As 2025 comes to a close, we’re taking a moment to reflect on a year that was, quite honestly, incredible. It’s been a journey of real growth and meaningful connection, made even better by welcoming more than 350,000 new teams and innovators into our community. We want to be transparent with you: everything we do is centered on the idea that we’re building this platform specifically for you.
Your work, your shared ideas, and the way you use Markdown to bring projects to life are the real reasons we show up every day to ensure your collaboration remains effortless.
Looking ahead to 2026, we’re excited to keep streamlining your documentation process and helping you say goodbye to version control headaches for good. We’ve been looking at the features and stats that defined our year together, and we can’t wait to share those highlights—along with a sneak peek at the vision we’re crafting for the months to come.
Our goal remains simple: to keep providing an inviting, helpful space where you can connect with your team and innovate together.
We’re just people building for people, and we’re so glad you’re here for what’s next. 💜
Everything we shipped in 2025
2025 has been an incredibly busy and rewarding ride for our team. We’ve spent the year focused on making your real-time collaboration feel even more effortless, rolling out several of the highly-requested features you told us were essential to your workflow.
We’re proud to have shipped a suite of updates designed to make your real-time collaboration feel more effortless and synchronized. We prioritized your most frequent requests to ensure our editor remains the most flexible space for developers and teams to build together. This year, we introduced Folders and Tag Management to streamline how you organize your knowledge, alongside a Profile Reboot to give your personal and team presence a modern, tech-savvy edge. We also focused on the fine details of the editing experience, launching Paragraph Bookmarks, Paragraph Citations, and Guided Comments to help you navigate and reference complex documentation with precision.
To further enhance how you communicate with your community, we rolled out interactive features like Emoji Replies and Link Previews, making every document feel more alive and connected. We’ve also simplified the way you manage and distribute your work with the introduction of Version Links and Shareable Links. Each of these features was built with our "honesty first" philosophy in mind, ensuring that our platform remains a lightweight, trusted place for you to accelerate innovation and bring your projects to life.
We’ve made exciting updates to the text editor and an overall updated product experience, empowering you to collaborate and innovate even more effectively. We are committed to building a platform that is both highly functional and a way for like-minded people to connect.
Partnering to amplify collaboration and documentation
In 2025 we partnered with both open-source industry leaders such as OpenJS and Web3 Startups such as Updraft and Blockfuse Labs!
Beyond the code we write, we know that building a truly connected community requires more than just a great editor; it requires deep collaboration with those who share our values. This is why our partnerships with OpenJS, Updraft, and Blockfuse Labs are so vital to our mission of empowering developers to share ideas.
By working alongside these teams, we bridge the gap between open-source standards and decentralized technology, ensuring that HackMD remains a trusted place for you to accelerate innovation. We believe in being authentically ourselves and building for you, and these relationships allow us to bring even more of that collective expertise to your daily workflow.
Connecting with the community
Aside from updates and partnerships, the HackMD team took some time to connect with the community, dive deeper into our mission, and meet up with the teams that build on our platform in real life.
We made a deliberate effort to meet our community where they already build and learn. One highlight was connecting with Tech Stack Nation, a live study group and developer community actively using HackMD as part of their learning and documentation workflows.
Sitting down with their team gave us a firsthand look at how HackMD supports real collaboration in educational and technical environments, from shared notes to structured learning resources.
These conversations reinforced why staying close to our users matters. By listening, learning, and showing up, we strengthened our connection to the community and gained valuable insight that continues to shape how HackMD evolves for the people building on it every day.
HackMD spent time learning from communities like The Commons Economy, who are actively exploring better ways to build and share knowledge together. Their work challenges the idea that collaboration should live inside closed, static documents.
Through conversations and shared examples, we saw how HackMD supports their shift away from Google Docs toward workflows built on openness, version history, and collective contribution.
Seeing how The Commons Economy uses HackMD reinforced something we believe deeply: collaboration works best when everyone can participate, understand what changed, and build on each other’s work. That mindset shaped how we continued to improve HackMD throughout the year.
The team also made time to Step away from our screens and spend time with the developer community in person. One highlight was attending JSConf 2025, where we had the chance to connect directly with the people building, teaching, and experimenting with JavaScript every day. Being there gave us a clearer picture of how documentation, collaboration, and shared knowledge fit into real development workflows, not just in theory, but in practice.
Spending time at JSConf reminded us that collaboration does not start or end with a finished document. HackMD often plays a role much earlier, when ideas are still forming, notes are messy, and conversations are evolving, and talking face-to-face with developers reinforced why we focus so much on creating tools that support thinking together, iteration, and openness, long before anything is considered complete.
No longer a tool but a growing ecosystem
We say this every year, but it keeps becoming more true. HackMD continues to grow because of the people using it.
In 2025, builders, educators, and teams around the world used HackMD to create, share, and collaborate in ways that went far beyond writing notes. What started as a simple editor has grown into an ecosystem shaped by real workflows, real communities, and real collaboration across borders. Everything we built this year was informed by how you use HackMD every day.
Here is a snapshot of what that growth looked like in 2025, made possible by the teams and individuals building together on HackMD:
But the numbers only tell part of the story. Behind them are teams turning documentation into momentum. One of those teams is Taipei Tech Racing.
TTR is just one example of how HackMD empowers communities, but they are far from alone. Across software development, web3, research, education, startups, and non-profits, teams rely on HackMD to collaborate openly and move ideas forward together. Whether it is early brainstorming, shared documentation, or long-term knowledge building, HackMD provides the space for people to come together, spark creativity, and turn ideas into action. That shared momentum is what continues to shape everything we build next.
Our vision for 2026
As we head into 2026, our focus is clear. We want to bring collaboration and knowledge closer together. Over the years, HackMD has helped teams work side by side, but we know that great ideas often live beyond a single workspace or document. They live in communities, shared learnings, and the connections between people doing similar work.
In the year ahead, we are exploring new ways to help that knowledge travel further. We want it to be easier to discover how others are working, learn from real examples, and build on ideas that already exist.
This means creating more intentional paths between collaboration and exploration, so knowledge does not stay siloed once a project is finished. That vision is what guides our next chapter.
With upcoming community-focused features, including new ways to explore and surface shared work, HackMD is evolving into a place where collaboration leads naturally into learning and discovery. In 2026, we are focused on bridging the gap between creating together and learning from one another, so ideas can move further, faster, and with more people involved.
We are excited to build this next chapter alongside you.