Hadro-production data on charm and beauty absolute cross-sections, collected by experiments at CERN, DESY and Fermilab, are reviewed. The measurements, corrected for the 'time evolution' of the branching ratios, are compared to calculations done with Pythia, as a function of the collision energy, using the latest parametrizations of the parton densities. We then estimate some charm and beauty production cross-sections relevant for future measurements, including nuclear effectes in the PDFs. We finish by briefly addressing the relevance, in heavy-ion collisions, of beauty production as feed-down for J/psi production.