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Investing in Onshape's Foundation: Focus on Stability and Performance for the Next Two Releases
Vajrang_Parvate
Member, Onshape Employees Posts: 10 
Hello Onshape Community,
We have an important update about our upcoming releases. As you know, we've been committed to delivering new features and improvements every three weeks, and we greatly appreciate your enthusiasm and feedback. In just the past 6 or so months, we have released:
- Onshape AI Advisor
- Onshape Government for ITAR/EAR needs
- CAM Studio
- Powerful core modeling enhancements such as: constrained surfaces, routing curve, edit curve, sketch constraints manager, curve approximation, loft/boundary surface improvements, flatten surfaces, many sheet metal enhancements, ...
- FeatureScript performance and usability enhancements to make it easier and faster to create custom features
- A completely re-architected Render Studio, and many workflow improvements following the re-architecture
- A great leap forward in Drawings: Constrained sketching, support for many new types of drawing views, automatic centermarks, datum attachments, inspection tables, …
- Many UX and quality of life improvements: universal keyboard shortcuts, dark mode, cosmetic threads, reference repair, config parameter visibility, Product Structure View, …
- Product areas like Data and Release Management, and Enterprise Analytics
- And of course, many performance improvements in multiple areas of the product
We've also been listening closely to your feedback regarding performance, robustness, and addressing issues. To ensure Onshape continues to be a stable and reliable platform for your critical design work, we've made the strategic decision to dedicate the next two releases entirely to addressing technical debt and improving the overall user experience.
What does this mean?
Over the next two Onshape releases, we will be turning our attention to:
- Addressing reported issues: prioritizing those that cause the most significant disruptions to your workflows
- Architectural improvements: making core changes in several areas that will enable us to deliver even more powerful and innovative features in future releases
- Technical Debt: Look closer at areas of the product that are in need of refactoring and can benefit internal workflows for teams such as QA, Support, Documentation and Technical Operations
Why are we doing this?
We believe that investing in Onshape's foundation is essential for its long-term health and your continued success. By addressing these underlying areas, we're not just fixing user-reported issues; we're strengthening the core of Onshape to create a more stable and efficient platform that will empower you to design with greater confidence.
What to expect in the upcoming releases:
- A somewhat leaner list of feature enhancements (as listed in the What’s New posts)
- But a longer changelog that will list all the details highlighting the specific issues and performance improvements implemented
- We'll share selected "behind-the-scenes" technical updates to give you insight into the work done
We understand that you may be eager for new features, and we want to assure you that this is a temporary shift in focus. We are committed to returning to our regular cadence of feature releases after these two foundational releases.
We value your feedback and appreciate your understanding as we work to make Onshape even better and thank you for being part of the Onshape community.
Vajrang Parvate
SVP, Onshape Product and R&D
Comments
CAD Engineering Manager
More companies need to do this! This reminds me of a certain "other" CAD company where some users where advocating for one year with zero new features and just bug fixes instead but it never happened…
Looking forward to "behind the scenes" peek as well!
If this paves the way for some powerful configuration logic controls (suppression by expression, between tables etc. ) we are happy…
I’m sure that these will be the best updates
Excellent shift !!!
Excellent… as Eric has said other companies would benefit greatly from this approach.
This is most encouraging that the foundation of Onshape is being given this attention, thank you
In the long term, it is usually a good idea to get the base straight first.
This is why Onshape is the new standard in CAD.
Twitter: @BryanLAGdesign
Very good decision! Like @bryan_lagrange says, this is why you are the best.
Reminds me of this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard
@Vajrang_Parvate Our team at Trek is very excited for this, excited for more details!!
Thanks for the heads up @Vajrang_Parvate, I appreciate all that the Onshape team does for us!
2 whole releases for technical debt sounds amazing.
I'm excited to see a release notes like:
Custom FeatureScript and Onshape Integrated Applications
I waited a long time for an announcement like this.
I think any power user will prefer less bells and whistles and much more reliability.
This is great, and I hope OS will do this more often.
🙏
Absolutely the right move. As much as we all love shiny new features, none of that matters if the foundation isn’t solid. Prioritising performance and reliability is what keeps long-term users happy — something I’ve seen firsthand in crypto as well. In that space, the most effective platforms don’t just chase trends, they focus on their core community. That niche audience — passionate, clued-in — makes all the difference. If you're curious how that looks in action, take a look at readfi.io.
When you say architectural improvements for more powerful features, will that be on the internal engine side of things or on the open source featurescript side of things?
I'm imagining something like the improvements made to the hole tool last year which expanded capabilities but also deprecated useful functionality which hasn't returned to the feature yet. Blind-in-last is still missed by my team.
The work we're doing is not specific to FeatureScript, but system-wide in areas that need some stabilization after the number of large features we shipped in the past 6 or so months.
Yes. This is a great idea. Any product needs investment into technical debt and underlying systems/processes. Very important work.
Will you also focus on standardizing user inputs and desired outputs across various features? For example, implementing a consistent "hit Enter/Esc to confirm and close" instead of requiring users to hover over a green checkmark to confirm or using Esc to confirm. The UX varies significantly from feature to feature and between 3D and 2D environments.
I've noticed this as well with sketching spline vs bezier. Spline you have to right click and confirm. to finish it. and bezier you have to press the escape key to finish it. if you right click and click escape bezier it erases what you just did
This sounds fantastic. And what an excellent example of good communication with the Onshape community. Ty for the update!
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