I’m thrilled to share transformative news about Semaphore’s evolution. After serving developers through our commercial offering for over 12 years, we’re taking a significant step by open sourcing our core platform under the Apache 2.0 license. This decision reflects our belief that the most powerful solutions emerge when developers can deeply understand, modify, and enhance their tools.
Why the change
When we started in 2012, commercial, closed-source platforms like GitHub and Heroku showed the way forward in cloud services. Times have changed dramatically since then: Docker and Kubernetes have standardized cloud and on-prem deployment, security has become crucial for all companies, and organizations like Gitlab and HashiCorp have proven sustainable open source business models.
Yet today’s CI/CD landscape presents developers with an uncomfortable choice: they can either use open source tools that offer flexibility but struggle with scalability and user experience, or accept vendor lock-in from platforms where CI/CD is just another checkbox feature. Neither path fully serves modern development teams’ needs.
Semaphore has grown beyond our initial vision, shaped by thousands of hours of collaboration with our amazing customers. Each feature and improvement in developer experience has emerged from deep partnerships with teams solving real-world delivery challenges. Opening our entire platform to developers worldwide is the natural next step — an opportunity to expand this collaborative spirit to a broader community.
The new model
On February 26th, the core platform that powers Semaphore will be available on GitHub under Apache 2.0 license. This production-grade codebase, from our pipeline orchestration engine to our workflow builder, processes millions of workflows across thousands of organizations today.
Semaphore will be available in three editions to meet different needs:
- Semaphore Cloud remains our fully-managed service, offering both pure cloud and hybrid solutions for teams that want a seamless experience and the fastest CI/CD pipelines on the market, and access to all advanced features like pipeline promotions and flaky test detection.
- Semaphore Enterprise Edition provides on-premises deployment with advanced security and compliance features that larger organizations require.
- Semaphore Community Edition represents our core platform, now open source and free to use on your own infrastructure. This gives developers complete control to run and customize Semaphore for their specific needs.
Each edition maintains clear boundaries between open source and commercial features, ensuring a sustainable model where community innovation and enterprise reliability reinforce each other.
For our current users
We have carefully designed this transition to ensure continuity for all our users. If you’re using Semaphore Cloud today, your experience stays the same — you’ll continue to enjoy our fully-managed service and industry-leading pipeline performance. Enterprise On-prem customers maintain access to all their current features, with the added benefit of being able to examine and extend the core platform code.
The open sourcing of our core platform creates new opportunities for all our users. You’ll be able to better understand how Semaphore works, contribute improvements that matter to your team, and build custom integrations with unprecedented flexibility.
Our commitment to security and reliability remains unchanged — the same components that have reliably processed millions of your workflows are the ones we’re opening to the community.
For developers
This isn’t another half-baked open source release. We’ve spent a decade building a developer-focused CI/CD platform that makes complex workflows clear and simple, at any scale. Semaphore’s code and infrastructure have passed a comprehensive security audit by Cure53, and we’re opening production-grade code that processes millions of jobs daily.
Our mission now is to build the next major milestones together with the community. We’re embracing full transparency by moving all our product and engineering discussions to public channels on Discord, GitHub, and YouTube. We believe this “building in public” approach, combined with our proven UX and scalability, creates the foundation for a new standard in CI/CD that developers have been waiting for.
The path forward
Over the next three weeks, we will be preparing for the open source release by:
- Transitioning to our new home at semaphore.io
- Publishing comprehensive documentation, including architecture diagrams and contribution guides
- Preparing the main repository with issue templates and CI/CD pipelines
The journey culminates with Semaphore Summit, our online community event starting February 26. The Summit opens with a keynote announcing Semaphore’s open source release, where we’ll make the code publicly available and share our vision for the future of CI/CD.
Later that day, I’ll host a fireside chat to dive deeper into our technical roadmap and answer your questions about contributing to Semaphore.
The Summit continues over three days, with a few focused sessions each day to make it easy to attend alongside your regular work. You’ll hear from teams who’ve built remarkable delivery pipelines, join technical deep-dives into advanced patterns, and participate in hands-on contribution workshops. We’ve designed each day’s schedule to be both valuable and manageable, whether you join us for specific sessions or the entire event.
Get involved
Join us at Semaphore Summit:
- February 26–28, 2025
- Online and free
- Register here
This marks the beginning of a new chapter in CI/CD — one where developer experience, enterprise reliability, and community innovation come together. With production-grade foundations and a commitment to building in public, we’re creating the open platform we wish had existed when we started our journey. I’m excited to see what we’ll build together.
Darko,
Semaphore CTO and co-founder
Originally published at https://semaphoreci.com on January 29, 2025.
