Understanding Sugar's Release Cadence

Overview

Sugar is available through two deployment models: SugarCloud and on-site. Customers using SugarCloud, SugarCRM's Software as a Service (SaaS) model, have their instances hosted on our servers, whereas customers using the on-site model host their instances on their own servers or those of their partners. This article covers the different release cadences you can expect under each deployment model.

SugarCloud vs On-Site

Starting in 2025, we transitioned to a semi-annual release cadence to better align with customers' needs and adopted a new standardized versioning convention to help simplify versioning and improve the end user experience. For more information regarding the semi-annual release cadence, refer to this SugarClub announcement. The following format is used for Sugar versions:

• <Sugar_Product> <Year>.<Release>.<Patch>

For example, Sugar Sell/Serve/Enterprise 25.1.0 is released in April 2025 followed by Sugar Sell/Serve 25.2.0 in October 2025 (as shown in the diagram below). The first number (e.g., 25) in the version represents the year of the release and the second number (e.g., "1" for SugarCloud and on-site release in April, "2" for SugarCloud-only release in October) represents the type of release. So, instances hosted on Sugar's cloud environment will receive two releases (semi-annually) per year containing new features and fixed issues.

For Sugar versions 14.2.0 (from October 2024) and lower, customers using SugarCloud received new features and fixed issues for Sugar Sell and Serve on a quarterly release cadence.

Instances hosted on-site only receive new features once a year in a release that applies to both SugarCloud and on-site deployments. For example, when upgrading to version 26.1.0, the aggregate list of features will consist of the 25.2.0 cloud-only release (from October 2025) plus the latest 26.1.0 annual release. In addition, there may be on-site patches containing critical fixed issues released as needed between the annual releases.

The following diagram demonstrates the release cadence for SugarCloud and on-site:

Customers hosted on-site that wish to take advantage of the benefits of SugarCloud and its release cycle have the opportunity to migrate from a supported version of Sugar to the current semi-annual SugarCloud release. For more information on migration or SugarCloud upgrades, refer to the SugarCloud Policy Guide.

With the semi-annual release cadence, customers can expect impactful and high-quality products containing innovative features and fixed issues.