ERPNext vs SAP S/4HANA
ERPNext and SAP S/4HANA are both ERP software. ERPNext is open source under GPL-3.0, with 41k GitHub stars. SAP S/4HANA is a commercial product from SAP SE.
Which to pick
- Pick ERPNext when
- A small or mid-size business wants a complete ERP with no paid edition, and can self-host or use Frappe Cloud.
- Pick SAP S/4HANA when
- You are a large or global enterprise with complex multi-entity operations and the budget for a multi-year implementation with an SAP partner.
Side by side
A fully open-source ERP covering accounting, inventory, sales, purchasing, manufacturing, projects and assets, built on the Frappe framework.
SAP's flagship ERP covering finance, procurement, manufacturing, supply chain, sales and asset management on the HANA in-memory database, sold as cloud public, cloud private or on-premise editions.
Customisation needs Frappe knowledge, and HR, payroll and CRM have moved to separate apps to install.
Implementations are long and expensive, and the move from older SAP ECC is a project in its own right.
Production-ready (both)
Self-hosted server and cloud service
Cloud service and self-hosted server
Python, Frappe, JavaScript, Vue, MariaDB and Redis
ABAP and SAP HANA
Open source, GPL-3.0 (strong copyleft)
Closed source, sold by SAP SE
Use inside your business is unrestricted, but anything you distribute that includes it must be released under the same license.
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
41k GitHub stars
1.4k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Established: started 15 years ago, latest release v15.124.3.
Not known
Other comparisons
More ERP systems
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.