Post by Florian Forster

As we look toward 2026, the identity infrastructure landscape is shifting, and ZITADEL is evolving with it. We spent 2025 listening. While we pushed the boundaries of flexibility, the feedback from our engineering community was clear: foundations matter. You don't just need features; you need a system that doesn't feel like a black box. For the upcoming year, we are stripping away complexity to focus on what matters most to high-scale engineering teams: 1. Unifying the Operator Experience We are consolidating the Cloud Portal and Console into a single management hub. Whether you are defining a B2B organization or integrating an OIDC client, the flow must be intuitive. 2. Type-Safety and Predictability We are standardizing on API V2 with ConnectRPC from Buf. This eliminates ambiguity for your backend services, offering type-safe interactions that allow you to integrate deep business logic without fighting the system. 3. Linear Scalability We are refining our core architecture—optimizing our event-driven system backed by a relational database. This ensures predictable performance whether you are managing ten users or ten million. We are building ZITADEL so you don’t have to choose between the speed of a SaaS and the control of a self-hosted system. Thank you to our community and customers for the honest feedback that helped shaped this outlook. The work begins now. https://lnkd.in/gcRBAJsD #IdentityManagement #OpenSource #CloudNative #SaaS #DevSecOps