-flight documents. Historical transactions usually stay in Cin7 and your old accounting file as read-only history — you migrate opening balances and live data, not years of closed records, which keeps the move clean and the cost down.
Timing the cutover
We anchor cutover to a clean accounting boundary — the start of a BAS quarter, ideally aligned with a stocktake. You run a parallel period where stock counts in Odoo are validated against Cin7 before switching off the old sync. For a single-warehouse product business the core migration typically runs four to eight weeks; multi-warehouse or manufacturing setups take longer. Our implementation method sequences this so go-live never lands mid-BAS.
The risk worth managing
The one genuine risk is stock accuracy. If your Cin7 counts are wrong, importing them just moves the error into Odoo. We treat a physical stocktake as a non-negotiable step in the migration, not an optional extra — go-live is the cheapest moment you’ll ever get to start with numbers you trust.
When Cin7 still wins (who should stay)
We tell businesses what most consultancies won’t: sometimes the right move is to stay on Cin7. If your entire operation is buying and selling product, your team is small, your accountant is genuinely happy in Xero, and you have no manufacturing, projects, field service or billable time to track — Cin7 Core plus Xero is a tight, proven, lower-effort setup. Adding Odoo’s breadth to that business would be paying for rooms you’ll never enter.
Cin7 also wins when speed to stand up beats long-term consolidation: a young brand that needs inventory control next month, not a considered ERP rollout next quarter. The case for Odoo strengthens as the stack grows, the headcount climbs, and the questions you need answered start crossing the boundary between systems. The honest test is simple — count the tools pretending to be one business. At two, stay. At four, it’s time to talk.
If you’re weighing Cin7 against Odoo for an Australian product business — or already feeling the reconciliation tax of a Xero plus Cin7 stack — we can map your current systems against a single Odoo database and tell you plainly whether a move pays off. Book a consultation and we’ll give you the same honest read we gave the importer in Perth.
Frequently asked.
What is the disadvantage of using Odoo?
Odoo's breadth is also its weakness. More modules mean more decisions, and a poorly scoped setup can feel heavier than a single-purpose tool like Cin7 Core. It needs a considered implementation, and the free Community edition lacks the Australian payroll and Peppol features. Done well, that breadth becomes the advantage.
Is Odoo used in Australia?
Yes. Odoo runs thousands of Australian businesses across wholesale, retail, manufacturing, trades and professional services. The Australian localisation covers GST, BAS, STP Phase 2, Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 e-invoicing and ABA payment files for ANZ, NAB, CBA and Westpac. It's less name-recognised than Xero but far deeper past the accounting layer.
Do big companies use Odoo?
Odoo's sweet spot is five to five hundred users, but it also runs multi-entity, multi-currency and multi-warehouse operations for large organisations on Odoo.sh or self-hosted. Above five hundred users it competes against NetSuite and SAP rather than against Cin7 or Xero.
What is the best alternative to Odoo?
It depends what you need. For pure inventory, Cin7 Core or Unleashed; for accounting only, Xero or MYOB; for upper mid-market ERP, NetSuite or SAP Business One. Odoo's draw is putting those jobs in one database instead of stitching a stack together with connectors.
Which country owns Odoo?
Odoo SA is a Belgian company, founded in 2005 and headquartered near Louvain-la-Neuve. The software is open-source, with a large global partner network — including Australian specialists who handle local compliance, hosting and implementation.
Is Odoo better than Xero?
Neither is strictly better; they solve different problems. Xero is focused cloud accounting. Odoo is a full ERP with the same GST, BAS and STP compliance plus inventory, manufacturing and CRM in one database. Xero wins for small finance teams; Odoo wins once operations need the accountant's data.