WebODM has officially decoupled from OpenDroneMap 🎉

by Piero Toffanin - April 6th 2026

Some relationships are made to last. Sometimes others just don't work out. Due to some irreconcilable differences with my co-founder of the OpenDroneMap project, WebODM will continue and accelerate its mission of providing the most awesome open source drone mapping software as a separate, independent project going forward.

I invite existing users, developers and contributors to join me in this exciting new chapter. We'll build something beautiful, together.

How Does This Affect You

  • If you're an existing user of WebODM, you can continue to use the software as normal. Just make sure you are downloading from the correct source. To avoid confusion, I have asked OpenDroneMap to stop using the WebODM name to identify their software, but this might take a while. I apologize for any confusion in the interim.
  • Expect more frequent release cycles, bug fixes and features.
  • You can now download and install the latest version of WebODM free of charge on all platforms, including native installers for Windows and macOS distributed and signed by the WebODM developers.
  • If you use ODM or NodeODM, you can find updated forks at ODX and NodeODX, for which stable docker images will continue to receive updates and improvements at webodm/odx and webodm/nodeodx.
  • Other tools and libraries that I've built have also been forked and brought under the WebODM organization where they continue to be actively maintained and updated.

What Happened?

For the past 3 years, the OpenDroneMap organization, which was established by my co-founder and holds the rights to the name OpenDroneMap, has not contributed or supported in any substantial way the development of WebODM.

Despite commitments to adopt more transparent policies, to date it's still difficult to objectively quantify the true commitments of the OpenDroneMap organization. While their public posturing tries to depict an image of a supportive entity, their actions and results, or lack thereof, indicate otherwise. I encourage people to look at the facts and results, rather than the words.

Roadmap and Call for Participants

In the short term focus will be on:

  • Migrating existing infrastructure, builds and repositories to the new organization
  • Fixing NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 Series support on Windows
  • Adding support for checkpoints
  • Updating and expanding the documentation at docs.webodm.org
  • Setup a community directory

If you want to help and be part of this new chapter in WebODM history, you can join discord and provide your ideas and feedback for where the project should go (or just come say hi!). You can also help improve the documentation, the code, the translations or start a WebODM community on your favorite platform. For the latter, once you do ping me on discord and I can add it to our directory. Foreign language speakers are most welcome to start regional chapters of WebODM communities in their own language.

Welcome to this new chapter. There's lots of work to do. Let's build something beautiful, together.

-Piero