Honest Odoo Review: Is Odoo Maintenance a Good CMMS?

Odoo offers a suite of software solutions that help businesses manage various areas, including maintenance, inventory and supply chain management. In this Odoo Maintenance review, we highlight the company’s maintenance solution — available as part of Odoo’s complete package — to help you decide if it’s the right choice for your maintenance management needs.

Fortunately, Odoo has a one-app-free plan that allows you to use any of one of its apps for free. So, we simply tested Odoo Maintenance by signing up for the platform and using it to create work orders, assets, customize worksheets and more. During our testing, we found several great things and a few not-so-great things about Odoo Maintenance, which we discuss in-depth throughout this review.

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At Coast, we take our software reviews seriously. Our review methodology evaluates software across seven critical categories that help differentiate the solutions from one another. Each category receives a score from one to five, with five being the highest, and a maximum possible score of 35 points.

Odoo Ease of Use

Signing up for an Odoo Maintenance trial was a breeze. It’s the least amount of time we’ve spent signing up for any platform of the several we’ve reviewed.

After logging in, you end up on a blank dashboard.

The problem? It felt a little too empty because of its design. While most platforms stack their navigation to the left, Odoo Maintenance adds a ribbon at the top.

To start using Odoo Maintenance, you need to add basic data. This includes equipment, equipment categories and maintenance teams.

Odoo doesn’t make you add a ton of detail. For example, here’s what you see when adding a new piece of equipment to the system:

Work order management options are housed in the “Maintenance” section. When you click on “Maintenance,” you can choose to view work order requests as a list view or calendar view. This is also where you can add new work orders:

Odoo has designed a great interface that tries to balance simplicity and detail. For example, the new work order form includes essential details but looks surprisingly underwhelming compared to forms we’ve seen on competing platforms:

Odoo Mobile Experience

The mobile app is pretty much the same in terms of feature availability and design. It’s essentially a mobile-friendly layout of the web interface — almost every option lies in the same place as the web interface. For example, here’s the maintenance requests screen in Kanban view:

We saw a few negative reviews about the app crashing and a few bugs, but we didn’t personally experience any problems while testing the app.

Odoo Core Features & Functionality

Odoo Maintenance isn’t the most feature-rich maintenance platform. It’s designed to keep things simple and streamlined. However, it does offer all the essentials. Let’s discuss three key areas of importance.

Work Order Management

Whenever you create a work order, Odoo lets you assign it to a team and a user. Once a work order is assigned, the assignee receives a notification.

Your job now is to track progress. Odoo offers a ton of filters to help you stay sane as you monitor a large number of work orders.

The “Fix monitor screen” work order example here shows a corrective maintenance work order. To turn this into a preventive maintenance work order, we just changed the maintenance type in the form and selected a frequency:

Each work order has a comments section where you can communicate with the technician or other users as needed.

We liked that users can also upload files to messages and react to them.

There’s also a chat feature on the home screen. You can message users directly or create channels to send messages to a group.

Unfortunately, we didn’t see an option to trigger work orders based on meter readings. If you want to implement condition-based maintenance, Odoo Maintenance is not a good fit for your needs.

Asset Management

The form for adding assets is compact yet exhaustive. It lets you choose a maintenance team and technician in charge, add model and warranty info, and mention the location where it’s used.

What we liked most is how Odoo Maintenance automatically tracks various equipment downtime metrics. When creating a new asset, head over to the “Maintenance” tab to view the metrics Odoo will track for your assets as well as details on how they’re calculated.

You can create equipment categories by navigating to “Configuration” > “Equipment Categories” — no bells and whistles here — just a three-field form for name, person responsible for asset category and comments.

Reporting & Analytics

Reporting is pretty basic. This section helps you visualize maintenance data through various graphs and charts.

All filters available to screen work orders are also available here, so you can slice and dice data the way you want to visualize it. Altogether, the reporting features didn’t quite meet our expectations.

Odoo Adaptability & Customization

All of Odoo’s customization options are packed in one area — Odoo Studio (included only on the top-tier plan).

You can design your own worksheet templates using Odoo Studio. You can add checkboxes, bullet points, blank fields, HTML, links and more to worksheets, so workers can use them while performing onsite tasks.

The drag-and-drop interface makes the design process quick and easy. But there’s more to Odoo Studio than worksheet templates — you can design almost all parts of the app, create automations and set access control permissions.

The interface may look daunting, but you should be past the learning curve a few minutes into using it.

Odoo Customer Support

Support options include live chat, phone and video conferencing, support tickets and email. The fastest option is live chat, though you’re asked a few preliminary questions before the bot connects you to an expert.

Odoo Documentation includes basic details about all features. It’s not nearly as extensive as you’d expect it to be. However, we asked Odoo’s AI agent a few questions, and it answered them fairly effectively.

We found mixed opinions on Odoo’s support quality. Some customers say they loved the quality of support. For example, Francisco Javier H., an Odoo user, said the support service is “outstanding.”

On the contrary, Jon K., another user who only signed up for a trial, mentions several problems with the support quality: “After signing up for a trial, I received a phone call from the Account Rep to check up on me. As soon as I started giving him negative feedback on my initial experience (documentation was COMPLETELY out of date; support had to send me a totally different workflow to get basic task of connecting bank accounts set up), and the fact that I was concerned what else might be out of date, he flippantly said that their docs are often outdated and that’s just how it is … then HUNG UP on me mid-sentence (if the line was disconnected, I’d assume he’d call me back but never did).”

Odoo Pricing

Odoo offers a “one app free” plan that allows you to use one Odoo app for free with any number of users.

Paid plans include the following:

• Standard plan: $24.90/user/month (billed annually). This includes all apps except Odoo Studio.

• Custom plan: $37.40/user/month (billed annually). This includes all apps, including Odoo Studio, multi-company support and external API.

Both plans include unlimited support, hosting and maintenance.

You get access to over a dozen Odoo apps with your subscription, so it offers great value overall. But the real question here is — do you need access to all those tools? If you already have every other system in place, you might end up paying the full amount just for Odoo Maintenance, and that’s a costly proposition.

Coast: The Better Odoo Alternative

Odoo provides a comprehensive business management ecosystem, but Coast is your best bet if you’re looking for something maintenance-specific. Coast is a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) designed for simplicity and efficiency. Here’s how Odoo Maintenance compares to Coast.

Ease of Use	Minimalist design	Clean and simple interface with an attractive design
Mobile Experience	A near-replica of the web interface	A reflection of the web interface designed for mobile
Core Features & Functionality	Includes all essential features, but many capabilities are available in other modules and require additional setup	Extensive feature set tailor-made for maintenance professionals, paired with plenty of customization options
Adaptability & Customization	Customizations are only possible through Odoo Studio, available only on the highest-tier plan	Highly customizable
Customer Support	Users have shared mixed opinions about support quality	Support team is easy to reach and offers pre- and post-implementation assistance
Pricing	Pricing is only available for the entire Odoo package, which can seem expensive if you don’t need all the apps in the bundle	Given its feature set, Coast offers excellent value through its free plan and attractively priced paid plans
Current Reviews	Users give mixed reviews, saying support is slow to respond and that implementation can take a long time	Users seem to love Coast’s ease of use and excellent customer support