When Odoo announced version 20 at Odoo Experience 2026 in Brussels, one of the most significant changes wasn’t a new feature at all, it was a new licence tier. The Light User, priced at £7 per user per month in the UK, is Odoo’s attempt to offer a lower-cost option for staff who only need access to a few apps.
For UK businesses already running Odoo, or thinking about it, Light Users could be a meaningful change to your monthly licensing costs. Here’s what the tier covers, which businesses stand to benefit most, and the catch that’s worth understanding before you upgrade.
What a Light User can access
A Light User gets access to a defined list of operational Odoo apps rather than the full Standard set. The apps included are Time Off, Expenses, Attendance, Appraisals, Employee Directory, Point of Sale, Shop Floor, Warehouse, Field Service, and Shift Planning.
In other words, the apps that operational, front-line, and part-time staff typically interact with - rather than the business-critical apps like Sales, Purchases, Projects, or Accounting that need a full Standard or Custom licence.
What a Light User can’t access
The restriction is that Light Users can’t access what Odoo considers core business apps - Sales, Purchases, Projects, Accounting, CRM, broader Manufacturing (though they can access Shop Floor), Inventory beyond warehouse views, Marketing, Website, or any customised modules that rely on these.
For anyone who needs to live inside those apps, a Standard (£22/user/month) or Custom (£41/user/month) licence is still required.
Who benefits most
Light Users is best suited to businesses with a significant chunk of staff who fit a specific profile: they don’t live in Odoo day-to-day, they only need access to a handful of operational apps, and they’re currently being charged a full licence fee that doesn’t match their actual usage.
In practice, this often looks like manufacturers with shop floor operators, warehouse staff, and quality team members. Field service businesses with technicians logging their work from the road. Retailers with POS operators and shift workers. Or any business with casual admin, part-time staff, or employees who only use Odoo for things like time off and expense submissions.
If a chunk of your current Odoo users fit that description, moving them to Light User could cut their individual cost by more than two-thirds.
The catch worth understanding
Here’s where it gets more interesting. Under the new agreement that comes with Odoo 20, active employee records in HR count toward your Light User total too - even if those staff never log into Odoo.
That means if you’ve got a large payroll database of employees who aren’t day-to-day Odoo users, but their records are active in HR, they’re going to count against your licence total under the new structure. For businesses using Odoo mainly as a payroll system with limited broader usage, this could actually push your overall licence bill up rather than down.
Before you upgrade, it’s worth auditing your HR data to understand how many active employee records you have, and how many would qualify as Light Users under the new rule. That number is the one that determines whether Light Users ends up as a cost saving or a cost increase for your business.
How to think about the change
For most of the businesses we work with at Sixo, Light Users will be a net positive - the ability to move operational staff onto a cheaper tier more than offsets any additional cost from active employee records.
But it’s not automatic. The savings depend on the shape of your team, how your HR records are set up, and which apps your various staff actually use. A quick audit before you upgrade is the difference between walking into a cost reduction or a cost surprise.
How we can help
If you’re planning an Odoo 20 upgrade and want help working out how Light Users will affect your specific setup, Sixo Systems can walk you through it. As a UK Odoo Silver Partner based in Liverpool, we help businesses across the country make sense of licensing changes like this one and plan upgrades that actually land in a better place than where they started.
Book a call or drop us a message to start the conversation.