Ignition 2027 Is Here!
Ignition 2027 is one of the most feature-packed releases in Ignition's history, arriving just 18 months after 8.3. With 8.3, we made the case that clearing out years of technical debt and refactoring major parts of the platform would let us move quicker. Ignition 2027 is proof that it worked.
The headline features include a new AI framework built directly into the platform, a major update to Perspective's charting capabilities, and an important new historian built in partnership with Tiger Data. Underneath those extraordinary new additions is a host of solid improvements to Ignition's redundancy, enterprise architecture, zero data loss failover, and auditing capabilities; the kind of improvements that solidify Ignition as the best OT integration platform for enterprise customers.
Here's a closer look at what's in with the Ignition 2027 beta release:
Download Ignition 2027 Beta HERE
Ignition Catalyst: AI Built Into the Platform
Ignition 2027 introduces Ignition Catalyst, a new AI framework built directly into the platform across two modules: Catalyst Core and Catalyst Agent.
Catalyst Core brings AI into the places engineers already work. The Designer Assistant offers in-context intelligence for scripts, expressions, SQL queries, UDTs, and general application building, right inside the editors you already use, and a sidebar chat extends that to project-level tasks. Catalyst Core also brings plain-language diagnostics to the Gateway, summarizing subsystem states and surfacing actionable solutions instead of raw logs. You're not locked into one AI provider, either. Catalyst Core supports ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, along with self-hosted options like Ollama for teams that need an air-gapped, on-premise deployment.
Catalyst Agent takes things even further, letting you build custom autonomous agents for OT processes without needing machine learning expertise. It includes support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a low-code MCP server option for connecting your OT data to external AI tools, and embedded AI chat inside Perspective applications, so operators can get instant insights, like root-cause analysis on alarms or on-demand report generation, right from the interface they already use.
A Major Leap for Perspective
Perspective gets one of its biggest upgrades since its inception with Perspective Chart Modernization, a substantially expanded collection of 16 chart components. Alongside improved classics like line, area, bar, and scatter charts, you'll find more advanced options like radar and Sankey charts, making sophisticated OT visualizations and analytics applications easier to build than ever without breaking existing projects on upgrade.
Power Chart also gets a maturity and reliability pass in Power Chart 1.5, with better tag browsing and filtering, simplified pen color configuration, and several X-Trace improvements, including color-matched labels and engineering units and quality values shown across all plots.
There is also improved project translation management thanks to a modernized interface and new scripting support, making it easier to build multi-language applications. Also, Perspective Workstation gets fully native, customizable on-screen keyboards, so touchscreen and kiosk deployments no longer have to rely on OS-level keyboards or third-party overlay tools.
A New Historian, Built With Tiger Data
Ignition 2027 includes the new Enterprise Historian Module. The Enterprise Historian Module pairs with TimescaleDB for Ignition, a purpose-built, high-availability edition of the database sold and supported directly by Inductive Automation. In benchmark testing against Ignition's standard SQL Historian on Postgres, using a dataset of 2.1 billion data points, the Enterprise Historian delivered more than 10 times the ingest throughput and query speed, with a fraction of the storage footprint.
Read more about the new Enterprise Historian Module in Tiger Data's blog.
The Core Historian introduced in 8.3 is also getting several major upgrades. It's gaining redundancy support, so history data automatically syncs to a backup node, along with near-zero data loss failover, where a backup Gateway buffers historical data locally while in standby and backfills any gaps once it takes over. You'll also be able to manage historian backups, including scheduled backups, directly from the Gateway web interface, and historian custom aggregates will let charts and bindings take advantage of accelerated aggregates for faster historical queries.
Better Tags, Data Acquisition, and OPC
Ignition 2027 also strengthens the platform's role as a true data-acquisition and DataOps foundation.
A new Beckhoff ADS driver adds direct, native communication with Beckhoff TwinCAT PLCs. OPC UA redundancy will provide automatic failover between a primary and redundant OPC UA server, eliminating an important single point of failure for high-availability architectures. Ignition will also be able to natively subscribe to OPC UA events through Event Streams, not just poll for them, enabling more performant, scalable event-based systems.
Excel tag import/export brings a major quality-of-life upgrade for controls engineers configuring, validating, or testing a tag model, and expanded REST APIs will provide complete access to both tag and history data, building on the configuration API introduced in 8.3.
Stronger Enterprise Architecture and Infrastructure
Building on the foundation laid in 8.3, Ignition 2027 continues to strengthen enterprise-scale deployments in a few major ways:
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EAM Distributed Controllers will let Enterprise Administration Module controllers talk to each other, enabling a central-hub model for managing large, multi-site environments, and a new Redundancy Advisor adds a lightweight way to reduce or eliminate the “split-brain” problem in redundant setups.
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Partial Gateway import/export through a new .gwex file format will enable non-destructive, hot imports, closing a major operational gap for customers running multi-gateway environments and staged deployment pipelines.
With these additions, scaling Ignition across sites and Gateways becomes simpler, safer, and easier to automate.
Security and Compliance for Regulated Environments
Ignition 2027 will be fully Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) compliant, meaning it's secure by design right out of the box. An improved audit log will capture the previous value of tag writes and other changes, giving regulated industries like life sciences better traceability. Multi-IdP support will let you configure multiple Identity Providers on a single Gateway, with users explicitly choosing which one to authenticate through at login across the Gateway, Designer, Vision, and Perspective.
Also, starting with this release, a version won't be designated Long-Term Support until a full year after its initial GA release. That branch will be feature-frozen and receives only critical security updates and defect patches. Ignition 8.3 remains fully supported as an LTS release through September 2030, and the next LTS designation will land with Ignition 2027.15.0-LTS in Q1 2028.
CRA compliance is separate from LTS status: every release starting with Ignition 2027 will receive security updates for five years after its GA release, regardless of LTS designation.
Rounding Out the Release
Here are a handful of smaller but meaningful improvements that round out the release:
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File Resources will let projects store and manage files like PDFs, images, and configuration files directly as native project resources, with optional secure HTTP access.
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A native AWS Connector adds support for popular services like S3, SNS, SQS, and DynamoDB, along with a credential setup page in the Gateway web interface.
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A new Ignition Web Component Library, complete with an official Storybook reference, gives module authors building Gateway web pages a shared foundation to work from.
Download Ignition 2027 HERE
Download the Ignition 2027 Beta | Try Ignition 2027 Today!
The best way to see how these features fit your systems is to try them yourself. Download the Ignition 2027 public beta, explore Catalyst in the Designer, build a few of the new charts, and test the Enterprise Historian against your own data. You can also share your feedback with the team that built it right here on the Early Access Forum. You can find more information in the forum's "About" post.
General availability is targeted for February 2027, so now is the time to start planning your upgrade.