Sulu in 2025: Major releases, new products, and a clear path forward

The Sulu 3.0 story defines our year. We started 2025 confident we’d release in March. By February, we’d completed about 80% of the technical work: the new Doctrine ORM storage system was integrated, performance had doubled, and migration paths had been tested. We thought we were almost done.

Then we discovered what “almost done” actually meant. That final 20% turned out to be the real work: architectural cleanup, removing legacy code we’d been carrying for years, and properly handling rarely-used functions that still required migration paths. We had a choice: ship something that worked but wasn't quite right, or delay and do it properly.

We chose the delay. Sulu 3.0 represents an architectural shift, not just another release. Our backwards compatibility promise means this is our last chance for breaking changes in the entire 3.x series. Rushing it would haunt us for years.

The numbers tell the story:

• 476 pull requests merged
• 151,462 lines of code added
• 258,910 lines removed
• 2,632 official hours logged—not including the countless hours the team worked in their free time, or the work of external contributors

We shipped 4 alpha releases, 5 betas, and 2 release candidates before the final release in December. The result delivers up to 2x throughput, 50% lower latency, and a foundation we can build on for years.

While 3.0 consumed most of our energy, Sulu never stopped delivering elsewhere. We maintained 2.x, with 34 releases across 2.5.x and 2.6.x including:

• Security patches
• Symfony 7 compatibility
• Performance improvements
• Community-requested features
• Bug fixes

And let’s not forget Sulu.ai! Twenty-three organizations pushed the Sulu.ai beta through real workflows during private beta, processing 44,548 requests and analyzing over 69 million tokens of content. The service is now publicly available with a provider-agnostic approach. You choose between OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, DeepL, and Gemini based on your needs.

What’s more, Sulu:Touch in Amsterdam brought 60 participants together and gave us a chance to announce Sulu.cloud, our managed hosting solution. We’ll share more about that in 2026!

We’re proud to have welcomed six new partners to the Sulu family in 2025. Adesso SE, BOOTIQ, Verzameld Werk, Cognito, and team:PENTA joined in the first half of the year, followed by PERSPEQTIVE GmbH in November. Each partnership brings new expertise, perspectives, and projects to the ecosystem, and we’re excited to work with agencies across Europe who are building exceptional digital experiences with Sulu.

The pattern of how these partnerships developed tells an interesting story about the year. Five partners joined in the first half of 2025—momentum was strong and conversations were flowing. Then everything slowed down. Several promising conversations shifted to “let’s talk in January 2026.”

This wasn’t unique to Sulu. Agencies across Europe faced the same challenge. Economic uncertainty led to postponed investments and frozen budgets.

We’re doing fine as a company, but this pattern helped crystallize something important: Relying heavily on services revenue makes us vulnerable to forces outside our control. That realization shapes everything about our 2026 strategy.

Right now, 85% of our revenue comes from development services: client projects and implementations. Another 10% comes from the partner program, and 5% from consulting and training. 

Services revenue is inherently unstable. Projects end, economic conditions change, and agency budgets freeze. We’ve seen it firsthand this year. Product revenue provides the stability we need to keep investing in Sulu core, maintain our backwards compatibility promise, and support the community properly.

So 2026 is about shifting that balance. We’re focusing on three pillars: growing the partner program, promoting and improving Sulu.ai, and launching Sulu.cloud into production. These aren’t replacements for services—we’ll still take on client work and implementation—but the mix needs to change.

This matters because sustainable open source requires a sustainable business model. We’re not interested in venture funding, acquisition targets, or investor exits. We’re building for the long term. That means honest business practices, not just open code.

Nothing changes about our core commitment. Sulu remains MIT licensed, 100% open source, with no bait-and-switch tactics. We’re simply ensuring we can keep that promise for years to come.

Meanwhile, Sulu 3.x development continues. We’re working on bundle migrations, planning Symfony 8 support, and version 3.1 is already on the roadmap. The foundation we built in 2025 lets us move faster in 2026.