How to migrate Odoo Community without the official upgrade

One of the questions I hear most from people running Odoo Community is “how do I upgrade this?”. The short answer: from Odoo, there is no official path. Odoo’s upgrade service is exclusive to Enterprise subscribers, and the editions page itself lists “Version Upgrades” as an Enterprise feature.

That doesn’t leave Community stuck on its current version. The path exists, it is just a different one, and it takes more work.

The community path: OpenUpgrade

OpenUpgrade is the OCA project that does for Community what the official service does for Enterprise: it converts the database from one version to the next. It is open source and maintained by the community, the same way as the Brazilian fiscal localization.

Three things about it change the planning.

One version at a time. OpenUpgrade doesn’t skip versions. To go from 14 to 18, you pass through 15, 16 and 17, and each hop is a full migration, with testing.

Only Odoo SA modules. It covers the standard modules. OCA modules, third-party modules and custom modules need their own migration script, written by whoever maintains each one.

Coverage is public, module by module. For each hop there is a list with the status of every module. On the 18 to 19 hop, for example, accounting, sales, inventory, purchase, manufacturing, point of sale and HR are already marked as done. Before you start, check that the modules your company uses are on it.

Community arrives later

Because OpenUpgrade is built by the community, without Odoo’s commercial structure behind it, it usually reaches new versions later than the official service. For version 20, released in September, the OpenUpgrade work started at the end of that same month. Community users need a bit more patience between the release and the moment migrating becomes viable.

And the Brazilian localization comes in again

Everything I explained in the previous post applies here even more. OpenUpgrade converts the standard modules, but the fiscal localization has to be ported and bring its own migration. For Community in Brazil, the target version sits where two things meet: how far OpenUpgrade reaches and where the localization is complete. Today that point is 18.

”Isn’t it easier to move to Enterprise just to get the upgrade?”

It depends on where your effort is. The Enterprise upgrade migrates the standard apps and whatever was built in Studio. It doesn’t migrate the community localization or in-house modules without a separate maintenance contract with Odoo. If most of your migration work sits in those layers, and it almost always does, switching editions just to get the upgrade doesn’t solve the main problem. The Community versus Enterprise decision has other reasons, and migration is only one of them.

Next post

It is precisely in those layers, OCA, third-party and custom, that migrations tend to get stuck. The next post is about them: what migrates and what doesn’t.

If your company runs Community, KMEE’s migration assessment shows how far you can go. Free of charge.