Ignition’s New Release Cadence Balances Cutting-Edge Features With Unwavering Stability

During the technical keynote at ICC 2025, Inductive Automation CEO Colby Clegg said, “Ignition 8.3 is a new beginning, not a destination.” This idea of a new beginning came up repeatedly during both of the ICC keynotes as company leaders discussed new and upcoming Ignition features. As it turns out, Ignition 8.3 also represents a new beginning for Ignition’s release cadence.

As CTO Carl Gould said in the technical keynote, “We’ve learned something really important with the 8.1 - 8.3 era, and that’s that sometimes you sort of have to slow down in order to then speed up. So we skipped version 8.2 in order to focus on polish and quality and really getting the foundation right. And now that we’ve laid this solid foundation, both in the product and the team, we’re really ready to speed back up and increase our pace of innovation.” This is why our company is moving to a new, more consistent release cadence for future editions of Ignition. ​

New Versioning: Annual Calendar Releases

Our previous release-train concept was introduced in the 8.1 era and established a cadence for regularly scheduled maintenance updates on a fixed time interval. This helped us deliver consistent quality on a predictable schedule. Now, we’re taking that model even further by applying the same discipline and predictability to all major releases moving forward.

We’ll be retiring the Ignition 8 line, meaning that Ignition 8.3 will be the final version in our current numbering system. Our future releases will be based on a clear, calendar-based versioning system. From now on, you can look forward to a major release every year, with minor updates coming in every other month. The next major release will be Ignition 2027, set for release in February of that year.

Guaranteed Quality & Predictability

This new, predictable schedule means customers can plan with the confidence of knowing exactly when to expect new features, updates, and long-term support (LTS) windows. Not only will the new versioning system clearly track each release year, but it’ll also establish a clear pace for when changes will occur. We’ll support this new cadence by releasing a public beta by ICC annually, as well as possibly releasing early access and development preview versions on an occasional basis. This commitment allows our team to consistently put our focus on the mainline version, prioritizing bug fixes, security, and performance.

Redefining LTS

An exciting aspect of this new scheme is how it lets us redefine how we provide long-term support. As Ignition’s adoption continues to grow within more conservative and regulated industries, true platform stability is paramount. We heard your feedback: industrial automation customers need a foundation built for resilience, not just longevity. You need unwavering stability and a version that remains static, with changes made solely for essential security updates.

Moving forward, we plan to introduce a new LTS branch every other year. The moment a version is designated as LTS, it will become static. There will be no new features or functionality changes – only critical bug fixes and essential security baseline patches. This update to our release cadence and versioning scheme will aid us in delivering more features, more often, while simultaneously addressing the stability needs of our LTS customers. As Carl said onstage at ICC, “That is going to give you a rock-solid foundation to build on when change itself is really your biggest risk. And for those of you who want to stay on the cutting edge, great! Use those annual releases and that’ll mean that you’ll get new capabilities faster than ever.”

Next Steps In Your Support Plans

As you can see, many exciting changes are coming soon to Ignition. To guarantee continuous access to yearly feature advancements and ensure your system always runs on the latest version, check out our Support Plans with Upgrade Protection, which include unlimited free upgrades to purchased Ignition modules throughout the life of your Support Plan. To keep up your pace of innovation in the industrial software space for years to come, get started here.