The Road to 2026: How Your Feedback is Shaping the Future

Florian Forster
Florian Forster

Founder and CEO

To our community, customers, and employees.

As we close 2025, I feel excited. This year, Zitadel evolved—driven by you.

Every GitHub issue and Discord conversation was a signal. You showed us Zitadel’s potential to be the open-source identity standard. But you also told us where we fell short.

We know we didn't always get it right. In our push for flexibility, we sometimes neglected the foundations. Documentation wasn't always clear, onboarding could be confusing, and the initial rollout of our new login experience missed the mark. We own that.

We heard you because we are engineers, too. We know the pain of wrestling with rigid identity systems instead of building your product. You want a turnkey solution that handles SSO, B2B onboarding, and OpenID Connect without being a black box. You need the simplicity to spin up and connect in minutes, but the control to scale indefinitely.

That is our blueprint for 2026.

We are entering the new year with a single focus: Making complex multi-tenancy simple, secure, and scalable.

We are stripping away complexity so you can focus on innovation. Here is what we are building:

  1. From Zero to Hero in Minutes We are consolidating the Cloud Portal and Console into a single, unified management hub. You shouldn't have to jump between portals or guess your way through setup. Whether defining a B2B organization or integrating an app, the flow must be intuitive: Sign up, spin up, connect.

  2. Operations Simplified Running Zitadel should be effortless. We are committing to a seamless deployment experience across Zitadel Cloud, Kubernetes, Docker, and Linux. By smoothing out the rough edges in our Helm charts and configuration, we want to ensure you spend your time building your product, not maintaining ours.

  3. Predictable APIs & Custom Logic We are ending the ambiguity. We are standardizing on API V2 with ConnectRPC to give you type-safe, predictable interactions for both simple scripts and complex backend services. With Actions, we are making customization seamless—allowing you to hook into flows and integrate deep business logic without forking the codebase or fighting the system.

  4. A Login Experience You Can Call Your Own Authentication is your app's front door; it needs to look great and work perfectly. We are providing a battle-tested, customizable Next.js Login UI as a blueprint you can brand. For absolute control, you can use our User and Session APIs to build a completely custom flow from scratch.

  5. Reliability by Design We are evolving our core architecture to an event-driven system backed by a relational database. This isn't just about tech; it's about guaranteeing predictable performance and linear scalability. Whether you have ten users or ten million, the system stays rock-solid, ensuring zero maintenance headaches even during peak traffic.

Let’s Build the Future Together

We are building Zitadel so you don't have to choose between speed and control, simplicity and scale, or cloud convenience and self-hosting freedom. Identity should adapt to your architecture, not the other way around.

I am confident in what we can achieve. The foundation is set and the path is clear.

If you want to be part of this next chapter, join us on Discord or check the progress on GitHub.

In the coming weeks, Elina, our Product Manager, will share a detailed roadmap blog post with the technical specifics for Q1.

Thank you to our customers for your trust, our community for your honesty, and the Zitadel team for your hard work.

2026 will be big. Let’s get to work.

— Florian

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