SAP S/4HANA Alternatives: 7 Options for Companies Still on SAP ECC

1. SAP extended maintenance to 2030

Mainstream maintenance for ECC 6.0 ends on 31 December 2027. SAP will keep legal changes and security patches coming until the end of 2030 for a premium of two percentage points on your maintenance rate. You must be on enhancement package 6, 7 or 8, and you must opt in.

Best for: a company that has chosen its next system and needs the time to get there. It solves nothing by itself. Our guide to every SAP ECC deadline covers the conditions, including what SAP added in October 2026 about third-party databases.

2. Third-party support

Firms such as Rimini Street and Spinnaker Support maintain ECC independently of SAP. Rimini Street has committed to supporting ECC 6.0 through 2040 and says clients save up to 50% on annual support fees. This is the route Kingfisher took.

You keep a system your people know, on customisations you have already paid for. You give up SAP's own notes and new software. A board member of the German-speaking SAP user group has warned that one consequence of third-party support is that SAP will not grant you any incentives, and a Gartner analyst commenting on Kingfisher put the limit plainly: eventually the core has to be upgraded.

Best for: a stable ECC system that the business is content with, where the freed budget will fund work outside the ERP. It postpones the platform decision without making it.

3. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management

This is Microsoft’s ERP system for big enterprises. It performs exceptionally well in financials and supply chain management and integrates nicely with Azure, Power BI, and Microsoft 365.

On customisation, Microsoft is explicit. Extensibility is the only customisation framework, and overlayering, which is direct modification of Microsoft's code, is not supported. You extend what Microsoft exposes, and where it does not expose what you need, you log an extensibility request. Microsoft ships four service updates a year and requires at least two.

VendorBenchmark puts the list price at $210 a user a month for a full Finance and Supply Chain user, with typical enterprise agreements at $159 to $176, a minimum of 20 full users, and partner services at 1.5 to 3 times first-year licence cost.

Best for: a Microsoft-centred enterprise that wants a tier-1 vendor and can live inside the extension model. If you are weighing it against open source, our Dynamics 365 to ERPNext page sets out the differences.

4. Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP

The Oracle solution suite is primarily a financial application explicitly developed for its functions of consolidation-planning-control. It is only available in the form of a software-as-a-service product, and there is no option for an on-premises system, nor is there a perpetual license for it.

Oracle itself says this about its solution: “Oracle constrains customization of the underlying applications, middleware and database objects; Oracle customers extend the system via configuration, reporting, integration, and other standalone applications. Oracle provides updates every quarter. Oracle suggests you test your extensions each time.”

Oracle does not provide pricing information. ERP Research estimates $375 to $475 per user per month for a fully-featured Financials user (before 25% to 55% discount), implementation of $800,000 to $1.5 million for finance and supply chain modules. Oracle's NetSuite solution is often used for smaller subsidiaries.

Best for: finance-oriented team that seeks standard processes provided as a service and happy to adapt to them. See our Oracle NetSuite to ERPNext comparison page.

5. Infor CloudSuite

Infor provides industrial editions of CloudSuite for small companies; in addition, it offers larger ones with Industrial Enterprise (LN) version and food and clothing editions that are based on M3. What makes it attractive is the fact that engineering to order, catch weight, or shelf-life flows are prepared.

Typically, it is deployed in a multi-tenant environment on AWS. The review of ERP research for 2026 claims that the limited capacity for customization, a smaller number of partners compared to SAP or Microsoft has been criticized by users. The researchers estimate the price per subscription to vary within the range of 150 to 400 dollars per month per user with direct implementation taking place within 9 to 18 months.

Best for: a manufacturer whose processes match one of Infor's industry editions closely enough that little customisation is needed.

6. Odoo Enterprise

Odoo has a very large application catalogue, a polished interface and a wide partner network. Its Community edition is open source. The Enterprise edition adds proprietary applications and is licensed per user.

You can develop your custom modules in Python and host Odoo on your server using the Custom plan, and therefore you will own the database. New major versions of Odoo come out annually. In the 2026 guide by one of Odoo partners, it is stated that an upgrade project should be undertaken once every two or three years, and the fact that there is custom code increases the complexity of every such project. The same guide mentions that the price for the Custom plan increased by roughly 20% in September 2026.

Best for: a mid-size company that wants a broad suite quickly and accepts per-user pricing. We compare the two in detail in ERPNext vs Odoo.

7. ERPNext

ERPNext is the option we implement, so weigh this section with that in mind.

ERPNext is open source in full. There is no paid edition, no licence fee and no per-user fee. It runs on the Frappe Framework, and against the six questions it looks like this:

Customisation and flexibility.

You have the whole source code. Custom documents, approval workflows, reports and integrations are built in Python and JavaScript, and many changes are configuration that a business analyst can make. No vendor approves or schedules your changes.

Database control.

Your data sits in MariaDB, an open-source database. You can query it with SQL, back it up and host it on Frappe Cloud, your own cloud account or your own servers.

Data volume and transaction load.

Frappe has published the case of a fintech customer with 700 million ledger entries in a single ERPNext site, adding 800,000 to 1 million entries a day. Its customer story on the Indian stock broker Zerodha cites 25 to 30 million records a day. Across our own dairy customers, ERPNext handles more than 4,350 sales orders a day.

Stability.

ERPNext has been in development since 2008. You decide when to upgrade, and upgrading carries no licence fee.

There are two limits to be stated here. The first one is that ERPNext has no built-in automatic scaling. As described by Frappe themselves when talking about their 700 million entry project, standard Trial Balance cannot operate within the live database at such a capacity, so there is a dedicated analytical copy where the same operation completes in about two minutes.

The second one is that the solution is heavily dependent on the partner. ERPNext has less partners experienced in enterprise implementation compared to SAP or Microsoft. Every partner will gladly provide you with references and written documentation of the parallel run and fallback procedure.

Best for: companies for which the workflow processes of their own are more important than SAP standard and that want to have full control over the code and database of the system. Check our SAP to ERPNext migration page for the module mapping, scale proof and method.