Zitadel v3: AGPL License, Streamlined Releases, and Platform Updates

Florian Forster
Florian Forster

Founder and CEO

    Introduction

    As Zitadel continues to evolve, we are excited to announce several significant changes coming with the release of Zitadel v3. Our team has been working diligently to enhance Zitadel’s sustainability, performance, and developer experience.

    Today, we are sharing three major updates:

    1. Our transition to AGPL 3.0 license
    2. A completely streamlined release process
    3. Discontinuation of CockroachDB support

    All these changes reflect our ongoing commitment to maintaining a robust, open-source identity and access management (IAM) platform while ensuring its long-term sustainability and focusing our resources where they deliver the most value.

    License Change

    With Zitadel v3, we are transitioning from Apache 2.0 to the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0). This decision was not made lightly, but after careful consideration, we believe AGPL better aligns with our vision for Zitadel's future.

    Why AGPL 3.0?

    The AGPL license ensures that any modifications to Zitadel used to provide a service need to be made available to the community. This creates a more reciprocal relationship between Zitadel and organizations that leverage and build upon our platform. It protects the open nature of our project while encouraging contributions back to the community.

    What This Means for You

    For most users and contributors, this change will have minimal impact:

    • For end-users: If you are only using Zitadel as an identity platform, the license change doesn't affect you.
    • For contributors: Your future contributions will be licensed under AGPL-3.0 and we will introduce a contributor license agreement (CLA).
    • For service providers: If you modify Zitadel and provide it as a service to others, you'll need to make your modifications available under the AGPL-3.0 license.
    • For developers: If you are using our Examples, Libraries, SDKs, APIs, do not worry we will keep those under their existing license.

    Our commercial licensing options remain available for organizations that require different terms. Please reach out to us if you have any questions about licensing.

    If you have more questions we compiled a detailed blog post and an FAQ for you.

    I will also be hosting a Community Office Hours session on Discord on March 25 at 15:00 UTC | 08:00 US Pacific to help answer questions from the community.

    Release Streamlining

    We are excited to announce a completely revamped “fast release” process that will bring new Zitadel features to you more quickly and make updates more manageable for our users.

    What’s Changing

    We are introducing a process that's more agile and responsive to user needs. Instead of our current approach that can result in larger releases with many changes at once, we are moving to:

    • Major releases (v3, v4, etc.) every 3 months
    • New minor releases (v3.1.0, v3.2.0, etc.) every 2 weeks
    • Patch releases (v3.0.1, v3.1.1, etc.) whenever needed, particularly for bug fixes
    • Release candidates (RC) before each major release that you can test before production
    • Creation of a new release branch after each release while approved PRs are merged into the main branch for the next release
    • Backward compatibility between minor releases

    Benefits

    These improvements translate to tangible benefits:

    • Features are available fast for testing while the release schedule clearly indicates when a version is ready for production deployments
    • Opportunity to test release candidates in your environment before production releases
    • More predictable planning for your upgrade cycles
    • Faster security patches and bug fixes when needed

    For organizations using Zitadel in production, this means less operational overhead and more reliable planning for upgrades.

    This process is also detailed in this GitHub announcement in our repo.

    Discontinuing CockroachDB Support

    After careful consideration, we have made the decision to discontinue support for CockroachDB in Zitadel v3 and beyond.

    While CockroachDB is an excellent distributed SQL database, supporting multiple database backends has increased our maintenance burden and complicated our testing matrix. By focusing on a single primary database technology, we can:

    • Deliver well optimized performance
    • Provide more database-specific features
    • Simplify our codebase and reduce potential bugs
    • Concentrate our resources on core feature development

    This has been detailed in this GitHub issue.

    Alternatives and Migration Path

    Moving forward, Zitadel will standardize on PostgreSQL as our recommended database backend. For existing CockroachDB users, we have prepared a migration guide to help you transition smoothly. We will provide more detailed instructions specific to the CockroachDB to PostgreSQL migration in our documentation following the release of Zitadel Version 3.

    Support During Transition

    We understand this change may impact your operations. To ease the transition, CockroachDB support will continue in maintenance mode for Zitadel v2.x until September 30, 2025. Our team is ready to assist with migration questions; please feel free to respond to this GitHub issue or post a question on Discord.

    What Do These Changes Mean?

    Immediate Actions

    If you're currently using Zitadel, here's what you should do:

    1. Review our licensing FAQ to learn if and how the license change to AGPL 3.0 affects your use case
    2. If you are using CockroachDB, start planning your migration to PostgreSQL
    3. Test the v3 release candidates in your non-production environments when available

    Long-term Benefits

    These changes, while significant, set the foundation for Zitadel's continued growth and improvement with a more sustainable open-source model, fast and plannable development cycles, improved performance and reliability, and simplified maintenance and upgrades.

    Looking Forward

    Zitadel v3 represents more than just these changes—it is a significant step forward for our platform. With these foundational improvements in place, we are excited to focus on new capabilities:

    • Enhanced developer experience with improved APIs and SDKs
    • More advanced authentication options
    • Deeper integration capabilities
    • Expanded compliance certifications
    • Improved performance and scalability

    We are also expanding opportunities for community involvement. If you are interested in contributing to Zitadel, now is an excellent time to get involved!

    Conclusion

    The changes announced today—our move to AGPL-3.0, streamlined release process, and focused database support—represent our commitment to building a sustainable, high-quality identity platform that meets the needs of modern organizations.

    We deeply appreciate your support as we continue to evolve Zitadel. Your feedback and contributions have been invaluable in shaping our direction. For more information about these changes, please visit our documentation, join our community Discord, or reach out to our team directly. We're here to answer your questions and help ensure a smooth transition to Zitadel v3. Thank you for being part of the Zitadel community!

    Have questions or concerns? Join the discussion on Discord or contact us directly.

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