🎉 Yes, you all have been waiting for this moment for almost too long 🎉
The new version of Kimai, which was announced and released as beta back in January, has received 22 minor releases since then. And now it is finally time to make it official: Kimai 2.0 is available for everyone.
Let’s explore 5 reasons why you should upgrade.
This release is the result of almost 1.5 years work and received hundreds of visible and invisible changes. Hundreds of hours went into the improvement of Kimai itself, the website and documentation. Read the detailed list in this post, here are some:
With this news the 1.x series is also officially retired and will not receive any more updates.
In fact, the last release for the 1.x series was released on the 17th of February with the number 1.30.8.
These super important security features were added to Kimai:
It’s a simple technical fact: PHP 8.1 outperforms 7.4.
In combination with the new frontend architecture, this should make Kimai faster. If it doesn’t: change your hoster and/or read Reason 5.
What happened in Kimai:
PHP 7.4, which is the supported version of Kimai 1.30 and the one many of you are using, is end-of-life. Meaning that it doesn’t receive updates sind December 2021 and doesn’t even receive security fixes since December 2022.
Do not run your business on an outdated software stack, especially if it publicly available server software.
Kimai is a server software, that needs a bit of technical knowledge when it comes to hosting and maintenance. And not everyone is familiar with the Linux bash.
If you want to use the latest and greatest feature, you can use www.kimai.cloud and be always up-to-date. If you have many employees or a strict governance, using the on-premise version of Kimai might be the best solution. But if you are a solo entrepreneur or a small company, it is cheaper and a big time-saver to use the cloud version of Kimai.
To make it simpler for you to move to the cloud, and saving you the hassle of updating Kimai, I am announcing the “Summer of Free Migration”: If you switch to a paid plan, I will import your existing Kimai data for free. All I need is the registered cloud and a database dump of your current Kimai installation. Please contact me to discuss the details.
Old plugins are no longer compatible. So please read this post if you are using Kimai 1 plugins.
Cloud users do not need to worry about this.