Bye 2025, Hello 2026! A year in review

We’ve just wrapped up 2025 - and what a year it has been! As we do every single year, let’s take a moment to celebrate all the achievements of the past 12 months, and share what’s coming next!

Before we go through the details, to all of you who have used Strapi: thank you! By being part of the community, you have contributed to elevating the Strapi open-source project to:

• 70K+ stars on GitHub (add yours!)
• 36K commits
• 9.4K pull requests merged
• Thousands of customers, including Adidas, Airbus, Amazon, Cisco, Tesco, Toyota, PostHog, and CodeRabbit

These milestones are especially meaningful, as Strapi turned 10 this year!

12 months ago, we shared that we would focus on the Side Editor, the New Cloud Plan, the JavaScript/TypeScript SDK, the AI tools, and the first in-person StrapiConf. And that is exactly what we delivered!

Product improvements

More than ever before, the Strapi community shipped.

Strapi AI

AI is changing everyone’s job. You have to disrupt yourself, and so do we. Content Management Systems sit at the intersection of Developers and Marketers, who both have to reinvent their jobs with code generation (vibe coding and AI coding) and content creation (gen AI). The way CMSs are used continues to evolve at an incredible pace. What an exciting time to be building!

This is why we invested heavily in AI. In 2025, we unveiled a suite of strategic product enhancements designed to accelerate both developer workflows and content editor experiences.

AI Content-Type Builder

It all started with the AI Content-Type Builder that we announced at StrapiConf (see below). With the brand new AI Content-Type Builder, you can generate content types and components from natural language prompts or uploaded frontend apps/Figma designs. This eliminates redundant tasks, saving days of development time.

AI Media Library

Creating alt text and captions is another repetitive -and often overlooked- task. The AI Media Library handles this automatically whenever you upload an asset.

AI Translations

If you manage a website in multiple languages, translating content can be a lengthy, costly, and error-prone process. The AI Translations feature has you covered. When enabled, it automatically translates your content into all the locales you selected. This marks an important step in Strapi’s evolution toward an agentic CMS. Merci beaucoup!

These are the first steps into the Strapi AI journey. Stay tuned for more!

Editing Experience

Live Preview

The Headless architecture is a great separation of concerns between the frontend and the CMS. However, this separation often came at the cost of the editing experience. Non-technical people need - and deserve - to edit websites and apps in an intuitive and smooth manner. Combined with Strapi 5's Draft & Publish capabilities, Live Preview addresses this challenge.

Responsive

Editing content for small screens has been a community request for several years. We must admit this comes later than expected, but Strapi is becoming responsive. We've released the first improvements and will keep rolling out additional updates.

Conditional Fields

At Strapi, we’ve always prioritized giving developers and content teams the flexibility to organize content as they see fit. So we introduced Conditional Fields.

With Conditional Fields, you can dynamically show or hide fields based on specific criteria like dropdown selections or checkbox values. This helps editors focus on the right fields at the right time.

Developer Experience

Strapi was created by developers, for developers. In 2025, we shipped a significant number of Developer Experience improvements:

• Strapi Client Library: The brand new SDK allows you to easily request your Strapi content from your favorite frontend framework.
• OpenAPI support: We’ve heard many users requesting the ability to benefit from typing when using the Strapi Client Library in a frontend project (Next.js, Tanstack, Astro, Nuxt.js, etc.). OpenAPI support will allow us to add this to the Strapi Client Library.
• Homepage widgets: From now on, it is possible to display and create widgets on the Strapi homepage.
• MCP prototype: The first MCP prototype was shipped. This will be a massive enabler in making Strapi fully agentic.

Integrations

A Headless CMS is often used in conjunction with other services, making it the foundation of a composable architecture. In 2025, in close collaboration with our partner VirtusLab, we launched official integrations for Shopify, BigCommerce, and Cloudinary.

Strapi Cloud

24 months after its launch, Strapi Cloud has become the leading platform for hosting Strapi projects, as it comes with everything you need: Node.js hosting, a Postgres database, asset storage, a CDN, GitHub/GitLab integrations, and more.

Until 2025, the most affordable plan was the Pro plan, at $99/month. Many of you have shared that this price was too high for small projects. This is why we introduced the Essential Plan, for $15/month (when billed annually). We even went a step further by launching a Free Plan, making Strapi Cloud accessible to everyone.

Based on your feedback, we released a bunch of other improvements, such as:

• Ownership transfer: Give full access to a Strapi Cloud to anyone (ideally for agencies with clients, and vice versa).
• Data migration: Easily migrate content from one environment to another.
• Downloadable backups: Save your content and store it anywhere.

Community milestones

Strapi is so much more than an open-source project; it is a vibrant community of contributors, users, and partners who build faster, together.

StrapiConf

After organizing 3 online StrapiConf, we organized the first in-person StrapiConf on May 13, 2025. After years of chats on the Strapi Community Discord, it was fantastic to meet so many of you face-to-face!

Community members presented incredible plugins. Large organizations, including Adidas and Airbus, benefit from the unique customization capabilities that Strapi offers. We had a blast!

Thank you again to our amazing sponsors for empowering the Strapi ecosystem.

Community Calls and Events

We had some amazing calls with the community, one of which was a full-on conversation with Kent C. Dodds about the future of the web, AI agents, and why Model Context Protocol (MCP) might be as big a shift as the early days of the internet.

Here are some other talks and events you may have missed:

• Strapi Community Call: Strapi AI, Media Library AI, Plugin Generators (with Boaz) & Q&A
• Community Call January 2025: What's New and AMA
• Strapi July Community Call 2025

To join live streams & online meetings on the latest updates & discussions about Strapi, visit our events page: https://strapi.io/events

Tutorials

Among many amazing tutorials, we created a full tutorial on “Strapi 5 and Next.js 15 Full Stack Project Course”, which shows you how to build a fully functional summer camp website from start to finish, through hands-on practice.

Other great tutorials from the community that you may want to see include:

• Strapi 5 Crash Course 2025 Full Tutorial For Beginners
• React Native Project | Build Full Stack React Native App with Expo, & Strapi | AI Recipe Generator
• Build Your Own MASTERCLASS clone in React Native
• Next.js 16 + Strapi 5: Caché components, autenticación y despliegue gratis a producción

To see more tutorials, visit the Strapi Blog or our YouTube channel.

Marketplace

We introduced several improvements to the Strapi Marketplace:

• The Plugins & Providers are now merged into one overview
• The overview is sorted by the number of NPM downloads by default
• The home page now directly shows the overview
• Outdated plugins for Strapi v4 have been removed

Thank you to the top plugin creators:

• Mateusz Ziarko - VirtusLab
• Scherwan Al-Ahmad - MagicDX
• Kevin Vugts - Headlockr
• Tim Schipper - PluginPal
• Nikita Shenderov - CKEditor plugin
• Laurent Cazanove - Meilisearch

Partner Program

The Partner Program continues to become increasingly beneficial for both enterprises seeking trusted implementers and agencies expanding their client base.

Special shout-out to Notum, QBurst, Alloy, TenTwenty, and Thrillworks for becoming Enterprise Partners, totaling 5 Enterprise-level partners added in 1 year.

This year, we launched monthly live Partner Enablement sessions to keep our partners informed on Strapi best practices, product updates, and sales alignment.

Partners have consistently shared valuable feedback with our product and engineering teams. They've helped identify bugs, feature gaps, and opportunities to price the product more competitively. Thank you for that!

Looking ahead to 2026

As you have seen in this article, we have shipped numerous new features, just as we have for the past few years. This is great!

Over the past few months, you all have shared your opinions through the Community Survey and the pain point GitHub issue. A few improvement requests have been around for a long time on the Feedback page. This is largely because we needed to build a solid company to make the open-source project sustainable and navigate through 2 different business models.

We’ve heard you loud and clear. Although adding features is exciting, it is time to improve some of the foundations. That's why 2026 will be dedicated to User Experience. And it all starts with Quality - fixing bugs, improving data migration, and strengthening the foundations - while also encompassing both the Developer Experience (MCP, typing in the frontend) and the Editing Experience (Media Library enhancements, etc.). Regarding Strapi Cloud, we are migrating to a new infrastructure that will significantly enhance performance, but also allow us to provide you with direct database access and improved runtime logs.

We also plan to continue collaborating as a Strapi community, including creating plugins, contributing to the core, and hosting events.

A Heartfelt Thank You

Thank you so much for being part of the Strapi community. We are 10 years into this journey, and it feels like we are just getting started.

Str’happy New Year!