Roadmap and Product Ethos

Introduction

This page details the planned roadmaps for the key products in the OpenFn product suite, including Lightning, Adaptors, and this Docs site. While this page will be updated periodically, you can track our realtime roadmap and progress here.

Our approach to product development

At OpenFn, we follow the Shape Up approach to help our small engineering team build meaningful products and features faster without compomising on quality. With Shape Up in place, we typcially commit to projects that can be delivered in a 4-6 week period with multiple releases based on QA approval within the building cycle. We also proiritize feedback and feature requests from our users over features in the backlog.

Transparency and building what matters

Note that it's fairly rare for us to commit to delivering a specific feature more than 2 or 3 months in the future. We are committed to constantly evluating what our user base needs most and spending the few resources we have to deliver value to them—we simply can't guarantee that what sounds like the "7th most important feature to build" now will still be on our list in 6 months.

At the same time, we strive to be as transparent and inclusive as we can in our planning processes. We have a big backlog of feature requests and GitHub issues (bug reports, stubs, even partially shaped epics or projects) that are getting voted up, commented on, and used as inspiration when we're deciding what to prioritize next.

Read on to learn more about how we work, how you can see what's coming, and how you can get involved!

What are we currently working on?

All of our team's work is tracked publicly using a GitHub Project. Three key views give you up-to-the-minute insights on what we're doing and what's on our immediate roadmap.

See Now 🚧 for what's been funded and is currently being built

See Epics 🤔 for a list of projects that we're considering, roughly-prioritized

See Bugs 🐞 for reported bugs

We will update this site monthly to reflect our progress on major items. You can also keep track of all new features, changes, and bug fixes in real-time via our Changelog.

How to get involved

We collect feedback and new feature requests via our Community site. This allows OpenFn core team and users to track, engage by upvoting their favorite and mission critical feature requests.

Upvote features 👍

1. Go to the community feature request board
2. Scroll down or use the filter and search features to see existing feature requests
3. Click on the (Vote) button beside the title of the request to upvote
4. If you want more upvotes for this feature request, share a link to the feature with your network

Request a new feature 💡

1. Go to the community feature request board
2. Click on + New Topic to create a new request.
3. Provide a very clear, concise and descriptive title for the feature (e.g., "Make the new workflow button green")
4. Describe the feature request in detail and why it's important to you. Helpful if you can add reference images and links.
5. Share the feature request on across your professional network for upvotes

Tip

When describing the feature, it is very helpful to help us understand the problem, proposed solution (if any) and similar solutions we might glean insights from if they exist.

Open an issue or bug directly

If you prefer the direct approach, you can search across all tracked issues in OpenFn's GitHub org here, comment on them, or even pick them up to work on yourself. If you don't find what you're looking for, please go ahead an create an issue in the relevant repo. We'll do our best to respond promptly!

Summary Roadmaps

How to interpret Status values in the roadmap

• Tracked means we're thinking about this, but it hasn't been designed/scoped/shaped
• Shaped means it's been scoped and ready to be picked up by an engineer
• In dev means it's currently being worked on by an engineer (see NOW)
• Delivered means it's been released (see Changelog)

Lightning Roadmap

OpenFn/Lightning is the fully open-source workflow automation platform at the core of the OpenFn Digital Public Good (learn more about the product here).

Feature	Status	Timeline	Link(s)	Description
• Workflow snapshots	Delivered	Q3 '24	Issue 1680	Keep a snapshot of a snapshot based on a run or saved changes of the workflow. Allow users to be able to view snapshot and switch to the latest version of the workflow from a snapshot mode.
• Configurable run concurrency by workflow	Delivered	Q3 '24	Issue 2002	Allow users to control the limit of concurrent runs per workflow in a project.
• Kafka workflow trigger	Delivered	Q3 '24	Issue 1801	A new workflow trigger type that creates a new workorder when a Kafka message is received .
• Allow users to create new projects	Delivered	Q3 '24	Issue 1700	Allow users to create new projects from the project list page.
• Export work order history with logs and data clips	Delivered	Q3 '24	Issue 1698	Allow project users to be able to export workorder history. The workorder history contains ALL logs and data clips (Input and Output) associated with runs in a workorder.
• Project datastores and buffers	Delivered	Q4 '24	Issue 2190	Allow users to configure a data store or buffer that allows temporary of storage of data that can be used in a workflow.
• Make User Onboarding better with resources	Delivered	Q4 '24	Issue 2523	Control what is printed in run logs by specifying log levels and allow users to disable printing console.logs, for data privacy once workflows are handling production data.
• Snapshots and Audit Trail	In dev	Q4 '24	Issue 2526	Control what is printed in run logs by specifying log levels and allow users to disable printing console.logs, for data privacy once workflows are handling production data.
• Enable Save and Sync on Canvas and Inspector	In dev	Q4 '24	Issue 2707	Make version control more accessible to user by allowing users to save and sync their changes to GitHub via the canvas and inspector.
• Make AI Assistant available for all users	In dev	Q4 '24	Issue 2613	Add AI Assistant to help users build workflows faster and easier.
• OpenFn Workflow JSON APIs	Shaped	Q4 '24	Issue 2126	Expose API endpoints that allows developers to interact with OpenFn from other platforms or within jobs. e.g create a new workflow with the jobs given a JSON payload.
• Manual Runs for Cron jobs	Shaped	Q4 '24	Issue 1880	Allow users to manually run cron triggered workflows with a custom cursor and run now button.
• Workflow library	Tracked	Q1 '25	Issue 2723	Create a library of common workflows that users can easily access and clone for use in their projects.
• Load local adaptors into lightning	Tracked	Q1 '25	Issue 2155	Enable lightning to use local adaptors to allow developers quickly test adaptors locally without deploying to npm
• Allow custom inputs for manual runs	Tracked	Q1 '25	Issue 2155	Users should be able to trigger a manual run with a custom input data. The input data can a raw JSON, CSV, I/O data clip or dataset from project collections
• Redesign workflow canvas and inspector interface	Tracked	Q1 '25	Issue 2722	Redesign the canvas and inspector to make user experience and workflow building better for users.
• Enable sandbox and production modes	Tracked	Q1 '25	Issue 2524 and Issue 2525	Allow users to be able to switch between sandbox and production modes in their projects.
• Control log output and levels	Tracked	Q1 '25	Issue 1755	Control what is printed in run logs by specifying log levels and allow users to disable printing console.logs, for data privacy once workflows are handling production data.
• Enhanced websocket worker Monitoring	Tracked	Q1 '25	Issue 608	Give users better visibility of what's happening on inside the worker, especially when an error occurs during run execution.

You can follow Lightning's progress and track delivered features in the Changelog.

Adaptors Roadmap

OpenFn's open-source adaptors can connect any application, including web APIs, databases, and even raw data files, enabling interoperability with any information system (read more). Adaptors, alongside OpenFn's workflow engine, enable automated workflows that cut across digital systems.

Feature	Status	Timeline	Link(s)	Description
• Develop an OpenLMIS adaptor	Delivered	Q3 2024	Issue 533	Enable users to build workflows that interface with OpenLIMS
• Enhancements to FHIR & OpenHIM adaptors	Delivered	Q3 2024	See existing adaptors for FHIR and OpenHIM	To rebuild the existing 2021 OpenFn Instant-OpenHIE reference demo to highlight the exchange of data between existing non-FHIR digital health tools and a HAPI FHIR server. (OpenFn Lightning is OpenHIE-compliant and can be used as a workflow engine for the OpenHIE Interoperability layer - learn more here.) We also want to demonstrate data exchange between existing non-FHIR digital health tools and key components of Google's Open Health Stack and Cloud Healthcare API
• Enhancements to the OCL adaptor	Tracked	Q1 2025	See existing adaptor docs	To ensure that mappings stored in OCLs can be more easily access and processed as inputs in OpenFn/Lightning workflows
• Implement MOSIP Adaptor	Tracked	Q1 2025	Issue 737	Add an adaptor that enables users to integrate with MOSIP for identity management use cases across countries.
• Implement OpenCRVS Adaptor	Tracked	Q1 2025	Issue 736	Enable OpenFn workflows to integrate with OpenCRVS for CRVS workflows.
• Implement ArcGIS Adaptor	Tracked	Q1 2025	Issue 738	Add an ARCGIS adaptor for users to build weorkflow that manage data sync between source and online maps with OpenFn Workflows.
• Support Personal Access Tokens in DHIS2	Tracked	Q1 2025	Issue 697	Extend the DHIS2 Adaptor to support Personal Access Token(PAT).

Docs Roadmap

Feature	Status	Timeline	Link(s)	Description
• New Lightning User Guidance	In Progress	2025	To be hosted on docs.openfn.org	New documentation, videos, and other user guidance on how to use OpenFn/Lightning and how to migrate existing OpenFn/platform projects to Lightning (the new OpenFn "v2")

Have questions, feedback or found a bug?

We encourage users to post their questions on the OpenFn Community at community.openfn.org, or consider creating issues for bugs via product repository. You can also independetly start contributing to the OpenFn software, adaptors, or documentation by getting started here.