Building an ERP System with Directus – Looking for Experiences and Potential Issues

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Building an ERP System with Directus – Looking for Experiences and Potential Issues

Hi everyone,

I’m planning to develop an ERP system using Directus, where one of the collections might receive around 1 million records per year.

I intend to handle some business logic through hooks extensions, and if needed, implement custom interfaces using module extensions.

I’d love to hear from anyone who has experience with similar large-scale projects on Directus:

  • Has anyone built a project of this scale with Directus before?
  • What kind of performance, scalability, or development issues might I encounter with this data volume?
  • Are there any best practices or things to watch out for, especially when working with hooks and custom modules?

Any insights, lessons learned, or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

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Welcome to the community @yakupsogut :waving_hand: !

You could absolutely use Directus to build an ERP system. At Directus, some of our own internal instances (yes we run Directus the company on Directus the product :smiley: ) have 50+ million records in a single collection, so your target of 1 million records per year is well within what the platform can handle.

Your approach using custom hooks and endpoints for business logic is the best pattern for API side customizations. On the UI side you’ve got a lot of flexibility, and you don’t necessarily have to reach for a custom module, you can use custom interfaces inside the existing forms.

Directus itself is performant out of the box, but that said there’s a lot that goes into maintaining that performance as you scale. So my response is a classic developer one :rofl:

It depends…

  • Which database you’re using
  • The hardware you are hosting Directus on
  • The complexity of your data model and relationships
  • What your business logic looks like
  • Your infrastructure setup (extra nodes, load balancers, database server)

If you’re using Directus Cloud, we handle these infrastructure concerns for you, which can simplify things considerably for large production deployments.

To give you better guidance specific to your use case, I’d need to know:

Q1: Are you building this ERP system for a specific client? Or is this something you are developing with intent to offer as a SaaS service or to sell to different clients in the future?

Q2: How many users do you expect to have accessing the system simultaneously?

Q3: What’s your data access pattern like - is it read-heavy, write-heavy, or balanced?

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Thanks for the warm welcome!

Here are the answers to your questions:

Q1: We’re developing this ERP system with the intention of offering it to multiple clients in the future. Each client will have a separate instance (i.e., separate deployment and server) — it will not be a multi-tenant setup.

Q2: We expect around 50 concurrent users per instance.

Q3: The system will be read-heavy, with most interactions involving data retrieval rather than frequent writes.

Thanks again for the detailed insights — really helpful as we move forward with the architecture! Looking forward to any further suggestions you might have based on this.