The six that belong on a Texas shortlist
Odoo is the open-source suite: full MRP with shop-floor terminals, quality and maintenance, plus accounting, CRM, eCommerce and field service on one database, at a published $24.90 USD per user per month. Global Shop Solutions, family-owned in The Woodlands since 1976, is the one-system job-shop specialist, all-inclusive from roughly $75,000 in year one. Cetec ERP, from Austin, publishes $50 per standard user and $25 per shop-floor user, cloud-only, full feature set for everyone. Epicor Kinetic, headquartered in Austin, is the mid-market heavyweight: embedded MES, a mature configurator, benchmarks of $1,500 monthly platform plus $100 to $200 per user and implementations from $75,000. JobBOSS², ECI Software's job-shop product, benchmarks $85 to $150 per user for shops under fifty people. ECI M1, its step-up sibling, benchmarks $200 to $400 per cloud user for 10-to-200-employee discrete manufacturers.
Every one of these has a detailed head-to-head on this site: Odoo vs Global Shop Solutions, Odoo vs Cetec, Odoo vs Epicor Kinetic, Odoo vs JobBOSS² and Odoo vs M1.
Match the product to the plant, not the brochure
Under ten people, pure job shop: JobBOSS² speaks the dialect natively and onboards in days; its per-seat premium is the price of that fit. Odoo matches the quote-to-job core at a third of the seat cost once a partner configures it, and wins outright the day you add a storefront or a service crew.
Ten to a hundred people, discrete or mixed-mode: this is the contested middle. Global Shop brings fifty years of finite-scheduling depth at a $75K-plus entry; Cetec brings honest published pricing with a genuinely clever $25 shop-floor tier; M1 brings flow-based navigation at $200-plus per seat; Odoo brings the same operational core plus everything around it, commerce, service, multi-company, at $24.90. Run the five-year totals for your actual headcount mix; the spread across these four routinely exceeds $300,000.
Complex multi-plant, configurator-driven, compliance-heavy: Epicor Kinetic's class. Its embedded MES and CPQ-grade configurator are real, its $500,000-to-$800,000 five-year TCO at 50 users is the price of that class, and a plant that genuinely lives on those capabilities should evaluate it against Infor and IFS, not against the SMB field.
The pricing reality, side by side
Only two vendors on this list publish prices: Odoo ($24.90 per user per month, everything included) and Cetec ($50 standard, $25 shop-floor, $20 portal). Everyone else sells by quote, which means the numbers above are benchmarks, not menus, and your quote will be shaped by what the discovery process learns about your budget. Fifteen users over five years, licences only: Odoo about $22,400; Cetec about $45,000 at standard rates, less with floor-heavy mixes; JobBOSS² $76,000 to $135,000; M1 $180,000 to $360,000; Global Shop and Epicor bundle differently but land at $75,000-plus year one and $500,000-plus five-year respectively. Implementation adds $15,000 to $35,000 on Odoo, and anywhere from onboarding fees to $300,000 elsewhere.
The single most useful act in a Texas ERP evaluation costs nothing: require every vendor to put a five-year all-in figure in writing, licences, implementation, support and hosting, and refuse to compare anything else until they do.
The Texas factor: what local actually buys you
Three of the six, Global Shop (The Woodlands), Cetec (Austin) and Epicor (Austin), are Texas companies, and for some buyers that matters: same-time-zone support, user groups within driving distance, references you can visit. It is worth something real. It is not worth a multiple of your software budget, and it should not decide between products whose five-year totals differ by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Odoo's answer to the local question is its partner model: implementation, support and customization come from firms in your market, on a platform whose published economics no local vendor can quietly reprice.
Verdict
Tiny static job shop: JobBOSS², eyes open on the seat price. Shop-floor-heavy pure manufacturer comfortable in vendor cloud: Cetec, and respect that it publishes its prices. Deep-pocketed shop living at the scheduling constraint: Global Shop Solutions. True multi-plant complexity: Epicor Kinetic, evaluated against its own class. Everyone else in Texas manufacturing, and especially anyone who sells parts online, services what they build, or plans to be bigger in five years, should model Odoo first: the same manufacturing core, the widest suite around it, and the only five-year total on this page you can compute before a salesperson calls back.