What Is OCPP?

OCPP — the Open Charge Point Protocol — is an open standard, maintained by the Open Charge Alliance, for how a charging station talks to a central management system. Its stated purpose is that any central system can connect to any charge point regardless of vendor. For a business running chargers that is genuinely important: it is the difference between owning your hardware and renting it from whoever wrote the firmware. For a homebuyer, it is a nice-to-have — and if you are choosing between a cheaper non-OCPP charger and a pricier OCPP one for a single car in a garage, the honest advice is that OCPP should not decide it.

That is an unusual thing for a site that sells chargers to say, so here is the reasoning in full, along with what the versions actually mean, because the version numbers show up on listings and almost nobody explains them.

The problem OCPP solves

A networked charger has two halves: the box on the wall, and the back end that authorises sessions, records energy, handles payment and pushes firmware. Historically each manufacturer wrote both, which meant the back end only worked with that manufacturer's hardware. For an operator that is a trap — the cost of changing hardware brand is replacing the entire software platform, and the cost of the platform going away is replacing the entire fleet.

OCPP decouples them. A charge point speaking OCPP can be managed by any compliant management system, so hardware and software become separately replaceable. That is the whole value proposition, and it is an operator's problem far more than a homeowner's.

The versions, and what each added

• OCPP 1.6 (released 2015). Still the workhorse of the installed base. Available in SOAP and JSON variants, and the version that introduced smart charging — load balancing and charging profiles — plus local authorisation list management. If a listing just says "OCPP," it usually means 1.6 JSON.
• OCPP 2.0.1 (introduced 2020). The intended successor. Adds proper device management, improved transaction handling, security features, more smart charging capability, support for ISO 15118, and display and messaging. Edition 3 of 2.0.1 was approved as an IEC standard, IEC 63584, in 2024 — which matters because it moves OCPP from an industry agreement to a formal international standard.
• OCPP 2.1. Builds on 2.0.1 with care taken that application logic written for 2.0.1 remains compatible. The headline additions are support for ISO 15118-20 with bidirectional power transfer, and a new functional block for bidirectional charging — vehicle-to-everything energy flows.

When OCPP is worth paying for at home

• You want local control with no vendor cloud. This is the strongest reason. Pointing an OCPP charger at a management system running on your own hardware means the charger keeps working if the manufacturer's servers go dark or the app goes subscription. That is a real risk with cheap smart chargers and OCPP is the real mitigation.
• You run more than a couple of charge points. A small business, a strata, a short-let property with chargers — see best chargers for an Airbnb and EV charging for condos and HOAs.
• You need to bill someone. Session-level authorisation and metering with an audit trail is what OCPP management systems do, and it is not something a consumer app generally offers.

When it is not

One car, one garage, no billing, no intention of running server software: the features you will actually use are scheduling and energy reporting, and both come from the manufacturer's own app on chargers that make no OCPP claim at all. Paying an OCPP premium for a charger you will drive from a phone app is paying for an interface you will never open. If the vendor-lock-in worry is what drew you to OCPP, the simpler answer is often a dumb charger— no cloud, no account, nothing to deprecate.

The middle path most owners should consider: a well-supported smart charger from a company with a track record. Our smart charger roundup covers what the apps actually do, and do I need a smart EV charger works through whether you need any of it.

OCPP is not the only acronym on the listing

Two neighbours worth separating. ISO 15118is the car-to-charger communication standard — the one behind Plug and Charge and, in its -20 revision, bidirectional power. It is a different link in the chain from OCPP, which is charger-to-cloud; see Plug and Charge explained. OCPIhandles roaming between charging networks, which is why your account on one network works on another — see EV charging networks explained. None of the three substitutes for the others.

The picks, in context

Published specs on the three realistic home positions — strong app and monitoring, mature network-backed app, and no software at all — with live prices.

#ad Prices read live from the Amazon Product API as of October 16, 2026, and they move. Specs are the manufacturer's published claims from the live listing — we have not bench-measured them. Where we have no verified price we print none rather than a number that has gone stale.