Zitadel Roadmap

Identity has changed significantly since Zitadel was first built.

Over the last few years, we've worked with customers operating everything from modern SaaS applications to large enterprise platforms serving millions of users. As those customers have grown, we've seen the same platform take on increasingly complex identity challenges—from enterprise federation and global deployments to machine identities and AI agents.

The next generation of Zitadel is built so our customers can continue solving tomorrow's identity challenges on the same platform they choose today. That requires a more flexible foundation—one that supports new identity models, web-scale deployments, and emerging identity patterns without accumulating complexity over time.

The roadmap below outlines the strategic platform investments we're making over the coming releases and the customer capabilities they unlock.

This roadmap reflects our current strategic direction rather than a fixed release plan. As we continue validating the next generation of Zitadel with customers and the community, priorities and sequencing may evolve.

Strategic Roadmap

The next generation of Zitadel will be delivered incrementally, with each investment building on the foundations established by the previous one. The roadmap below outlines the major platform capabilities we're investing in and our current target horizon for each.

Flexible Identity

Every application models identity differently, and those requirements continue to evolve over time. As products grow, new user types emerge, registration flows become more sophisticated, and different applications require different identity models.

The next generation of Zitadel introduces a more flexible foundation for modelling identity. User schemas become the source of truth for identity, while composable authentication components and identity-as-code make authentication feel like a natural part of your application development workflow.

Strategic Investments

• User Schemas
• Identity-as-code
• Composable authentication components
• Live development preview
• Versioned identity configuration

Customer Outcomes

• Authentication adapts to your application.
• Identity models evolve without disruptive migrations.
• Identity becomes part of your normal development workflow.

Enterprise Platform

Enterprise identity becomes increasingly complex as products grow. Every new customer brings different identity providers, organisation-specific requirements, compliance needs, and operational expectations. Over time, those differences can turn into multiple configuration models, overlapping policies, and an increasing number of special cases.

The next generation of Zitadel simplifies that foundation. By moving towards a more unified platform model, we're making enterprise identity easier to operate while building the foundations required for web-scale deployments.

Strategic Investments

• Unified identity model
• Unified configuration
• Web-scale architecture
• Regional deployment foundations

Customer Outcomes

• Onboard enterprise customers without accumulating operational complexity.
• Scale from your first enterprise customer to global deployments on the same platform.
• Reduce configuration overhead while supporting increasingly complex identity requirements.

AI-Native Identity

Identity is no longer limited to human users and traditional service accounts. AI agents are increasingly authenticating, accessing APIs, performing delegated actions, and interacting with enterprise systems on behalf of users.

The next generation of Zitadel treats AI agents as first-class identities. Rather than adapting existing human identity models to new use cases, we're building identity, delegation, and lifecycle management around the way AI agents actually operate.

Strategic Investments

• Agent identities
• Delegated authority
• Agent lifecycle management
• Scoped permissions
• Agent-to-agent interactions

Customer Outcomes

• Govern AI agents with the same confidence as human identities.
• Secure delegated actions without introducing new trust models.
• Build AI-native applications on an identity platform designed for autonomous systems.

Identity Observability

As organisations adopt more distributed identity models, understanding who did what—and under whose authority—becomes significantly more difficult. A single request may involve a human user, an AI agent, delegated authority, enterprise federation, and multiple systems before it reaches your application.

The next generation of Zitadel brings that visibility closer to the identity layer itself. By connecting authentication, authorization, sessions, delegation, and identity activity, we're building a more complete view of identity across your systems.

Strategic Investments

• Identity observability
• End-to-end identity context
• Identity activity timeline
• Delegation tracking
• Identity intelligence

Customer Outcomes

• Understand who performed an action, through which identity, and under whose authority.
• Investigate identity-related incidents more quickly with complete identity context.
• Improve governance, security, and operational visibility across human, machine, and AI identities.

Supporting Existing Customers

The next generation of Zitadel is designed as an evolution of the platform, not a replacement.

While much of our engineering investment is focused on the next generation of Zitadel, we're committed to supporting existing customers throughout the transition.

Zitadel V4 will continue to be supported for at least 12 months, previous versions will be sunsetted in due course, and we will communicate the timelines shortly. During this period, we'll prioritise security updates, critical customer issues, and high-impact improvements while introducing the next generation incrementally. We'll share the end-of-support timelines for earlier major versions, together with migration guidance, in the coming months.

Community contributions remain an important part of Zitadel. If you're maintaining a V4 deployment and would like to contribute fixes or improvements, we'll continue reviewing and working with contributors wherever those changes align with the long-term direction of the platform. Before starting a larger contribution, we encourage you to open a GitHub issue first. This helps us validate the approach, share any relevant roadmap context, and ensure the work aligns with the direction of the platform.

As new platform capabilities become available, we'll provide migration tooling and guidance so teams can adopt them incrementally rather than through a disruptive migration.

Our goal is to make adoption predictable and low risk, whether you're running Zitadel Cloud or self-hosting your own deployment.

Strategic Investments

• Incremental migration
• Compatibility guidance
• Migration tooling
• Cloud & self-hosted alignment
• Long-term platform stability

Customer Outcomes

• Adopt new platform capabilities without disrupting existing deployments.
• Plan migration based on your own priorities and timelines.
• Continue building on the same platform as your identity requirements evolve.