QGIS has taken a big leap forward with a new major release. It is named after Norrköping, where the global QGIS User Conference was held last year. 

But hold your horses, the new version is the latest release so we recommend that you wait for the Long Term Release before using it in a production environment. The estimated release date for the Long Term release is 3rd of July 2026. 

What’s new?

The biggest change is that QGIS 4.0 has migrated from Qt5 (pronounced cute) to Qt6. Qt is the software framework QGIS uses to build its interface — everything from the buttons and menus to how the map window renders on your screen. 

Do not worry, QGIS will look very much the same, but the performance will improve. 

But do worry about your plugins! Since plugins are built with Python and the PyQt library you will need to make sure the plugins you are using are updated to work with QGIS 4.0. You can check the already updated plugins here.

You can see the full changelog for QGIS 4.0 here to get a view over the new features!