Odoo

Odoo is a suite of open source business apps, and Email Marketing is the module that sends its newsletters and campaigns. Odoo describes itself as covering "all your company needs: CRM, eCommerce, accounting, inventory, point of sale, project management, etc.", and the email app is built to work with those other apps rather than as a standalone service. The email marketing page promises to help you "send emails people actually read": polished campaigns from reusable templates, personalization by audience, scheduled sends, and tracking of what drives clicks. Because the campaigns sit on the same database as the CRM, sales orders and events, the reports can follow a campaign all the way to leads, orders and revenue. The whole suite comes in two editions, a free open source Community edition and a paid Enterprise edition, and it can run on Odoo's own hosting or on your own servers.

Building a campaign

The email marketing page says you can create campaigns "without any IT knowledge", starting from scratch or from one of Odoo's themes. If you do not want to design a newsletter yourself, you pick a template, readjust the layout, add your message and images and send. The editor works with building blocks that you drop where you want them in the email, and titles, calls to action, social media buttons and footers can be added in one click.

Odoo says the email content adapts automatically to the reader's screen, whether a tablet, mobile phone, laptop or desktop computer, by adjusting spacing and optimizing images.

Targeting and segmentation

Campaigns go to targeted groups within your Odoo database. The page describes selecting leads, customers or any other group from your contacts "by country, by date, by function, and more". Because the contacts are the same records the rest of the business uses, a campaign can be aimed at CRM leads, existing customers or event attendees without importing a separate list. The CRM page lists nurturing and tracking email lists, and generating leads from event registrations, among the things the CRM does together with the other apps.

Tracking and revenue reporting

This is where the integration shows most. Odoo promises "accurate, and real-time statistics on every email sent out" and lists the number of leads created, orders, the amount of revenue generated, open rate, bounce rate and click-through rate. The Odoo Link Tracker adds a tracking code to the links in a campaign and shows each campaign's performance on a dedicated dashboard. Through Odoo CRM you can then follow the opportunities a campaign produced and analyze its conversion rate, expected revenue and generated revenue, with filters for more detailed analysis.

The apps around it

Odoo's model is one app per need, and the email marketing page points to the apps that extend it: CRM to follow opportunities and track revenues, Marketing Automation to create dynamic marketing campaigns, Events to message attendees and encourage leads, Survey to gather insight from audiences, and Social Marketing to add posts and SMS messages. The Marketing menu also lists a separate SMS Marketing app.

The CRM itself shows each opportunity as a card in a Kanban pipeline that you move between stages by drag and drop. You can schedule calls, meetings, mailings or quotations in a few clicks, and Odoo "automatically plans the next activity based on your sales script". Incoming emails are added to the pipeline automatically, all contact with customers happens from one place, and the CRM page lists live chat, SMS and VoIP next to email. It also says Odoo can automate lead creation, team assignment and scheduled activities, and that "our AI scores leads" so the team works on the right priorities.

Editions, pricing and hosting

The email marketing and CRM pages both carry the line "Free, forever, with unlimited users", with a link explaining why. The home page describes the two editions this way: Community is "Open Source, 100% free", and Enterprise adds "extra apps, infrastructure and professional services". Signing up needs no credit card and gives instant access.

On paid pricing, the home page says there is "no usage-based pricing, no feature upselling, no long term contracts, no hosting limits, no surprises", just "a single price per user - all inclusive". The product pages print no per-user figure, so the Enterprise price sits on Odoo's separate pricing page.

Hosting and data ownership are a strong point. The home page says Odoo uses no proprietary data format, "just PostgreSQL: you own your data", and that you get the source code, GitHub access and "the flexibility to host on our infrastructure, or on premise". Developers can build or vibe-code tailored modules with Odoo.sh, and Odoo notes that because it is open source, "LLMs are already trained on our source code". The community side counts 100k+ developers and 40k+ community apps, which Odoo calls "the world's largest business apps store". The same pages say 28 million happy users grow their business with Odoo.

For help, the site offers a live chat, and says an operator "answers within a few minutes". There is also documentation, tutorials and a community forum.

A known rendering issue with Outlook

One thread on Odoo's own community forum is worth reading before a big send. A user reported that a template built in Odoo "completely changed within Outlook", with the layout and pictures resized. Another user quoted Odoo's support answer: "Unfortunately, how the campaign is displayed by different vendors is beyond our control", adding that Odoo's developers were testing providers to find a solution but that this "is very complicated given the different restrictions issued by each of them". Support suggested testing a campaign in a tool like Thunderbird first. Later replies say the email marketing templates were improved in versions 16 and 17, rendering "much better" but "still not perfect in some Outlook clients", and one user noted that the new Outlook displays fine while the legacy app does not. Another found the problem came from editing in the Safari browser and went away in Chrome. If your list reads mail in Outlook desktop, test on the version you will run.

Who it suits

Odoo Email Marketing fits businesses that already run, or plan to run, their CRM, sales, events or online shop on Odoo, because the email app's main strength is reporting leads, orders and revenue per campaign without any integration work. The free Community edition and on-premise hosting suit teams with a developer on hand, organizations that want their contact data in their own PostgreSQL database, and companies that expect to customize modules.

It suits less well a newsletter writer or marketer who wants only an email tool, since the value comes from the surrounding apps, and a sender whose audience is heavily on Outlook desktop, given the rendering reports on Odoo's forum.