Certification and Compliance Program

Certified OPC products you can trust in real projects

Interoperability is only valuable when it works under real conditions. The OPC Foundation’s Certification and Compliance program helps members develop and deliver high-quality OPC and OPC UA products that meet defined minimum operability requirements, and gives users confidence that “OPC UA compatible” also means robust, reliable, and usable in production environments.

Certified products are tested to verify conformance to OPC specifications, interoperability across vendors, resilience in scenarios like lost communications, adherence to best-practice usability, and efficient resource handling. The program is governed by the OPC Foundation’s Compliance Working Group, which maintains the certification rules, defines test cases and procedures for OPC UA Profiles, and sets guidelines for accredited certification labs.

Key Facts

• Purpose: supports development and delivery of high-quality OPC products with minimum operability requirements

• What certification demonstrates: specification compliance, multi-vendor interoperability, robustness, usability best practices, and resource efficiency

• What can be certified: OPC UA Clients, Servers, Publishers, Subscribers, OPC Classic (COM/DCOM) products, in software or hardware form

• Supported releases for certification include OPC UA 1.02, 1.03, 1.04 and OPC Classic DA (2.05, 3.0), HDA, A&E

• SDKs/toolkits are not certified directly; reference/sample implementations can be tested and certified, while applications still require their own certification

• Test coverage: all exposed OPC functionality is tested across interfaces and supported profiles/facets; information model testing can add effort

• Successful products earn the OPC Certified logo under a logo license agreement

Applications

• Vendor product readiness: validate OPC UA or OPC Classic implementations before release and reduce support cases

• System integration risk reduction: select certified components to accelerate commissioning and minimize interoperability issues

• Procurement and standardization: require certification in tenders to ensure predictable multi-vendor behavior

• Ecosystem scale-out: support rollouts across plants and sites with consistent behavior across clients, servers, and PubSub components

• Engineering efficiency: shorten start-up and troubleshooting with tested conformance and predictable interoperability behavior

To learn more about the OPC Foundation Certification Program and Compliance, contact the Compliance Staff.

Click here to get started with Certification.