The wait is over! We are pleased to announce the new major release of QGIS 4.0.

Installers for Windows, Linux, and Mac are already out.

What’s new?

On the surface, existing users should expect to engage with a QGIS experience familiar to what they have come to know and love from previous releases. Under the hood, however, 4.0 introduces significant changes to maintainability and usability. These changes ensure that QGIS 4.0 can unlock additional access to modern libraries while bringing much-needed performance and security improvements to the code base.

For developers

To ensure a smooth transition, we have retained deprecated APIs where possible, minimising the effort required for plugin developers to update their tools. While some legacy APIs (such as the Processing API from QGIS 2.x) will not be guaranteed future support and backwards compatibility throughout the lifespan of the QGIS 4.x series, developers supporting existing plugins can easily ensure their plugins are compatible with the new release using the Qt6 compatibility guide.

New features

While preparation for the QGIS 4.0 migration has been underway, the developer community has added over 100 new features across the application, making QGIS more powerful, more flexible, more secure, and generally just more awesome. Adjacent to developments associated with the code base, the budding community of QGIS users has continued to share resources, including projects, styles, scripts, and more, leading to an exciting period of growth for the revamped QGIS Hub and associated community sites.

For a whirlwind tour of all the new functionalities introduced in this release, you can view the highlight reel video on YouTube, and for a detailed rundown of the new features and improvements, please check out the visual changelog for this release.

QGIS is a community effort, and we would like to extend a big thank-you to the developers, documenters, testers, and the many folks out there who volunteer their time and effort (or fund others to do so) to make these releases possible. From the QGIS community, we hope you enjoy this release!

If you wish to donate time, money, or otherwise contribute towards making QGIS more awesome, please wander along to QGIS.ORG and lend a hand!

QGIS is supported by donors and sustaining members. A current list of donors who have made financial contributions, large or small, to the project can be seen on our list of donors. If you would like to become an official project sustaining member, please visit our sustaining member page for more details. Sponsoring QGIS helps us to fund our regular developer meetings, maintain project infrastructure, and fund bug-fixing efforts. A complete list of current sponsors is provided below – our very big thank you to all of our sponsors!

QGIS is free software, and you are under no obligation to pay anything to use it – in fact, we want to encourage people far and wide to use it regardless of their financial or social status – we believe that empowering people with spatial decision-making tools will result in a better society for all of humanity.