From TV Series to famous feature films, Kitsu was involved in a wide range of production styles, including 2D, 3D, 2D/3D, VFX, Stop-Motion, immersive experiences, and monumental projections.
Better, over the past few years, Kitsu has accompanied the animation and VFX industries through all its major changes: pipeline and workflow maturity, lockdown, platform booming, and the recent crisis.
Kitsu enabled studios to adopt distributed setups based on remote work and co-productions. During the good days, it made it easy to onboard many artists quickly, and then it facilitated organizing teams in a lean way.
Today, over 10,000 professionals in the animation and VFX industries use Kitsu daily. Thousands of hours of movies were reviewed and delivered through our system. Kitsu was battle-hardened on many productions and proved its excellence. Movies that used Kistu won all the main awards (Cristal, Oscar, Palme d'Or, etc.) and met success by reaching a large audience.
The game industry also benefited from Kitsu's power. Creative teams from prominent licensing companies adopted it to manage their assets and communicate with artists.
Students enjoyed Kitsu too, by acquiring a professional frame during their studies. Many young professionals were ready to work in a team environment when they started with their first studio.
Most of all, our community helped to refine, improve, and debug the solution throughout the process. We received countless feedback and contributions. It allowed us to build the most accurate software on the market.
That's why, today, we are proud to announce that Kitsu is now available as version 1.0.0! It felt natural to mark the fact that Kitsu is now a robust software that can be used entirely in production. He has successfully proved that it is a fully functional part of a production pipeline. You can now feel confident using it for your productions.
Main Recent New Features
All versions come with new features. Below are the main additions we made to version 1.0.0.
Contact Sheets
Every view can be seen as a contact sheet to get a more visual overview of the production!
Versioned Schedule
You can forecast your schedule and try different scenarios. It's possible to display this same schedule based on the actual dates of tasks.
Task Schedule Split View
To make progress more visual, you can display your schedule as a split view.
Task Schedule Comparison
Still in the task schedule, you can display the previous steps and the day when time sheets were filled. This way, you can set dates with context.
Budget
With Kitsu, you can now forecast your budget and try different scenarios. It includes software and hardware costs. It also allows for comparison with real expenses.
Plugins
Last but not least, you can now tweak Kitsu for any of your use cases. For that, you can set up a new plugin in Kitsu to extend its capabilities.
Upcoming Breaking Changes
This new version is a prelude to the 1.1.0 version that will include some breaking changes. There won't be any backward compatibility. These changes are tied to the execution environment and are listed below:
- Kitsu REST API (Zou): Drop Support for:
- Postgres < 14
- Python < 3.10
- Python API (Gazu) - Drop Support for: Python 2.7 and Python 3.6
- Kitsu UI: Only the following web browsers will be supported
- Chrome >=107
- Edge >=107
- Firefox >=104
- Safari >=16
If you can't do without these tools, v1.0.0 will always be a robust software for you. If you self-host Kitsu and want to stick with the latest versions, you will have to update the dependencies. Cloud and On-Premise users are not affected by the Kitsu REST API changes.
What's next
Since the beginning of Kitsu, we have operated two main developments. The first one was dedicated to Artists, Supervisors, and Directors. It included the basic features necessary for collaboration and review of the work done, such as task dispatching, commenting, status updates, and the review engine.
Then, we ran a new phase dedicated to Producers with scheduling, budget, and cross-project features (and soon-to-come, carbon consumption tracking). We also added the capability to compare forecasting with real data.
Following these two significant additions, we have entered a consolidation phase, during which we will refine all existing features and optimize performance. Once this operation is complete, we will proceed to the third phase, dedicated to Technical Directors.
We will focus on integrations and extension capabilities of Kisu. In other words, we will make the use of Kitsu with DCCs seamless and ensure that our plugin system covers all your use cases.
Overall, version 1.0.0 is a significant milestone for Kitsu. It wraps a long and committed work and opens the door to a new era for the software. We will keep pushing it forward to allow you to
Celebrate it!
We will celebrate this release with a full day of conference dedicated to Kitsu on February 12, 2026 in the heart of Paris, France! We will deliver more details about the future roadmap. Now that Kitsu impacts so many creative professionals, this event will have a significant impact on the industry. Let's come together to design the future of production collaboration. Join us for this unique event!
