When will Craft CMS 6 launch?

At this year’s Dot All 2025, Pixel & Tonic CEO Brandon Kelly delivered his long anticipated update on when we can expect Craft CMS 6, but all was not as we expected. That’s because prior to launch the team will be making a switch from Yii 2.0 to Laravel, an ambitious project that means Craft CMS 5 will be supported for a lot longer than we initially anticipated. Here’s everything you need to know about the port and Craft CMS 6.
Yii 2.0 and Laravel are PHP frameworks. This is a set of tools and pre-written code that helps developers build PHP web applications consistently and securely. It provides a structure or foundation so that you don’t need to build every project from scratch.
Why is Craft CMS moving to Laravel?
Craft CMS has always been built on the Yii framework, and it’s served Craft well, but over the years, the ecosystem has changed and, as Brandon explained, Yii 2.0 is no longer meeting developers where they need to be.
The team are also keen to stress that the move isn’t a decision that has been made lightly, there has been much discussion, thought and research. Ultimately, it was felt that Yii would quickly become legacy.
Laravel, in contrast, offers an active community, a rich ecosystem of packages and tools and excellent support. There’s also a sense that Laravel is a familiar framework for a lot of developers and it’s encouraging that the team can demonstrate a clear and ambitious roadmap for its future.
Choosing a full port over a phased approach
Pixel & Tonic has clearly given significant thought to whether they’d take a phased approach to the process or opt for a full port. The latter won out. Craft has been established for many years, it’s a huge application with lots of legacy code written by lots of people. The consensus was that, while replatforming is never an easy task, it would be better and much quicker to opt for a full port.
This is not the first time the team has managed a huge transition. Many of the team recall the difficult switch from Craft 2 to Craft 3. Pixel & Tonic are determined to make the move from Yii 2.0 to Laravel, and the road to Craft CMS 6, far smoother. That’s why they’re building a Yii 2.0 adaptor.
This adapter means that we as developers won’t need to rewrite everything immediately. While Pixel & Tonic are carrying out a full port, Craft CMS developers have the option of taking a phased approach to updating plugins, modules, and integrations. It will offer most existing Craft CMS and Commerce classes, rewritten as Laravel wrappers and will share everything needed with Laravel to ensure a better experience for developers. The code for the adapter: composer require craftcms/yii2-adapter, can easily be added to your project or plugin and it stays there as long as you need it.
This not only reassures us as developers, it gives our clients’ peace of mind that the transition will be smooth and seamless.

When is Craf CMS 6 launching?
While the port to Laravel is already underway, Pixel & Tonic has shared the tentative release timeline for Craft 6. We can expect Alpha in Q1 2026, Beta in Q3 2026 and GA in Q4 2026. But the team also announced that Craft CMS 5 will continue to receive active support until December 2030 and security support until December 2031.
What does this mean for our clients? There’s plenty of time to schedule in your Craft CMS 6 upgrade, but we understand that some clients’ will be budgeting to upgrade sooner rather than later.
We have a policy to never launch sites in Beta, so the earliest you can expect to be upgraded is Q4 2026, more realistically 2027 onwards.
While you won’t need to upgrade to Craft 6 right away, we understand that some client’s will want to budget for an upgrade at a time to suit their business. We’re likely to start scheduling these from Q1 2027.

We'll begin scheduling our client’s upgrades once it’s in general release, more than likely in Q1 of 2026.
For those looking to upgrade to Craft CMS 6, expect a host of immediate improvements to the authoring experience which include the ability to:
- Schedule multiple edits across entries
- Schedule drafts for future publication
- Import content
- Set approval workflows
- Comment directly within entry pages
- Track changes and history with element activity logs.
We can also expect some significant improvements to the user interface. The team is introducing dark mode and a much more user-friendly mobile first experience. They’re also assuring us of full WCAG 2.2 compliance for accessibility, something that we at webdna already build to. That’s why the Pixel & Tonic team will be using Lion, a framework for building accessible web components, to create a storybook-powered style guide.
For the team at Pixel & Tonic this shift is about future-proofing Craft CMS. It’s a long-term investment that opens the door to a better developer experience and stronger performance for the system. We at webdna very much welcome the news.

We are experts in Craft CMS and specialise in taking an approach that is right for your business and your goals. Why not take a closer look at our development services.