Essential Criteria for Selecting Your Odoo Partner as an End-User Company

“OCA modules are open source, so there’s no license involved.”

I was taken aback when I heard an Odoo partner say this to a client company, which prompted me to write this post.​

This article is primarily aimed at Japanese user companies. My goal is to shed light on a perspective that is rarely covered through official Odoo channels, yet is critically important when choosing a partner. It’s quite a long read, but I strongly recommend going through it in full to reduce the risk of failure in your Odoo implementation.

1. What’s Happening as Odoo Grows

1-1. Odoo’s Expansion in Japan

Even just looking at Google Trends, it’s clear that Odoo is gaining traction in Japan. As Odoo’s global market share continues to rise, Japanese businesses are encountering the product more frequently. Combine that with targeted marketing efforts from Odoo S.A., including a fair amount of YouTube ads (yes, we’ve heard the complaints!), and the stage is set. More and more Japanese companies are now seriously considering Odoo as an option for their enterprise systems.

1-2. A Rise in Failed Projects

Zooming in a bit, we’ve seen a noticeable uptick over the past year in a particular type of inquiry here at Quartile: project recovery. These are companies who’ve already tried implementing Odoo with a partner, only to find the results disappointing, and now they’re asking if there’s any way to improve the situation. Our own resources have been stretched thin lately, so we can’t always take over entire projects, but we’re increasingly being pulled in as advisors for these troubled implementations.​

The macro and micro trends are closely intertwined. In our previous article,“The Momentum of Odoo, the Concern of OCA, and What Comes Next” (unfortunately not yet available in English), we touched on the emergence of a “market for lemons,” a situation where poor service offerings drive out quality providers, making it difficult for user companies to find competent support, among Odoo service providers. That trend is no longer just theoretical. We’re seeing real examples of it on the ground.

2. Odoo vs. SAP — Where the Fundamental Differences Lie

2-1. The Commonly Cited Differences: Product Perspective

You’ll often hear comparisons between Odoo and other enterprise ERP systems, especially SAP. If we were to simplify things (maybe a bit too much), SAP is a system of “subtraction,” while Odoo is one of “addition.”

SAP is a massive, monolithic piece of software, designed to support the operations of virtually any large enterprise. Implementation projects revolve around setting parameters in a highly structured way. You end up with tons of unused features, but the system really stands out when it comes to handling detailed data and highly reliable transaction records, especially in accounting. It’s no surprise SAP is widely regarded as a solution for large enterprises.

In contrast, Odoo takes an open-source (technically, open-core) approach where you start with the bare minimum, the base module, and then add only the features (modules) you need. Those added features might be standard ones from Odoo, or they could be custom-built. Technically speaking, there’s no distinction between the two: they’re all just modules. Because unused modules aren’t activated, Odoo users don’t feel boxed in by standard functionality. This contributes to the platform’s renowned flexibility.

Alongside this characteristic, the core of Odoo is intentionally kept lean. In other words, while the standard features offer a usable baseline, they often fall short when matched against specific business needs. The underlying philosophy is, “If it doesn’t exist, go ahead and build it.” As a result, Odoo generally presents more situations where custom development becomes necessary compared to other systems.

However, this modularity and flexibility come at a cost: a looser structure and potential variability in how data is handled or how robust transactions are. The sheer number of possible module combinations creates an infinite variety of implementation patterns. That’s part of Odoo’s charm, but it also means the core product doesn’t enforce strict design or governance constraints.

With all this in mind, it makes sense why people often say, “SAP is for enterprises, Odoo is for small and medium-sized companies.” It’s a superficial distinction, sure, but it stems from real differences. From an implementation style perspective, SAP leans toward a “template-driven” approach, whereas Odoo is more of a “freestyle”.

2-2. The Less Talked-About Difference: The Role of OCA

These product differences naturally shape the ecosystem around them.

With SAP, where the source code is closed and the implementation tends to follow a “template-driven” approach, there is inherently less room for discretion on the part of service providers. Beyond the product itself, SAP has dominated the Japanese ERP market for nearly 30 years, during which time a set of well-established "best practices" has taken root among implementation partners. As a result, except in cases involving large-scale custom development, SAP projects tend to show little variation in how the product is configured and deployed across different providers. This consistency is, in many ways, one of SAP’s key strengths.

Odoo, by contrast, is open source, at least in its community edition, and most of its codebase is hosted openly on GitHub. As we mentioned earlier, its “additive” nature means custom functionality often has to be built to meet client-specific requirements.

This combination of being open source and having an additive nature inevitably leads to the need for community-driven collaboration. Without it, every service provider is forced to reinvent the wheel to meet custom demands. That drives up development costs, complicates quality control, and often wrecks maintainability.​

That’s where theOdoo Community Association (OCA)comes in. Established in 2013, the OCA is a non-profit organization that promotes collaborative development among community contributors. It currently manages over 200 GitHub repositories, organized by business domain and country. Across various Odoo versions, roughly 2,000 open-source modules are actively maintained. The OCA enforces rigorous code style checks and review processes, ensuring its modules are generally high-quality and stable.There is even a dedicated repository for Japanese localization features.As of June 2025, all modules in that repository have been submitted by Quartile.

Among experienced Odoo integrators, using OCA modules in implementation projects is considered standard practice. These modules help reduce variability and support the creation of stable, sustainable environments. This is especially important in "freestyle" Odoo implementations, where developers face fewer constraints and the technical quality and implementation approaches can vary significantly between providers.

Put simply, the presence of an open-source community like the OCA is one of the most decisive differences between Odoo and SAP. Failing to leverage the OCA in an Odoo project could very well be a recipe for failure.

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3. How Real OSS Experts Would Share Information

3-1. Gaps in Odoo S.A.’s Messaging

Odoo S.A. essentially operates in two communication modes: (1) open-source-facing activities—primarily on GitHub—where it engages transparently with the developer community; and (2) revenue-driven, user-facing marketing efforts, which will be the focus here.

Messages from Odoo S.A. directed at the Japanese market currently come from the teams responsible for marketing and sales, given the company’s organizational structure. As a result, these communications rarely highlight the broader ecosystem or open-source community efforts. While Quartile's contributions were featured once (“[Customization for Japanese Requirements by Partner Quartile]”) by a well-meaning team member, this focus on community efforts is quite rare. We've talked more about Odoo S.A.'s communication limitations in another blog post: “​Exploring Ways to Increase Participation in Odoo’s OSS Initiatives.”​

From Odoo S.A.’s perspective, this omission probably isn’t a problem. The company continues to grow even without spotlighting its open-source foundation. However, once you truly understand how different Odoo is from other commercial ERPs, especially considering the vital role the OCA plays, it becomes clear that Odoo S.A.’s current messaging lacks sufficient focus on the open-source perspective. As a result, it falls short of providing users with the full picture.

Some might say, “That’s the responsibility of service providers within the ecosystem,” and perhaps that’s true. Precisely for that reason, Quartile believes part of our role—as an Odoo partner—is to share this kind of broader perspective, to help maintain balance in the market.

3-2. A Model for Balanced Communication

Many companies promoting Odoo in Japan tend to highlight the good stuff: “Odoo meets Japanese localization needs!” and so on. But from our perspective, the follow-up question is often: “Really? Under what conditions?”

Let’s be real. In Japan’s still-nascent Odoo market, it’s almost never the case that the core product alone fully fits local requirements. Even if it seems ready-to-use, that’s likely thanks to years of community-driven efforts behind the scenes.

What we really need is more honest communication. For example: “Odoo’s standard features don’t support Japan’s common mid-month payment terms. However, the open-source moduleaccount_payment_term_cutoff_dayfrom the OCA does. It’s licensed under AGPL and was created by [Company X]. As of now, support for version 18.0 is still pending, but work is underway.”

This kind of nuanced, community-aware messaging is what makes open-source tools powerful. Yet very few service providers present information this way.

4. Quality Issues and the Risks for User Companies

4-1. Growing Quality Concerns Among Odoo Service Providers

Odoo is becoming a global leader in the ERP market for small and medium-sized businesses, but it is still a latecomer in Japan. Unlike regions such as Europe, where the open-source community has had time to mature, Japanese service providers have been slow to participate in community activities. As a result, their overall proficiency with Odoo tends to be relatively low. However, this fact is rarely communicated to users—by Odoo S.A. or the service providers themselves. Without a clear framework for evaluating what they’re told, users often accept a partner’s guidance at face value and allow heavy customizations to be made. Before they realize what they're getting into, they end up with a system that is bloated, fragile, and virtually unmaintainable. And by then, reversing course becomes extremely difficult.

You might think, “But Odoo partners are certified and ranked—surely that means something?” Unfortunately, not much. The ranking system emphasizes enterprise license sales. Just like their general messaging, Odoo S.A.’s partner program says very little about open-source competencies. Even if a partner proposes major improvements to Odoo itself that are accepted upstream, it doesn’t factor into their score. This isn’t a new problem. We said as much back in 2018 when we published “Quartile Becomes an Odoo Learning Partner.”

We see this trend clearly reflected in the number of recovery projects we’re consulted on. In every one of those cases, users tell us that their original partners said nothing about the open-source ecosystem, the OCA, or licensing implications. When we explain it, they’re often surprised and, frankly, angry that this context was kept from them.

This situation isn’t good for us either. Spending time cleaning up a preventable mess after it has already happened means we don't have time to create new improvements for the community.

And the problem of projects-gone-wrong may get worse. One of the main pillars of Odoo S.A.’s Japan outreach these days is promoting their partner program, but there’s still no mention of open-source culture or its benefits. As a result, more newcomers may be jumping in to sell Odoo as a commercial product, without any real understanding of how the ecosystem actually works. It’s hard to imagine this ending well for their clients.

4-2. The Risks of User Companies Not Understanding the Open-Source Community

Based on the current situation, it seems that Japanese user companies are rarely given a detailed explanation of the OCA by Odoo S.A. or partners other than Quartile. This lack of exposure poses a significant risk for user companies.

With highly flexible software like Odoo, it’s possible to build just about anything. Making something “look like it works” is relatively easy, but keeping it in a maintainable state is much harder. This is an important point that often gets overlooked. What’s more, the consequences of poor implementation may not become apparent until well after the system has gone live. While users without technical expertise may be able to assess whether a feature meets their business requirements, they typically have no way of judging its long-term maintainability.

This information asymmetry creates the following incentives for Odoo service providers with limited professionalism or expertise:

• Ignore maintainability and just deliver something that “seems to work"
• Lock in users by implementing custom features based on proprietary specifications that leave them unable to switch or adapt

These approaches cause major harm. In our experience, recovering a project like that usually means starting nearly from scratch, just as we did in the case study “Odoo Version Upgrade: MI7 Japan (V10→V15).”

What makes the situation even more difficult is the high cost of switching. Implementing an enterprise system is never as simple as installing software. It involves assembling the right team, establishing internal policies, reviewing business processes, gathering requirements, and working through the definition phase. All of this requires a great deal of effort, ideally carried out in collaboration with a trusted partner. Replacing that partner means accepting that much of the time, money, and effort invested in those preparations may have to be written off as sunk cost.

As mentioned earlier, in “freestyle” Odoo implementations, it’s all too easy for user companies to fall victim to low-quality service providers, especially if they aren’t paying close attention. Odoo S.A.’s current partner program, which evaluates providers primarily based on sales performance, does little to guard against this risk. In fact, most of the clients Quartile has taken over have come from official Odoo partners, including some with “Gold” or “Silver” status.

ERP projects are expensive and deeply impact a company’s operations. Yet we see too many users making bad decisions simply because they lack awareness of what Odoo really is as an open-source product and what a proper implementation approach should look like.

5. What a Partner’s Community Activities Tell You

5-1. Community Contributions Reveal a Partner’s Real Stance and Skillset

Let’s be clear: Odoo is a fantastic product but it’s not perfect. In fact, there are a few persistent challenges that can’t be overlooked:

1. Bugs and incomplete features are relatively common
2. Japanese localization is still underdeveloped
3. Helpdesk-based feedback channels are limited

The first point is largely a trade-off for Odoo’s rapid pace of development. Things have improved a lot over the years, though we still occasionally run into issues that make us want to bang our heads against the wall. (When I spoke with Odoo’s CTO Antony last year, he laughed and said bugs are just part of Odoo, so I suppose we have to accept that.)

The second point—Japanese localization—remains weak. Up until just 3 or 4 years ago, nearly all localization work for Japan (translations, accounting modules, etc.) came from Quartile. Odoo S.A. has only recently started dedicating internal resources to this, and even then, the progress is partial at best.

The third point is one that, from the perspective of partners who truly understand Odoo, clearly has room for improvement. When users run into operational issues caused by overlooked requirements or Japan-specific needs, helpdesk channels are usually of little help. These are the kinds of challenges that require structural understanding, not just ticket-based support.

So what happens? In Japan, most Odoo implementations require fixes or enhancements, but Odoo S.A. isn’t positioned to help.

In such situations, service providers who prioritize user value and are well-versed in Odoo typically take part in community efforts. For us, this is only natural. If a problem is shared across the market, the solution should then become part of the community assets, ultimately benefiting all users.

If that doesn’t happen, the only remaining options are as follows.

• Give up on dealing with overlooked edge cases or local requirements
• Build a solution privately, behind closed doors

The first option is, of course, a source of frustration for users. The second raises concerns in terms of efficiency and transparency, as it often leads to locking users into custom-built, proprietary solutions.

A provider’s willingness (or unwillingness) to participate in community development says a lot about their values. The true strength of open source lies in its open flow of information. Without tapping into that, there’s no way to genuinely “use” open source in the way it was meant to be used.

Submitting modules to the OCA, for example, is more than a technical act. It’s a visible demonstration of a provider’s understanding of the product and their ability to solve real problems. Reviewing working code and seeing how a module is structured tells you far more about a company than any polished slide deck ever could.

A service provider’s capabilities can generally be assessed based on their track record of community contributions.

• Consistently submitting meaningful improvement or bug fixes to core Odoo or OCA repositories　→Indicates a technically capable and reliable service provider
• Submitting thoughtful bug reports to core Odoo or OCA repositories　→May lack strong development resources but demonstrates a positive attitude toward open-source collaboration
• No visible participation in community activities　→Unlikely to fully leverage the strengths and benefits of the open-source model

I'll say it again—these community contributions are not part of Odoo S.A.’s official partner rankings, which places heavy emphasis on sales performance for the Enterprise edition. While community contributions are not the only measure of a good partner, it is a critically important one that can be easily overlooked, especially when users rely primarily on the information from Odoo S.A. or from those service providers who are not involved in community activities.

5-2. Why Global Companies Should Choose Service Providers Who Are Active in the Community

Since Quartile has been working with Odoo since 2013, we are occasionally approached by newly appointed or prospective Odoo partners seeking collaboration. However, in many such cases, the proposed arrangement ends up with us simply providing our know-how, without any meaningful benefit to the end user. For that reason, we generally decline these offers.

But when the potential partner has a track record of OCA activities, it’s a different story. Among OCA contributors, there’s a shared understanding that dramatically lowers the cost of collaboration and minimizes conflict:

• A mindset of sharing know-how and contributing results back to the community​
• Knowledge of existing community solutions (OCA modules)
• Proper code management practices that respect open-source licenses
• A development and Quality Assurance process aligned with OCA guidelines

We’ve successfully executed projects withEcosoft(Thailand) andKomit(Vietnam), both major OCA contributors in Asia. While each company has its own internal practices, our shared foundation made the collaboration smooth. We brought different skill sets to the table and achieved genuine synergy. In fact, we already collaborate loosely with these partners via our day-to-day work in the OCA, so formal cooperation was just a natural extension of that.

This kind of synergy would be incredibly difficult to replicate with providers who don’t participate in the community. In fact, we’re currently helping clean up a failed project that collapsed due to a poorly aligned partnership between service providers—neither of whom were engaged in community activities.

If you’re a global enterprise planning to implement Odoo across multiple regions, it's important to keep this perspective in mind when choosing your partners.

5-3. Why So Few Providers Join the Community

Community participation isn’t just about maximizing user value. It’s also a golden opportunity for service providers to showcase their capabilities. When a module you created gets recognized and widely used, it builds your reputation in the ecosystem. Representing your company in the open is intimidating for less capable firms, but for those who know what they’re doing, it’s one of the best forms of marketing.

We’ve noticed a gradual increase in savvy user companies choosing partners specifically because of their community contributions. Even though Odoo S.A.’s own materials don’t talk much about the open-source ecosystem, users are now discovering the OCA on their own. Some have even contacted us after learning about our community record, sometimes with help from AI tools that surface our contributions more effectively than any official directory.

But here’s the catch: even with all these benefits, very few Odoo service providers actually participate in the community. As of June 2025, there are over 3,300 official Odoo partners worldwide. In 2024, only 448 of them made any contribution to the OCA and the number with consistent activity is far smaller. In Japan, Quartile is currently the only one.

What’s behind this? It’s likely because actively participating and delivering tangible results, such as getting a pull request merged, is not an easy task. The bar is reasonably high.

First, as outlined in “​Why You Should Contribute to OSS Communities”, there are certain hurdles to participating in community activities, particularly when it comes to submitting pull requests to the Odoo or OCA repositories. Without all of the following capabilities in place, meaningful participation becomes difficult.

• understanding of the Odoo ecosystem in depth
• technical proficiency in the product
• communication skills in the community’s working language (English)
• compliance with quality and procedural standards

Pull requests submitted to the Odoo core or OCA repositories that meet these capabilities are only merged after receiving approval from experienced members—usually more than one.

For providers lacking these capabilities, the barrier can feel overwhelming. Since these contributions don’t generate immediate revenue, they may seem hard to justify in the short term.

But let’s not forget: back when Odoo was still called TinyERP or OpenERP and was fully AGPL, this kind of community involvement was simply the norm.

The shift to an open-core model inevitably gave rise to an ecosystem increasingly disconnected from the open-source community. That said, as noted earlier, the declining participation of new Odoo partners in community activities is also a consequence of Odoo S.A.’s heavily skewed messaging to the market.

5-4. Contract Terms for Leveraging Open Source

There’s another reason, not related to skills or mindset, that keeps some Odoo service providers from participating in the community: contract terms.

If the goal is to make full and meaningful use of open source, one fundamental contractual point to avoid in contracts between Odoo service providers and user companies is assigning copyright ownership of deliverables, such as code, to the client (the ordering party). Under copyright law, ownership of such works is originally held by the creator or developer. However, if the contract stipulates that those rights are transferred to the client, it can impede the secondary use of deliverables, including their release as open-source software.

This also affects more than just new developments. If you’re improving existing Odoo core features or enhancing OCA modules, you might hit roadblocks. Odoo and OCA repositories require signing a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) before accepting any contributions. But you can’t expect end-user companies to go through the CLA process. It’s simply not practical.

While it’s theoretically possible to structure contracts so that generic components are owned by the provider and non-generic ones by the client, drawing such distinctions introduces additional administrative overhead. In practice, once the design is carefully refined, truly “non-generic” requirements tend to be quite rare.

So here’s the bottom line: unless the user company is planning to lead community contributions themselves, assigning copyrights to them only serves to block open-source collaboration.

At Quartile, we take a different approach. In every project, we retain copyright over the code, and instead grant our clients a perpetual, royalty-free license to use, modify, and distribute the deliverables freely. This structure ensures we can continue contributing to the community without legal entanglements.

For user companies, it’s essential to understand what it truly means to hold copyright before deciding on contract terms. If a service provider proposes assigning copyright to the client without any plan for community contribution, that’s a clear indicator they may lack the capability—or intention—to fully embrace the open-source model.

5-5. How to Check a Provider’s Community Track Record

Odoo is an open-source (open-core) product, and with that comes one of open source’s greatest strengths: transparency. Many people, accustomed to proprietary software, forget this, but when it comes to evaluating a provider’s capabilities, there’s no better source of truth than their public contributions.

Here’s where you can look to assess community activity:

• Odoo's GitHub repositories(Pull Requests, Issues)
• OCA’s GitHub repositories(organized by module category)
• OCA Apps Store/Odoo Apps Store(for open-source apps only)
• Transifex(for core Odoo translations) / Weblate(for OCA module translations)
• OCA mailing lists
• Odoo forums

Some platforms, like translation tools, may require login access and aren’t always easy to browse. But most of the above are freely available to anyone.

That said, many user companies don’t have much experience with GitHub or similar tools. And understandably, you might not even know which accounts represent which providers. If that’s the case, just ask the provider directly. Any provider with meaningful activity should be able to share relevant links right away.

A quick tip: th​e OCA publishes an annual blog post on its website featuring theTop Contributor Ranking.  A spreadsheet attached to that article provides a quantitative overview of contributions. It tracks the number of pull requests that were merged, as well as the number of related reviews, aggregated both by organization and by individual.

As mentioned earlier, submitting improvements or fixes to the Odoo core or OCA repositories requires a CLA. For the Odoo core, you can verify whether an organization has signed the CLA by checking theCLA directory in Odoo’s GitHub repository. If a provider does not appear there, it means they haven’t signed the CLA and therefore cannot submit improvements or fixes to the Odoo core. In other words, if they’re not listed, they have no track record of contributing to Odoo’s development. (You can find Quartile’s CLA here.)

5-6. Communication Style of Providers Who Don’t Participate in the Community

Unfortunately, the vast majority of Odoo service providers cannot truly be considered professionals when it comes to open-source products. As mentioned at the beginning, many of them lack even a basic understanding of open-source licenses like AGPL or LGPL. When a provider lacks real strength in the open-source domain, their messaging typically falls into one of the following three patterns:

1. Promoting Odoo’s strengths as a product

This is primarily intended to drive potential customers to the company’s website and lead them to inquiry or service pages. However, now that Odoo S.A. has been releasing information in Japanese, this type of communication rarely brings new or useful information to the market.

2. Highlighting their company size and service advantages

This can be a reasonably valuable form of communication if it accurately conveys the company’s unique characteristics. However, transparency may be an issue outside of community activity topics—claims are often exaggerated since it is impossible for outsiders to verify them.

3. Emphasizing their partner status with Odoo S.A.

This includes statements such as “We have been certified as an Odoo Partner,” “The only Gold Partner in [region],” or “Best Partner of 20xx.” At first glance, these may seem like legitimate selling points. However, if Odoo S.A.’s partner evaluation is based primarily on enterprise license sales and does not reflect the actual quality of service, then such accolades should not be a major concern for user companies. That said, these forms of "endorsement" often resonate with companies unfamiliar with the broader context. As a result, Odoo partners who lack clear differentiators tend t place disproportionate emphasis on certifications and awards issued by Odoo S.A.

6. What It Means When Service Providers Keep Everything In-House

6-1. Is Having an In-House Development Team Really a Strength?

Some Odoo service providers promote the fact that they have their own in-house development team. A common setup in Japan is that sales and requirement gathering are handled locally, while the actual development is outsourced to an offshore team.

At Quartile, we also have overseas members who are primarily involved in development activities, but we don’t really have a dedicated "development team."

What truly matters in maximizing the value delivered to clients is providing the right solution as quickly and efficiently as possible, with minimal overhead. While a development team might fit that purpose in some cases, that generally assumes a need for large-scale development, which isn’t always the case.

At Quartile, we source required functionality from the OCA or develop it within the OCA framework, and take a concierge-style approach to proposing those OCA features in individual projects. Although developing within the OCA can take time, it significantly reduces case-by-case troubleshooting and long-term maintenance effort. This allows us to deliver reasonably large-scale projects without a large dedicated development staff. In this model, it’s especially important that the consultants responsible for requirements definition also have technical expertise and a solid understanding of OCA solutions. To minimize communication overhead and reduce the risk of misunderstandings, even our consultants conduct code reviews, and when necessary, they also participate directly in development.

Even if a company has its own in-house development team, it’s certainly possible to adopt this style. However, when the presence of that team is overly emphasized, it raises a different concern, namely, whether the consultants truly have strong requirements definition capabilities, and whether coordination between the consultants and the developers is sufficiently effective.

In addition to the importance of collaborating with the community to make effective use of limited development resources, recent advances in generative AI have made it easier to support development in new ways. As a result, the need to maintain a dedicated in-house development team has likely decreased compared to the past. For the same reasons, the value of promoting Odoo implementation through offshore development also seems to be diminishing.

6-2. The Pitfalls of In-House Modules

A common approach taken by service providers with in-house development teams is to treat the features they develop as proprietary assets and offer them to client companies on a paid basis. This is a straightforward business model, and I don’t deny its legitimacy. However, if a provider actively promotes Odoo as open source while keeping all developed features to itself and making no contributions back to the community, such a practice feels disingenuous from the perspective of maintaining a healthy ecosystem for Odoo and its broader open-source community. This is especially problematic if those proprietary modules were developed or improved based on existing open-source OCA modules.

Putting the broader ecosystem aside, what user companies need to understand is that this approach effectively locks them into the service provider’s ecosystem. If the terms prevent them from using these features with a different provider, then that’s a lock-in in the strictest sense. Even if the features are technically transferable, the new provider would still face a significant learning curve to fully understand how they were implemented and why.

For this reason as well, it’s wise to leverage open-source features that have become part of the community’s shared assets under the OCA when customizing Odoo.

7. 18 Essential Criteria for Evaluating Odoo Implementation Partners

So far, we’ve laid out a broad set of key points to consider when choosing an Odoo partner, based on the perspective of long-time Odoo experts who’ve been active in the community from the early days.

With all of these points in mind, we’ve put together a checklist to help you evaluate whether an Odoo service provider is truly trustworthy. Chances are, many of the items on this list may not have been on your radar until now. We encourage you to go through them carefully and use them to assess potential partners, because ultimately, it’s about protecting your own interests.

8. Toward a Healthier Odoo Ecosystem

As we’ve emphasized throughout, most of the information currently delivered to the Japanese market by Odoo S.A. and the majority of Odoo partners lacks a perspective that empowers user companies to make full use of the advantages of open source. From the standpoint of someone who has been deeply involved in the community for many years, this situation is detrimental to the long-term health of the Odoo ecosystem. In fact, at Quartile, we’re seeing a growing number of inquiries about rescuing failed projects—clear indication that the Odoo service provider landscape in Japan is heading toward a lemon market.

The reason I wrote such a long article this time is because of a strong sense of urgency I personally feel. The open-source community activity that should be the very foundation of Odoo’s competitiveness is not being recognized. Worse still, free-riding, and even license violations, are becoming widespread. If this continues unchecked, those who actively contribute to the community may disappear altogether. If that happens, what would remain of Odoo’s true value? The product itself may still continue to evolve, but the user companies will undoubtedly bear the cost.

The most effective way to change this situation, I believe, is for user companies to speak up. Do you want an Odoo ecosystem enriched by community contributions and open-source modules, or one restricted to standard features and proprietary plugins? The answer seems obvious, doesn’t it?

Bonus: Career Stability as an Odoo Specialist

As a tangent on the community engagement topic, this also affects people who work at Odoo service providers. Those who don’t participate in community activities are likely passing up major opportunities that could greatly benefit their careers.

On a personal level, there are several advantages to getting involved in open-source community activities:

• You’ll have access to insights from experienced open-source developers
• You'll gain a clear sense of your capabilities in the broader market
• You'll improve your interpersonal communication skills in English
• You'll deepen your understanding of Odoo’s core architecture and its limitations
• Your contributions will directly serve as part of your professional portfolio

There’s a world of difference in the skills you can acquire over the course of a few years depending on whether you’re in an open environment where information flows freely, or confined to a closed, internal setting.

We can confidently say that members who succeed at Quartile can thrive anywhere. However, someone with Odoo experience from a company that hasn’t engaged in community activities won’t necessarily be able to deliver results right away after joining us.

When considering candidates with Odoo experience, Quartile always places strong emphasis on their track record of community contributions—or, at the very least, their willingness to engage in such activities.

Photo by Andy Beales on Unsplash