On Wednesday November 12th, during the Helm 4 presentation at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, Helm v4.0.0 was released. This is the first new major version of Helm in 6 years.

What's New​

Helm v3 has served the Kubernetes community well for many years. During that time we saw new ways to use Helm, new applications installed via charts, the rise of Artifact Hub, and numerous tools that build on top of Helm. We also saw where we wanted to add features but the internal architecture of Helm didn't provide a path forward without breaking public APIs in the SDK. Helm 4 makes those changes to enable new features now and into the future.

Some of the new features include:

• Redesigned plugin system that supports Web Assembly based plugins
• Post-renderers are now plugins
• Server side apply is now supported
• Improved resource watching, to support waiting, based on kstatus
• Local Content-based caching (e.g. for charts)
• Logging via slog enabling SDK logging to integrate with modern loggers
• Reproducible/Idempotent builds of chart archives
• Updated SDK API including support for multiple chart API versions (new experimental v3 chart API version coming soon)

You can learn about more of the changes in the Helm 4 Overview.

Helm v3 Support​

When a major version of software comes out, it takes awhile to make the transition. Helm v3 will continue to be supported to enable a clean transition period. The dates of continued support are:

• Bug fixes until July 8th 2026.
• Security fixes until November 11th 2026.

Helm releases updates on Wednesdays (typically the 2nd Wednesday in a month) and these dates correspond with release schedule dates. During this time there will be NO features backported other than updates to the Kubernetes client libraries that enable support of new Kubernetes versions.

Learn More​

You can learn about the Helm changes in the overview or find all the changes in the full changelog. The documentation shares many more details as you can find all the ways Helm has stayed the same and the new features you can take advantage of.