Farewell Portainer 1.X Series. Welcome to Portainer 2.0

5 min read
June 4, 2020
July 8, 2025
Last updated:
November 22, 2025
Neil Cresswell
Neil Cresswell
,
Portainer CEO
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Key takeaways

By now hopefully you have seen that we shipped version 1.24 of Portainer CE; this is the very last version of the 1.X series, which has carried Portainer through the last 3 years. This version will continue receive required critical security patches for the next 12 months, however there will be no new features, enhancements or bug fixes. Moving forwards, we are all about Portainer 2.X….

Over the next few months we will be releasing Portainer 2.0. It will be the first major release since Portainer first launched and marks a major milestone in our journey.

2.0 has given me the opportunity to reflect on how far Portainer has come and to acknowledge you, our community, for the part you have played. I think a few numbers might convey just how proud I am of what we have achieved together.

As I write, we appear to have maxed out Docker hub. The Portainer image has been pulled more than 2 billion (!) times across all versions. Docker stopped updating that number back in March, so maybe we broke it? Google tells us that we have about 350,000 regular monthly users, with more than 2.3 million individual users over the past twelve months. Overall, our user community is also growing at about 50% year on year, which I find awe inspiring.

On the 31st March 2020 we released our first Kubernetes beta and since that release, the beta image had been pulled more than 500,000 times. These numbers exceeded our wildest expectation and indicate to us that we’re doing good, valuable work. I see a bright future for Portainer in the Kube space, but we wouldn’t have got here without the support of the Swarm community and we will never forget you!

It is especially rewarding when we consider how small the group of coders and maintainers are on the Open Source project. Every year we receive masses of feature requests through our GitHub presence (as well as almost 15,000 stars!) which the team combs through every day. Throughout its life, Portainer has received code from just 150 contributors, so the vast majority of the code comes from us. And we love it.

As the founder and I guess the ‘vision holder’ for the product, I am deeply grateful to you all – whether you use Portainer, contribute ideas, a request, code or are part of the team. Thank you all

Infrastructure Moves Fast. Stay Ahead.

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Conclusion

Neil Cresswell
Portainer CEO
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Neil Cresswell is the co-founder and CEO of Portainer, a popular platform that simplifies container management for Docker, Kubernetes, and edge environments. A veteran of over 25 years in IT, he began his career with 12 years at IBM before leading VMware consulting at ViFX across Asia-Pacific and serving as CEO for cloud service providers. Frustrated by the lack of usable tooling for “containers as a service,” he created Portainer to make container technology accessible to everyone. Under his leadership, Portainer has grown from an open-source UI into an enterprise-ready platform used globally.

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