Every other first call starts with the same question: should we take an official Odoo partner or an independent developer? The honest answer depends on things nobody puts on a website, so here is what the words actually mean - with the numbers taken from Odoo’s own partner page rather than from anyone’s marketing.
What a partner status actually certifies
A partner level is not a grade for engineering. Odoo ranks partners as Ready, Silver and Gold on three counts: new Enterprise users sold in the last twelve months, certified employees on the three latest versions, and how many customers stay. Ready is ten new users a year and one certified person. Silver is seventy-five and three, with seventy per cent retention. Gold is three hundred new users a year, six certified people and eighty per cent retention.
Read that again, because it is the whole point: the ladder is climbed by selling subscriptions and by keeping certified people on payroll. Those are real achievements - a company that sold three hundred new users last year clearly knows how to deliver projects. But none of the three numbers says anything about the module that will run your warehouse, and it is worth knowing that before a badge decides your shortlist.
Certification is worth the same careful reading. It says a person passed Odoo’s exam on a recent version. That is a real signal about knowing the product, and it is not a signal about performance work, migrations of dirty data, or debugging a module somebody else wrote three years ago. Different skills, both legitimate.
Where the money comes from
The second thing to understand is where the money comes from. A partner earns up to twenty per cent commission on the Enterprise subscriptions of the clients they bring, and up to a hundred and fifty euros a month - one thousand four hundred and forty a year - on each Odoo.sh subscription. Odoo publishes both numbers itself. Nothing about that is hidden or shameful: it is how a reseller channel funds itself.
But it does shape incentives, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. A partner’s revenue grows when your user count grows and when you move to a bigger plan. Mine does not: I am paid for the work, so a recommendation to buy fewer seats costs me nothing. That does not make partners dishonest - it makes the question worth asking out loud: who gets paid if I use less?
Those three figures are the mechanics of the channel, published by Odoo on its own page. Use them the way you would use any vendor’s price list: as facts to plan around, not as an accusation.
What a partner gives that I cannot
Now the part that is uncomfortable for me to write. There are things a partner gives you that I cannot, and if you need them, the choice is already made.
Continuity is the first. A company survives someone leaving; a single engineer is a single point of failure, and you should ask me what happens to your system if I fall under a bus. Second is the formal side: an SLA with a phone number, a contract that procurement recognises, a vendor that a tender will accept. Third is parallel work - a rollout across five countries with five teams at once is not something one person does, whatever the daily rate.
There is also the escalation path. A partner has a channel to Odoo that a customer does not, and on the rare occasion when a problem really is inside the product, that channel matters. I have waited in the normal queue with the rest of the world, and that wait is written up honestly elsewhere.
What an independent gives that a partner rarely does
What an independent gives is narrower and sharper. You talk to the person who writes the code: no account manager translating your question into a ticket and the answer back into a status update. The work is done by the one who estimated it, which is why the estimate is usually closer to the truth.
And the kind of work differs. Deep customisation, a workflow that does not exist in the box, rescuing a project that stalled, performance work where the answer is a number and not an opinion - eight seconds to one on a six-figure catalogue is that kind of work. It is the part where a shortlist by badge tends to miss.
How to choose without regretting it
The practical way to choose is to stop comparing statuses and compare answers. Ask both sides the same three questions: what exactly will you change in the first two weeks, what does it cost if we stop after those two weeks, and who writes the code - the person in this call or someone I will never meet.
Then ask about the licence. If you hear that you need the bigger plan before anyone has looked at your processes, that is worth a second opinion regardless of who says it. What a team of ten actually pays is arithmetic you can do yourself in half an hour.
Full disclosure
For the record, and because the question comes up: I am not an official Odoo partner. Odoo is a trademark of Odoo S.A., I sell no licences and receive no commission from anyone. What I sell is the work - Odoo 15 to 19 in production, implementation, custom development and rescue.
If you are drawing up a shortlist right now, the cheapest way to compare is to talk to both. Half an hour with me is free, and if your case is one for a partner, I will say so on that call - it is a worse deal for me and a better one for you.