many2many_tags

By default, Odoo renders a many2many field as an embedded list or kanban of related records. That works, but it is heavy for something that is really just a set of labels. The Tags field replaces it with a single inline row of pills. Each pill shows the related record's name and carries a small cross that detaches it. Clicking into the empty space opens an autocomplete that searches the related records as you type.

Because the widget only ever reads the display name, plus one color value if you configure it, it stays fast even when a record carries a dozen tags. That efficiency is why it is the most-used relational widget in Odoo core, appearing 391 times across 77 modules.

Tags are where data quality is won or lost in an Odoo rollout. Get them right and your team can filter a pipeline by segment, group a kanban by category, and pull a report leadership actually trusts. Get them wrong, with everyone free-typing their own variants, and you end up with VIP, Vip customer and vip-client as three separate tags, and every report built on them is quietly wrong.

The Tags field is the control that decides which of those you get. Left at its defaults it lets any user invent a new tag mid-conversation, which is exactly right for a sales team capturing nuance and exactly wrong for a finance team that needs a fixed set of segments. Both behaviors are one configuration change apart, and the decision belongs to whoever owns the process, not to whoever builds the form.

Our own rule on implementations: let users create tags freely during the first month after go-live so the real vocabulary surfaces, then review what they created, consolidate it, and lock the list down. Deciding the taxonomy in a workshop before anyone has used the system almost always produces a list nobody uses.

Most of what teams need from this field can be done without a developer. Odoo Studio is available on Enterprise plans.

1. Open the form you want to change and click Studio in the top menu.

2. From the Add a field panel, drag Tags onto the form. Studio asks which model the tags come from, for example Contact Tags, and creates the underlying many2many field for you.

3. Select the field and open Properties on the right. Set Widget to Tags for the pill row shown above, Checkboxes to list every related record as a tickbox instead, or Many2many for the classic embedded list.

4. Tick Use colors. Studio creates the color field on the related model and wires it up. Clicking a tag now opens a color palette, and those colors carry through to kanban views.

Tip: turn on developer mode before adding the field if you want to see and set its technical name. Studio generates one otherwise, and generated names are unpleasant to live with once reports and integrations start referencing them.

Studio covers the display. It does not cover the rules. Four common requirements need a developer.

Restricting which tags appear, such as showing only tags belonging to the current company or only active ones, requires a domain on the field. Studio's filter options do not reach this.

Preventing users from creating new tags requires the no_create option. There is no Studio toggle for it, and this is the single most requested change once a taxonomy has been agreed.

Showing colors but stopping users changing them needs no_edit_color. Studio gives you all or nothing.

Making the tag list depend on another field on the same record, such as product tags filtered by the selected category, needs a dynamic domain.

If you are hitting any of these, you have moved past what Studio was built for. That is a normal place to be, not a failure of the tool, and it is the point at which most teams bring in Odoo customization support.

Minimal, plain tags

<field name="tag_ids" widget="many2many_tags"/>

Colored tags, the standard Odoo pattern

<field name="tag_ids"
       widget="many2many_tags"
       options="{'color_field': 'color'}"/>

The related model must define that integer field:

class ProjectTag(models.Model):
    _name = "project.tag"

    name  = fields.Char(required=True)
    color = fields.Integer(string="Color")  # 0 = no color, 1 to 11 = palette

Locked-down taxonomy, no creation and a filtered list

<field name="tag_ids"
       widget="many2many_tags"
       domain="[('active','=',True), ('company_id','in',[company_id, False])]"
       options="{'color_field': 'color', 'no_create': True, 'no_edit_color': True}"/>

Users pick from an approved, company-scoped list, see the colors, and can change neither the list nor the colors. This is the configuration to reach for after the post-go-live tag cleanup described above.

Large tag tables, delay the search

<field name="tag_ids"
       widget="many2many_tags"
       options="{'search_threshold': 3}"/>

Nothing is queried until three characters are typed. Worth setting on any tag model above a few thousand records, where searching on focus is a wasted round trip on every click.

Editable tags instead of colors

<field name="tag_ids"
       widget="many2many_tags"
       options="{'edit_tags': True}"/>

Clicking a pill opens that tag's form in a dialog. Note that edit_tags wins over the color picker, so if you set both, users get the edit dialog and no picker.

Three details catch teams out, and none are in the official documentation.

The picker is form-view only. Odoo registers a separate, extended version of the widget for form views. In list and kanban views you get the colors but no picker.

No color field means no picker at all. Clicking a grey pill simply does nothing. Almost every "the color picker isn't working" report we see turns out to be a missing color_field, or in Studio an unticked Use colors box.

Colors save immediately, to the tag itself. The color is written to the tag record, not to the record you are editing, and it saves the moment you pick it. Recoloring a tag on one customer recolors it on every customer, and discarding the form does not roll it back. This surprises users often enough to be worth covering in training, or worth setting no_edit_color to avoid entirely.

The palette holds eleven colors, indexed 1 to 11. Index 0 means "no color", which the picker exposes as a visibility toggle, and setting a tag to 0 is how Odoo hides that tag's color band in kanban views. If your custom tag model needs to match core styling, define the field exactly as color = fields.Integer(string="Color"), because Odoo's palette is keyed on that integer rather than on a stored hex value.

Odoo 20 is expected at Odoo Experience in Brussels, 24 to 26 September 2026, with general availability a few weeks later. Odoo develops in the open, so the changes below are read directly from the public development branch rather than from anyone's predictions.

Read this before you act on it. The development branch is unstable and will keep moving until feature freeze. Nothing here is a released behavior. We re-verify this page against the shipped release before we change the option table above.

Four changes are visible in the Tags widget at the time of writing.

Two new options appear: tag_limit and on_tag_click. tag_limit caps how many pills render before the rest collapse behind a counter, with a default of 8 and 0 meaning show all. on_tag_click is a selection between edit_color and open_form, generalising what edit_tags does today.

The color-editable variant disappears from the file. no_edit_color and edit_tags no longer appear in the development version of many2many_tags_field.js, and neither does the form.many2many_tags registration. Click behavior is now governed by on_tag_click on the single unified component.

The calendar registrations were renamed from calendar.one2many and calendar.many2many to card.one2many and card.many2many. If you have patched or overridden either of the calendar variants, that override will need updating.

The conditional-create option changes shape. The create domain option moves to a create attribute read as an expression (createExpression internally), so views relying on options="{'create': ...}" will need review.

If you are planning an upgrade, our Odoo migration team can assess which of your customizations these changes touch.