Welcome to ODK's Docs!#

ODK is a suite of open source tools that help organizations collect and manage data.

For a quick start, read Getting Started With ODK. In most cases, users of ODK:

This requires:

While this is the recommended workflow, it is not the only way to do things. ODK is a very flexible set of tools, and organizations will find their own best practices for adopting it.

Additional ODK tools are:

  • ODK Build, a drag-and-drop form designer. We generally recommend XLSForm for its flexibility but users only building very simple forms may prefer Build.

The specifications and libraries that power the tools are:

  • OpenRosa, APIs for how ODK clients communicate with ODK servers.

  • ODK XForms spec, a subset of the W3C XForms specification, for use in the ODK ecosystem.

  • ODK JavaRosa, a Java library that renders forms complying with ODK XForms.

  • XLSForm spec, a high-level Excel-based form specification.

  • pyxform, a Python library that converts XLSForms into ODK XForms.

For a complete list of our tools, check out ODK on GitHub.