In simple English
Dolibarr is a complete system for running your business. It tracks your customers, sends invoices, manages warehouse stock and records payments. You run it on your own server, so you do not pay monthly fees to a cloud service. It costs you time to set up and maintain, but the software itself is completely free. You can turn on only the features you need, keeping your daily screen clean and simple.
What it is
Dolibarr is an open-source enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management suite written in PHP. It runs on a standard web server with a MariaDB, MySQL or PostgreSQL database.
What it is good for
Solo builders and small business owners who want to track sales, issue professional invoices and manage stock without paying for expensive hosted SaaS tools.
- Replaces dozens of paid subscription tools with a single self-hosted system.
- Modular design lets you enable only the features you actually use.
- Active community and thousands of add-ons available for extra features.
- Requires a web server, PHP and a database, which can be hard for non-programmers to set up.
- Server memory needs depend on traffic, but a basic cloud instance handles small teams easily.
- Licensed under GPL-3.0, so any modifications to the core code must remain open source.
Paid SaaS tools like Salesforce, QuickBooks and separate inventory trackers
A Linux server running Nginx or Apache with MariaDB
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git clone https://github.com/dolibarr/dolibarr -b develop # Point your web server root to dolibarr/htdocs and open the install page in your browser