Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central vs. Acumatica: Which ERP Is Right for Your Business?

Choosing the best ERP for your growing business is a critical decision. You want to balance features and costs while ensuring the flexibility to accommodate future technical advancements and business growth. Two leading contenders in the cloud ERP space—Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Acumatica—offer comprehensive functionality for financials, operations, and customer management, along with ease of use, flexibility, and versatile platforms that support growth. But they take very different approaches when it comes to licensing, integrations, customization, and AI.

If you’re a small to mid-sized business (SMB) looking for a modern cloud ERP, here’s a head-to-head comparison between Business Central and Acumatica to help you make an informed decision.

Built for the cloud—and on-premises

Business Central and Acumatica are two modern ERP systems designed for the SMB market. Both are among the few ERPs for this market that can run in the cloud or on-premises.

However, their architectural philosophies differ significantly.

• Dynamics 365 Business Central is part of the larger Microsoft ecosystem. It’s built on the same platform as Microsoft 365 (formerly Microsoft Office), Azure, and the Power Platform. That means Business Central offers native integration with tools your teams probably already use—Word, Outlook, Excel, Teams, Power BI, and more. Business Central is optimized to run on Microsoft Azure, providing businesses with a true-cloud ERP that features a familiar interface and seamless integration with Microsoft Azure infrastructure and services, including administration, AI tools, and telemetry. Business Central can also be deployed on premises at a company site or as an on-premises instance on other cloud hosting platforms.
• Acumatica, by contrast, takes a platform-agnostic approach. Built on its proprietary xRP framework, it emphasizes open APIs and flexible deployment options, including public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises deployment. Acumatica can be implemented on Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), or Google Cloud, but it does not offer the seamless integration with Microsoft tools and services that Business Central does. Acumatica allows data import and export to Excel, but only has basic Teams integration and limited Outlook integration.

Licensing: Named users vs. unlimited access

Licensing is one of the most significant differences between the two ERP platforms.

• Business Central utilizes named-user pricing, with separate license types available for Team ($ 8 per month), Essential ($70 per month), and Premium ($100 per month) users. When implemented as Software as a Service on Azure and managed by Microsoft, your monthly costs become much more predictable.
• Acumatica, on the other hand, uses resource-based pricing, meaning you pay based on computing power and transaction volumes required to run your operations, not by user count. However, Acumatica’s licensing model can be quite complex. Although Acumatica’s Enterprise plan theoretically allows a company to have an unlimited number of users, its consumption-based pricing model is not always the most cost-effective option compared to Microsoft’s named-user pricing. Also, Acumatica’s lower-cost plan for small companies limits the maximum number of users to 10. Before deciding on Acumatica, be sure you fully understand your resource requirements, anticipated user count, and associated costs.

Comprehensive ERP functionality and specialized industry capabilities

Both ERPs offer robust core functionality, including financial management, inventory control, order management, project accounting, and CRM capabilities. But they differ significantly in focus:

• Business Central excels with its robust financial capabilities, multi-entity and multi-currency management, and localizations (supporting over 100 countries out of the box), in addition to comprehensive manufacturing, supply chain, inventory management, and CRM capabilities in its Premium Edition. Like all ERP applications, additional industry-specific capabilities are provided through third-party products available from Independent Software Vendors (ISVs).
• In addition to its core ERP product, Acumatica sells specific industry editions, such as construction, manufacturing, distribution, and retail. These industry editions offer additional modules and features for the specific vertical, many of which are already included in Business Central’s all-in-one licensing.

Customization and extensibility

Both systems are customizable to adapt to your unique business needs.

• Developers can easily customize Business Central using Microsoft’s Visual Studio, which supports code editing, debugging, AI-supported code suggestions, and GitHub version control. Business Central customizations are added as extensions external to the base ERP application, meaning the underlying core product can be updated without rewriting the customizations. In addition, Business Central’s integration with Microsoft’s Power Platform offers low-code/no-code capabilities through Power Apps and Power Automate, empowering business users to create their own apps and workflows—something Acumatica does not match natively.
• Acumatica’s open architecture and access to the underlying database make it an attractive option for companies with strong IT teams or partners who want to build custom applications and integrations. Like Business Central, customizations exist external to the core ERP application, making it easy to upgrade without impacting custom code. However, its drag-and-drop automation tools are less intuitive than those in Business Central.

AI and automation

AI capabilities are becoming a major differentiator in ERP systems, and Business Central has a distinct advantage here.

• Dynamics 365 Business Central includes Copilot, Microsoft’s generative AI assistant, which can draft emails, summarize records, automate workflows, and assist with tasks like invoice matching or sales forecasting. Business Central also offers seamless integration with Microsoft’s Power Platform, Azure AI, and Power BI for intelligent automation. For example, Business Central utilizes Azure AI to deliver predictive analytics, including sales and inventory forecasting. This allows businesses to anticipate demand, optimize inventory levels, and make proactive decisions to meet customer needs.
• Acumatica has only basic AI features, such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for invoice processing and machine learning for expense categorization. It provides the tools for developers to build AI integrations using third-party platforms (like AWS or Azure), but there is no native generative AI assistant like Microsoft’s Copilot.

For organizations looking to leverage AI today—not in the future—Business Central offers much more out-of-the-box capabilities.

Data and system security

Both Dynamics 365 Business Central and Acumatica offer comprehensive security features, including:

• Role-based access controls, support for least privileged access and separation of duties, and multi-factor authentication.
• Data encryption to secure data in transit and at rest.
• Compliance with industry standards and requirements.

Additionally, cloud service providers such as Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS offer enterprise-level security, backup and recovery services, high availability, intrusion detection and mitigation, and more.

Ecosystem and partner support

With either ERP, you’ll rely on an implementation partner to guide you through setup, implementation, training, and support. Here, Business Central has a decided advantage over Acumatica.

• Microsoft’s partner network is vast, comprising thousands of certified partners and technology providers, along with a mature marketplace (AppSource) with 6,000+ third-party apps. This broad ecosystem makes it easier to find specialized expertise, industry-specific solutions, and product support on a large scale. Business Central has over 40,000 customers in 160 countries, supported by localizations in more than 47 languages.
• Acumatica’s partner ecosystem, although growing, is significantly smaller than Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central’s. Some users report challenges finding experienced partners for complex implementations, especially outside core industries. Acumatica offers fewer than 200 third-party solutions on its Marketplace. Acumatica has roughly 10,000 customers with native localizations in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Mexico. Additional localizations are available for purchase from third-party vendors.

Long-term stability

This leads us to the question of which ERP will have the longevity to support long-term growth and innovation in the future.

• Business Central (formerly Navision, established in 1984) has been owned by Microsoft since 2002. Microsoft has been investing in the product steadily and has made it one of the most trusted cloud ERPs used worldwide. Microsoft has invested over $6 billion in developing generative AI and has incorporated this technology into its business applications, including Business Central, Microsoft 365, Power Platform, Visual Studio, and Microsoft Azure.
• Since its founding in 2008, Acumatica has been acquired twice by private equity firms: once in 2019 by EQT and most recently in 2025 to Vista Equity Partners (pending completion of the sale at the time of this writing). While Acumatica appears to have sufficient funding to carry it through the foreseeable future, it lacks native generative AI capabilities, and its long-term roadmap for technical innovation remains unclear.

Choosing the best ERP for your company

Business Central and Acumatica are both modern cloud ERP platforms that offer comprehensive financial and industry capabilities, extensive customizability, multiple deployment options, and robust security.

• Business Central has a much larger partner network, subscriber base, ISV support, deep AI capabilities, and a long-term financial commitment from Microsoft.
• Acumatica has a smaller subscriber base and a significantly smaller pool of partners and ISVs compared to Business Central. Acumatica also lacks generative AI capabilities and has changed hands among private equity firms twice in the last decade, raising questions about its future roadmap and technical innovation.

Business Central rises head and shoulders above its SMB ERP competitors, including Acumatica, on multiple fronts. Businesses already using Microsoft business products will especially find wider user adoption with Business Central.

Companies not currently using Microsoft 365, those seeking more flexibility in their deployment options, or whose usage requirements would benefit from Acumatica’s consumption-based model should give Acumatica serious consideration.

Both platforms are industry leaders for good reason. The right choice comes down to how you operate, what tools you already use, and how much control you want over your ERP environment.

Contact the experts at ArcherPoint by Cherry Bekaert to find out more about what Business Central has to offer your company and see if Business Central is right for you.

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