Twenty-two systems,
ranked by the damned
Facts from the vendors. Scores from you. Nine circles, where one is "I forget it's there" and nine is "we hired a person to work around it."
| System | License | Self-host | Public price | Source access | Hell score | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Acumatica small and midsize | proprietary | yes | no | unknown | — | |
| Brightpearl multi-channel merchants | proprietary | no | no | no | — | |
| Cin7 small business to enterprise | proprietary | no | yes | no | — | |
| Dolibarr SMEs and freelancers | open source | yes | free to self-host | yes | — | |
| ERPNext broad | open source | yes | free to self-host | yes | — | |
| Epicor Kinetic discrete manufacturers | proprietary | yes | no | unknown | — | |
| Fishbowl manufacturing and distribution | proprietary | yes | yes | no | — | |
| Infor CloudSuite small to large manufacturers | proprietary | no | no | no | — | |
| Katana small manufacturers | proprietary | no | yes | no | — | |
| MRPeasy manufacturers under 200 staff | proprietary | no | yes | no | — | |
| Microsoft Dynamics 365 BC small and midsize | proprietary | yes | yes | partial | — | |
| NetSuite startups to enterprise | proprietary | no | no | no | — | |
| Odoo micro business to large | open core | yes | yes | yes | — | |
| Priority Software SMB to enterprise | proprietary | unknown | no | unknown | — | |
| QuickBooks Enterprise growing small business | proprietary | yes | starting price only | no | — | |
| SAP Business One small and midsize | proprietary | yes | no | unknown | — | |
| SAP S/4HANA enterprise | proprietary | yes | no | unknown | — | |
| SYSPRO mid-sized manufacturing | proprietary | yes | no | unknown | — | |
| Sage 100 small and midsize | proprietary | yes | no | unknown | — | |
| Sage Intacct mid-sized | proprietary | no | no | no | — | |
| Xero small business | proprietary | no | yes | no | — | |
| Zoho One any size | proprietary | no | yes | no | — |
Tell me when voting opens
One email, the day the ballot goes live. Nothing else, ever.
Scores show a dash until a system has at least five votes — three angry people shouldn't be able to condemn a product, and one happy vendor employee shouldn't be able to save one. "Unknown" means the vendor doesn't publish it, which is itself worth knowing.
Facts verified September 2026 from each vendor's own website. Something wrong or out of date? Tell me and I'll fix it — corrections from vendors get the same treatment as corrections from users.
How the scoring works
You rate a system you've actually used on the five things that decide whether software becomes a second job. Each is scored 0–9. The hell score is the average.
- How hard is it to change something?
- How much of your process lives outside the system?
- How badly does it break at upgrade time?
- How much did the real cost exceed the quoted cost?
- If you left tomorrow, could you take your data with you?
One vote per person per system. We ask which system you use and roughly how big your shop is, because a score from a twelve-person shop and a score from a four-hundred-person shop are different facts.