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:

Create survey forms using the XLSForm standard in Excel or Google Sheets.
Upload forms to an ODK Central server.
Download forms into ODK Collect on an Android device.
Use Collect to fill out forms with participants.
Upload survey data from Collect to Central.
Analyze or export data from Central.

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.