We are excited to announce that Onset 5.0 is now stable. Since the last release, we've made several enhancements to improve user experience and performance.

AI Writing Tools

We are excited to introduce new AI writing tools designed to enhance your release notes and milestone descriptions. With the AI writer, you can easily adjust your text—making it longer, shorter, or altering the tone as needed.

Release Contributors

You can now add multiple contributors to each release, enhancing collaboration and crediting efforts.

To manage how these contributors are displayed, navigate to Settings → Page → Releases. Here, you can control the visibility of contributors on your public page.

Custom Email Subject Templates

We've introduced the ability to customize email subject lines using templates. This allows for greater flexibility and personalization in your communications.

Available Placeholders:

• {title}: Release title.

• {version}: Release version.

• {workspace}: Workspace name.

• {project}: Project name.

Example Use Cases:

• Changelog {title}: Add a prefix keyword before the release title.

• [{project} UPDATES] {title}: Include the project name in the subject line.

REST API

The REST API is back online! After a brief downtime, it is now fully operational and ready for use. We’ve also added new endpoints for managing various resources, such as webhooks, which will facilitate easier integration and task automation for developers.

For detailed information, including the API reference and practical examples, please check our documentation here.

Webhooks

We are excited to introduce new webhooks that are secure and more granular. The new webhooks utilize HMAC-SHA256 signatures, which provide a stronger method for verifying the authenticity of the data being sent. This helps prevent tampering and ensures that the data received is from a trusted source.

For more information, please refer to our documentation here.

We rebuilt Onset from the ground up with a cleaner interface, simpler flows, and faster performance. The focus is helping you publish clearer updates and keep customers informed with less effort.

Why we rebuilt Onset

Simply put. Our original stack was starting to show its age. As technology and our needs evolved, the system we built years ago became harder to maintain and extend. We’re rebuilding Onset to fix that at the core, not just to tidy up code but to establish a simpler, faster, and more scalable foundation. This foundation lets us ship improvements sooner and unlock the next wave of capabilities.

A seamless transition

Rewriting a platform is one thing; switching it on without disruption is another. The Onset dashboard will enter a brief maintenance mode over the weekend (August 23rd, 2025) while we migrate all workspaces to the new platform. No action is required from you, and your data and settings will be carried over.

What to expect

• A short, scheduled maintenance window on the dashboard during the weekend (August 23rd, 2025) migration.

• All releases, roadmap items, subscribers, and branding settings migrated to the new platform.

• Your public pages are migrated to the new design.

After we’re back, open the dashboard and pick up right where you left off. If anything looks off, contact support@onset.io and we’ll help immediately.

Release notes

The release experience is streamlined so you can write, publish, and share in fewer steps.

List view
The releases list is more compact and readable. It reduces scrolling, surfaces key metadata at a glance.

Roadmap

We refreshed the roadmap to improve readability and planning clarity.

Kanban view
A board layout is available for teams that prefer a column view. It uses your roadmap stages and gives a quick read on distribution across columns.

Email notifications

Custom email templates are deprecated in favor of the single high quality layout. You can now preview emails and customize the look and feel to be on brand.

Integrations

We are simplifying integrations to focus on the most used status and analytics providers while we redesign the rest. GitLab, Slack, and Sentry are deprecated for now. If you rely on a deprecated integration, contact support@onset.io for transition guidance.

Authentication and security

Password login is replaced with magic link authentication. If you used passwords previously, you can continue signing in by requesting a magic link from the login screen.

Other notable changes

Some features are removed or temporarily paused while the new architecture settles.

Onset now allows you to customize your roadmap stages to better align with your product release process and workflow. This exciting new update brings us one step closer to integrating a Kanban view.

We're excited to share that our AI Writer is open for testing! Our writer can help you take your copy to the next level — e.g., shortening it, rewriting it with a captivating tone, and more!

Try it out today by enabling it via the Onset Labs page!

(This release note is written with the help of AI 😉 )

We are thrilled to share that we have added three new page designs to the collection. These new stunning layouts are meticulously crafted and can be easily customized to reflect your brand's unique style and personality.

We invite you to participate in the public beta testing of our newest page designs. You can enable the additional layouts from the Onset Labs page.

Click here to learn more and preview the new layouts!

Subscriber Lists

We’re excited to announce Subscriber Lists is out of beta! A powerful new feature that will give you even more control over your email notifications. You can now organize your subscribers into lists, making it easier than ever to target the exact audience you want to alert.

Open Graph (OG) Images

Get ready to stand out on social media! We’re thrilled to announce that we are now dynamically generating Open Graph (OG) images for all release notes and roadmap items, making them more eye-catching in social media feeds.

Plain Email Template

And finally, we’re introducing our new Plain Email Template. This slim, minimalist design is focused solely on the content of your release notes, ensuring that your subscribers can focus on what’s important without any unnecessary distractions.

We're thrilled to announce the release of Widget Builder, a powerful new tool that makes it easier than ever to customize your widgets and see your changes in real-time!

With Widget Builder, you have complete control over your widget preferences. You can choose from a range of options to customize the look and feel of your widget, including color schemes, placement, and more. And the best part? You can see your changes live as you make them, so you can be confident that your widget will look exactly how you want it to.

Click here to check it out.

Introducing the latest additions to Onset's suite of features, JWT Single Sign-on and Protected Page Scopes. Our goal with these features is to enhance the overall user experience by streamlining the login process while providing maximum flexibility and control.

JWT Single Sign-on

JWT SSO allows you to authenticate users in your systems, tell Onset that the user has been authenticated, and grant your visitors access to your page.

Protected Page Scopes

Page Scopes allow you to publicize Release Notes and Roadmap items with specific projects or labels while maintaining secure, authorized access to the rest of the content.

JWT SSO and Page Scopes are ready for public beta and available for testing. You can enable them from the Onset Labs page.

In this version, we took the opportunity to conduct some much-needed "spring cleaning" of our backend engines. This involved reviewing and optimizing various aspects of our infrastructure to ensure everything operates as smoothly and efficiently as possible.

As a result of these optimizations, the overall performance of our applications has been significantly improved. You should notice a faster, more responsive experience with fewer glitches and errors.

We’ve added two new handy methods to our JavaScript Widget.

• onsetWidget.update() - updates widget options. Useful when updating the widget’s theme to match the embedded site’s look.

• onsetWidget.reload() - reloads the widget with the new data source and options.

We made an entire overhaul of our webhook integrations. Initially, when we developed the webhooks feature. It was very minimal and only supported webhook events relating to release notes. While this worked initially, our platform grew and required more comprehensive webhook support.

With the new Webhooks 2.0 release, we have opened up the Onset platform to provide the possibility to develop more extensive integrations. You can subscribe and listen to events from almost all entities, such as releases, roadmaps, projects, etc. Using the emitted notification and data, you could trigger CI builds, perform calculations, or send messages on specific conditions – you name it.

The entire list of supported entities and events is available in our documentation.

Happy New Year! 🥳

We are kicking off this year with exciting news. Scheduled Releases is now in public beta and ready for you to try. This new feature allows you to create and schedule release notes to be published up to one month ahead.

When creating a new release, select a future release date and time to publish, set up your notification settings, and we will take care of the rest. You can continue making edits to your release note while it’s in the scheduled state.

In order to use this feature, you must enable Scheduled Release Notes via Onset Labs.

We are excited to announce that the long waited attachments feature has finally landed! Now you can link external resources to roadmap items and release notes.

In addition to external resources, attachments allow you to associate release notes with roadmap items and vice versa.

Currently, we support three types of attachments:

• Links

• File (10MB limit)

• Roadmap ←→ Release relations

We have been working hard and have exciting new features to share!

Application Dark Mode

Our journey to the dark side is complete. You can set your preferred appearance permanently in the User Settings or have it switch based on your system preference.

Emoji Support 👋

Typing : will bring up a list of suggested emojis. The list will filter as you type, so once you find the emoji you're looking for, select it from the list and press Enter to complete the highlighted result.

We are working on automatically converting common emoticons into emojis next.

Customize Release Changeset Status

The default release change types can now be customized to suit your workflow better. This feature is frequently requested, and we are happy to deliver it 🙂. Add, edit or change the color of release changeset types in Settings → Workflow.

Page Visibility Settings

We’ve added new visibility options to give finer control over who can see your page. Previously, to make your page visible publicly, you had to have at least one public release note or a roadmap item, and your page would automatically be available to the public. Going forward, you are required to toggle page visibility manually. All pages are defaulted to hidden, and you choose when you want to share it with the world.

Available Options:

• Hidden: page is hidden from the public.

• Public: page is visible to everyone.

• Password Protected: page is visible only to ones with a password.

Custom Page CSS

We have fully revamped our public page and made it extensible. Business tier users can now insert custom CSS stylesheets under Settings → Appearance and have better control over the look and feel of the page.

Major release alert! Over the past few months, we’ve been working on Onset 4.0, a significant update with great new features. We are excited to announce that our new Roadmap feature is now in public beta and ready to go.

Use the new Roadmap feature to give your customers insight into awesome new features you have in plan. The upvote functionality allows you to learn about features your users are most excited about and prioritize accordingly.

The Roadmap is still under beta, and organization admins can enable it via Settings → Labs.

P.S. Check out our roadmap. 😊

This release is all about consent, cookie consent, that is! To be more GDPR and CCPA compliant, we have added a more rigid and granular cookie consent window.

Onset uses cookies to remember user interaction purposes only. The cookies used (as of 08/07/2020) are listed below:

• onset:theme - stores user’s dark/light theme choice.

• onset:subscribe - stores whether the user hidden the subscription pop-up window.

• onset:release_reactions - store the user’s release reactions.

If you have Google Analytics integration enabled. Google pixel creates and uses cookies to measure user interactions. No worries, consent covers those as well.

Make your first impression count with the help of a hero image! Or is it gyro 🥙? Don’t matter! With this new feature, you can add a large, flashy image to your release note showing off your cool new feature.

Another exciting release, friends!

Occasionally you want to share a draft version of your release notes before publishing them to the world. We are testing a new “Public Share Link” feature that allows you to generate a unique link for your releases and share them with anyone outside your organization. The release can be in any state, private, or draft.

We generated a share link for one of our private draft releases as a demo. Click here to check it out.

You can enable this feature via Settings → Labs.

P.S. It’s also great for previewing your release notes before making them publicly available.

Developers rejoice. Onset JavaScript SDK is officially here! We have made three different packages available for your disposal. All packages are available via NPM and YARN and include type definitions.

@onsetio/browser

Primarily used in the browser for loading public releases.

• NPM

• Yarn

• Github

@onsetio/node

Onset API JavaScript interface.

• NPM

• Yarn

• Github

@onsetio/widget

We recommend that you should always be loaded the Widget.js script directly from https://widget.onset.io/widget.js, rather than including it in a bundle or host yourself. If must bundle the Widget code into your application, you can use this package.

• NPM

• Yarn

• Github

Hola! Bonjour! Guten tag! Olá! Hallo!

We are excited to share that you can now change the default language of your public page. This highly anticipated feature is currently in public beta and only available to our 👬 Team and 👔 Business members.

Languages we are currently supporting:

• English

• Español

• Português

• Français

• Deutsch

• Nederlands

You can enable this feature via Settings → Labs. Once turned on, you should see a “Page Language” dropdown in the Settings → Appearance section of your page settings.

Also, don’t be worried. The selected language will also apply to the release notifications.

If you require translation to another language, no problem, reach out to us!

We got a ton of new features for you! A few notable ones are:

• Unread release badges - notify your users of new releases by showing the count in the trigger badge. We check for new releases every five(5) minutes.

• Widget directions - adjust the direction widget window appears. You can emulate a modal window.

• Events - subscribe to widget events. Read more about them in our doc.

We’ve gone dark y’all! We are following up on our previous release and rolling out dark mode for our widget. Unlike the page, dark mode is enabled programmatically, with no toggles.

While embedding the widget, you now have an optional theme attribute that you can pass. It accepts one of three values:

1. light - light theme

2. dark - dark theme

3. auto - auto-detect based on the user’s computer system settings

We default to our usual light theme to avoid shocking your eyes with the new theme. In the future, this property default value be changed to auto.

onsetWidgetSettings = {
  page: 'releases.onset.io',
  triggerText: "🔔 What's New",
  theme: 'dark',
};

Check out our widget documentation for more configuration options.

We’ve got a special gift for you today - Onset dark mode. It’s finally here! Page light and dark themes are automatically toggled based on your computer’s system settings. Of course, you can override the system settings by manually toggling the switch in the header.

P.S. Don’t forget to upload a dark mode-friendly version of your logo in the Settings → Appearance.

We worked on our editor and made various changes that we are proud to share. The main one that we are most excited about is the new image upload functionality.

Previously, we only allowed you to embed images via URL from an external source. We understand that it was somewhat of a frustrating process, so we decided to fix it. You can now upload images directly to the platform without using any other third-party hosting, and it’s completely free.

🤔 Did you know?
While adding changes, you can use cmd/ctrl + return to add a new change line item.

We cooked up another new feature, Labels! Create labels to help organize and filter releases across projects.

You can now insert Loom videos into your release notes!

Here is an example of a valid Loom video URL:

https://www.loom.com/share/f8e954b12c0446db8dc0df0fba4d5722

Our editor now automatically converts certain characters to correct typographic characters. If you want to undo the converted result, just hit Backspace once.

Symbols

• (c) to a copyright sign ©

• (r) to registered trademark sign ®

• (tm) to registered trademark sign ™

Math

• 1/2 to one half ½

• 1/4 to one quarter ¼

• 3/4 to three quarters ¾

• +/- to plus/minus sign ±

• != to a not equal sign ≠

• 2 * 3 or 2x3 to a multiplication sign 2×3

• ^2 a superscript two ²

• ^3 a superscript three ³

Quotes

• “Smart” opening double-quotes

• “Smart” closing double-quotes

• ‘Smart’ opening single quotes

• ‘Smart’ closing single quotes

• << to left-pointing double angle quotation mark «

• >> to right-pointing double angle quotation mark »

Other

• -- to an emdash —

• ... to an ellipsis character …

• <‐ to an arrow ←

• ‐> to an arrow →

We made some exciting changes to the editor.

Code Blocks

To add a code block, use the insert menu of the editor or just type three backticks ( ```) at the start and end of your code snippet. Your finished code block will look like this:

Array(13).join('wat' - 1) + ' Batman!'; // Theme song!

Quotes

To create a blockquote, start a line with greater than (>) followed by a space or insert it via the menu.

I'm not saying I'm Batman. I'm just saying no one has ever seen Batman and me in the same room together.

You can now add links to your website and other important resources in the header of your release notes page.

Just add the URLs you'd like to link to, and they'll appear in the header. If you add social media links, they'll appear as clickable icons on the sidebar.

In this release, we are focusing on page privacy. Password-protected pages are now available for preview. Lock your page and only allow those with the password to view it.

Currently, the password-protected privacy layer must be turned on via the Labs settings. To enable the feature for your workspace, please navigate to Settings → Labs.

Password-protected pages are available for paid customers only, Team Plan, and above.

The Onset API is now available for all developers to explore and build upon. Integrations built on the API are available to all Onset users on free or paid plans.

Currently, Onset API is must be turned on via the Labs settings. To enable the API for your workspace, please navigate to Settings → Labs.

To learn more, visit the API Reference section in our docs.

Please Note: The current version of the web API is considered a draft phase. While we don’t expect public endpoints to change greatly, keep in mind that the API is still under development.

We have been tirelessly working on updating the release creation process. Our goal was to provide a seamless experience that allows you to see precisely how your releases would look without needing to publish them.

Our newest, fastest, best-performing, shiniest, most nutritious, and delicious version of Onset is now fully rolled out, so that's the one you're now using. Brilliant.

Our design and development team has been diligently laboring over every last detail of Onset Pages for the last several months. Today we are so excited to show off this brand new way to use public pages.

Here are a few highlights:

• All Releases - all your release notes under a single page.

• New Sidebar - floating sidebar that allows your users to search quickly and toggle between projects.

• Subscription Window - the ability for your readers to subscribe to multiple projects at once.

Migrate the contacts that you have collected in Mailchimp to Onset with ease as there's no need to export them first and import from file later.

To learn how to click here.

We are excited to announce support for video embeds.

To add a video to your release, simply click on the new film icon in the editor:

Or wrap the video link in a markdown like so:

![Beautiful Nature](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGQwd1_dpuc)

The code above will result in 🌊:

Video embed support is currently limited to YouTube and Vimeo.

After numerous requests and feedback, we are delighted to announce the new version-less projects. We understand that some projects might be composed of multiple technologies, API, UI, and services, etc...

Projects without versioning enables you to compose releases about your product, rather than a single service.

Reactions let users rate a release. Once a customer finishes reading your release, they can let you know how they feel about it by reacting with a happy, neutral or disappointed face.

We are excited to introduce a new release creation behavior. From now on, all your new releases are automatically saved as a draft in order to avoid loosing any of your changes.

Hello there,

We are super excited to introduce our public releases pages. It's still in beta and we are hand picking organizations for testing.

If you would like to be part of the beta, feel free to reach out to us via support@onset.io

Key Features:

• Public projects visible to all your visitors.

• Allow visitors to subscribe to your projects.

• Custom page branding.

• Custom domain.