The open-source SAP alternative question has two answers, not one

If you mean replacing the system of record, the real open-source ERPs are Odoo Community Edition (LGPLv3), ERPNext (GPLv3), Dolibarr (GPLv3), and Apache OFBiz (Apache License 2.0). ERPNext is the closest to SAP's single-product breadth; Odoo Community is the most modular; Dolibarr is the lightest; OFBiz is a permissive Java toolkit. All four are genuinely free to license and all four are a full migration off SAP. The part those comparisons skip: after the migration you still have manual keystrokes moving data between the new ERP and the systems you did not migrate, which is recurring labor regardless of which ledger you land on.

No. Mediar is not an ERP and does not replace SAP as your system of record. It replaces the automation layer on top of SAP: the manual data entry, and the enterprise RPA tools (UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Power Automate) that try to automate that entry with brittle selectors. The engine is open source, MIT-licensed at github.com/mediar-ai/terminator, but it is an automation engine, not a ledger. If your goal is to stop paying the SAP license, an open-source ERP is the answer and it is a migration. If your goal is to stop paying for the labor around SAP, that is what Mediar automates without any migration.

Because they answer a narrower question than the one most teams are actually asking. The lists equate 'open-source SAP alternative' with 'open-source ERP,' so they rank Odoo, ERPNext, Dolibarr, and OFBiz and stop there. None of them mention that the day-to-day cost of running SAP is rarely the license alone; it is the people re-keying orders, invoices, and reconciliations between SAP GUI and every other system. That labor does not disappear when you move to ERPNext. It moves with you. The automation layer is the part of the SAP bill you can actually attack first, and it can be open source too.

In Mediar, an automation is a plain workflow.yaml file stored in a Git repository. The executor loads it by folder and git ref: crates/executor/src/services/github_loader.rs has load_workflow(folder, git_ref) which fetches {folder}/workflow.yaml at the pinned reference. So a workflow is a version-controlled, human-readable artifact you can read, diff, review in a pull request, and fork, pinned to an exact commit. Compare that to a proprietary RPA project locked inside a vendor orchestrator as a binary you cannot inspect. The openness is at two layers: the MIT engine and the readable workflow definitions.

Yes, that is the whole point. It reads what SAP GUI exposes through OS-level accessibility APIs, the same interfaces a screen reader uses, so it does not need a published SAP API or a connector. The same approach covers Oracle EBS, mainframe green-screens, and banking and healthcare cores (Jack Henry, Fiserv, FIS, Epic, Cerner) that browser-based AI agents cannot reach. Because it reads the accessibility tree instead of matching pixels or hard-coded selectors, it re-reads the layout when SAP screens change rather than breaking on a moved control.

Usually yes, for two reasons. First, the migration itself is heavy keystroke work: exporting and re-keying master data and open transactions between SAP GUI and the new ERP, often by hand because SAP rarely exposes a clean bulk path for everything. Second, after cutover the order-to-cash and procure-to-pay cycles still have manual steps that bridge the new ERP and the systems you did not migrate. Mediar drives both SAP GUI and an open-source ERP through the same accessibility-API path, so the automation comes along to the new ledger unchanged.

The Terminator engine is MIT-licensed and free to clone and run on your own Windows machine, so the automation software itself is $0. You pay only if you run it on Mediar's managed runtime: $0.75 per minute of runtime, no per-seat licensing, with a $10,000 turn-key program fee that converts to credits. The managed runtime is what adds hosted execution, retries, audit logs, and a SOC 2 Type II environment. The open-source ERPs (Odoo Community, ERPNext, Dolibarr, OFBiz) carry $0 license cost too, but hosting, implementation, and support are real line items on any of them.

When the SAP license and maintenance are the dominant line on your budget, your processes are reasonably standard, and your team is small enough that a multi-quarter migration is survivable. In that case ERPNext or Odoo Community is the honest free answer. But for most teams running production workloads on SAP, the faster, lower-risk move is to automate the labor first with the open-source engine, measure what it saves, and decide on the ledger migration later with data instead of a vendor pitch.