How hellish
is your ERP?
Twenty-two systems. Nine circles. Rated by the people who actually have to use them — not by analysts who get paid by the vendors.
Every owner I know has a story about software that was supposed to fix the business and instead became a second job. Nobody collects those stories. Nobody scores the thing that actually matters, which isn't the feature list — it's whether you're allowed to change the software you're paying for.
So: this. Rate what you run. See what everyone else runs. Find out what your workarounds are costing you in real money.
Twenty-two systems, scored
Every entry carries only what the vendor publishes: can you self-host it, is the price public, can you read the source. The hell score comes from votes, not from us.
What your workarounds cost
Six questions about spreadsheets, double entry and hand-built reports. Out comes a number in dollars per year. Most owners are wrong about it by half.
Tell us the worst thing
The implementation that ate a year. The consultant who billed you to learn your own business. Anonymous, unedited, published.
One question, four ways
Are you allowed to change the software you're paying for?
That's it. That's the whole thesis. Every feature comparison in this industry measures what a system can do on the day you buy it, which is the least interesting fact about it. What decides whether you're in hell three years from now is what happens the first time your business changes and your software doesn't want to.
So the index tracks four things a vendor either publishes or doesn't:
Can you run it yourself? If the answer is no, your data lives somewhere you can't reach and your leverage at renewal is zero.
Is the price public? A vendor who won't publish pricing is a vendor who prices you, not the product.
Can you read the source? This is the one nobody asks about and the one that decides everything. You cannot fix what you cannot see.
Who is it actually for? In the vendor's own words — which is often several sizes away from who they sell to.
Those four are facts, taken from each vendor's own site, and we link the page we took them from. The hell score is separate, and it is opinion — yours, averaged with everyone else's.
Voting isn’t live yet
The index is up and the scoring rules are set. The ballot opens once there are enough people here that five votes actually means something. Leave an email and I’ll tell you the day it does — that is the only thing I will ever use it for.
There is one, and it isn't switching vendors
Every system on this list that scores well scores well for the same reason: it lets you get at it. That's not a brand preference, it's the only variable that has ever mattered.
I run Odoo. I'm loud about it. I also wrote a book about building on top of it with AI, because the platform is only half the answer — the other half is being able to change it yourself without hiring a development team.
That Odoo link is an affiliate link — if you become a paying subscriber through it, Odoo pays me a commission for twelve months at no extra cost to you. I ran Odoo for a year before there was any commission attached. Full disclosure.