Frequently Asked Questions

Octopus is free software. You don’t need to purchase commercial licenses. You must understand that you are not buying a product but a service: you are paying a fee for annual maintenance. This is our open source economic model. This fee depends solely on the outstanding loan / savings balance of the MFI. Octopus is cheaper than any commercial solution of the same category since you don’t need to invest in licences when you start with Octopus, or when you open new branches or offices. You can install Octopus in as many branches as you want, without limitations. The other important point is that you are never tied to a specific reseller: you pay the maintenance fee to the reseller you trust. If you no longer want to work with a local reseller, you can renew your contract with an Octopus certified reseller of your choice.

Octopus Enterprise and Octopus Community are 90% the same product, with the same features, the difference lies in the services that are provided along with the product. Octopus Community comes with no warranties: no guaranteed support, maintenance, bug fixing, or migration. Octopus Community is provided under the open source LGPL licence that requires you to distribute all your developments under the same LGPL licence. Octopus Enterprise is entirely dedicated to professional use, and includes all the required services to be used in production: support service (in English, French, Russian) for both functional and technical issues, security alerts, maintenance (unlimited bugfixing), and unlimited migrations to new Octopus versions. Octopus Enterprise also comes with the extra permission to make “private modules”, meant for companies that wnat to develop their own modules, for internal use.

Octopus Professional is free of licence, you only pay for services. At least, you pay an annual guarantee, based on on the outstanding loan / savings balance of your institution. Half of the guarantee covers the software maintenance (bug fixing), Half covers the technical assistance delivered by Octopus or your local reseller. You can then subscribe to additional services such as installation, training, automated backups and one of our Software as a Service (SaaS) offers. For Institutions with single branch, Octopus Community can be used for free.

Depending on your internet connexion (none, low-bandwidth, high-debit) we propose different options tailored to your needs. To understand better our different offers, refer to the Octopus Network page.

To guarantee the quality of our services, we have implemented a training system for local resellers that must get an annual certification to be systematically up-to-date with Octopus latest evolutions. We provide a technical assistance to our certified resellers and ensure software maintenance in relation to any eventual defects they could point out to us. The easiest way to know if a reseller is certified is to check on our resellers list or contact us. We do not provide any kind of assistance if you work with a non-certified reseller.

Octopus is robust and easy to maintain for an institution without internal IT skills. Octopus is based on SQL server, which is the most stable solution largely used in industry. Our automatic tests ensure the system stability and automated scripts included in the Octopus Professional edition make Octopus upgrading easier. Thanks to the integrated module of database management, making database backups and restorations is as easy as saving a file in Word: no specific competences in IT are required. In case of problems, your local reseller is trained to take hand directly on your computer through “remote-control”.

The first step is to search on our online documentation (wiki). If you cannot find the answer, please visit our forum: a user has maybe already given the solution. If you don’t find any answer there, the easiest way is to leave us a message on the forum. Our developers are always connected on it and the whole community will benefit from the answer.

Octopus is relatively easy to install. Your certified reseller will require approximately 1 to 2 hours to install Octopus and the various components of its environment, and about half-day to configure Octopus according to your microfinance practices. Please keep in mind that configuring a random bank software can take up to several weeks. You can download and install Octopus by yourself by following the user guide.

Octopus is a project initiated by ACTED, one of the top 10 european NGOs. Octopus is a for-limited-profit company, that works as a social business. Octopus is a hybrid economic model: we don’t intend to maximize profit but to be financially viable to ensure the fulfillment of our social mission.

Of course yes ! It is much more robust and transparent than a commercial licenced solution. We bet that the more Octopus users and members we’ll have, the more they will help us improve the software by pointing out defects. Currently, Octopus is being downloaded and installed 500 times a month, and used by a global community that provides us regularly with feedbacks on its new functionalities. Moreover, Octopus we benefit from the experience and expertise of the best European software editors that are developing Octopus. Learn more about Octopus robustness.

AGILE is one of the most plebiscited methods for software development currently. It allows developers to have more reactivity and flexibility on developments while clients benefit from more visibility. Instead of launching 1 new version each year, we offer a new version every 5 weeks. Thus, our clients do not need to wait a year to have their specific developments or to fix a bug. Of course, you don’t need to have your version upgraded with every release. However, thanks to AGILE, we are much more reactive to our users needs and to specific microfinance practices evolutions.

We have chosen open-source more because of pragmatism than by ideology: we believe that open-source allows us to have a more robust and easily accessible software for small IMFs. Nearly 100% of these small IMFs employees are familiar with the Windows & Office environment. If we want Octopus to be used as largely as possible, it has to be easy to use, hence running on Windows. However, for our technical choices, every time a qualitative and easy-to-use open-source solution is available (accounting integration, reportings), we favour open-source.