UXP 2.0 and Crossplane: Clarifying the Relationship

Last week, we introduced Upbound Crossplane (UXP) 2.0 — our AI-native distribution of Crossplane — alongside the monumental release of Crossplane 2.0. With these announcements, we want to provide more clarity on how UXP relates to upstream Crossplane, and how our role at Upbound evolves as the project matures within the CNCF.

Crossplane's Path in the CNCF

Crossplane was donated to the CNCF in May 2020. Since then, the community has steadily grown, the project has matured, and adoption has expanded across industries. Today, Crossplane powers thousands of production deployments worldwide, including companies like Apple, Nike, and Allianz that are known to be running and scaling it in production. We’re humbled by this growth and the project’s broad appeal.

Crossplane is now applying for CNCF graduation, positioning itself to join the ranks of foundational CNCF projects like Kubernetes and Prometheus. This milestone affirms its status as a vendor-neutral, community-governed project with proven production maturity.

Our Evolving Role as Creator and Vendor

As the creator of Crossplane and one of its primary maintainers, Upbound has been driving important changes to prepare the project for graduation. A critical requirement for CNCF graduation is vendor neutrality — maintaining a clean separation between what belongs to the community and what is vendor-driven. We’re excited about these changes as they set Crossplane up for long-term success and adoption.

In practice, this means:

• Separating community-maintained providers and functions from vendor-maintained ones
• Establishing xpkg.crossplane.io as the community registry, distinct from the Upbound Marketplace at marketplace.upbound.io
• Defining a health criteria for community providers and functions
• Ensuring governance stays vendor-neutral and community-first
• Following Kubernetes’s model: a flexible framework – batteries not included.

This approach keeps Crossplane broadly useful while ensuring neutrality. At the same time, we hear consistent feedback from users and customers: they want better developer experiences, robust provider ecosystems, and enterprise features.

UXP: An Opinionated Crossplane Distribution

This is where distributions come in. Just as Linux has Ubuntu and Red Hat, or Kubernetes has OpenShift and Rancher, Crossplane now has UXP. By creating commercial value alongside open source, we can meet user needs while sustaining and growing our contributions to the upstream project.

With UXP 2.0, we believe we can balance both. Crossplane is the control plane framework, and UXP is our opinionated distribution.

UXP is designed as a seamless upgrade from Crossplane — it even shares version numbers — but adds important elements:

• Free forever in the Community Edition — no license required, no limits
• 100% API compatible with upstream Crossplane
• New Developer Experience — manage your control planes like a software project, complete with IDE integration, linting, autocomplete, unit testing, integration testing, and AI-powered authoring
• Web UI — explore, debug, and learn your control plane without digging through YAML
• AI-native capabilities — integrate Claude and OpenAI directly into control plane operations
• Access to Official Packages — curated and tested providers
• Production hardening — optional enterprise features like provider autoscaling and integrated backup

The Community Edition includes a completely new and opinionated developer experience, the web UI, and provider ecosystem access — all completely free. If you need enterprise features, you can purchase a license. If not, the Community Edition is production-ready on its own.

How We Work Alongside Crossplane and Our Commitment

We want to be clear: creating UXP does not reduce our commitment to Crossplane — it strengthens it. We remain the largest contributor and are investing heavily in its growth.

Our model is straightforward:

• Upstream Crossplane (CNCF): The vendor-neutral foundation. Community-owned APIs, extensibility model, and core framework. Upbound contributes as a maintainer alongside others.
• Upbound Crossplane (UXP): Our distribution that extends Crossplane with opinionated experiences, enterprise hardening, and the path toward the Intelligent Control Plane. Free forever in Community Edition, with optional enterprise features.

Our commitments to the community:

• Crossplane upstream remains vendor neutral, community-owned, and broadly maintained
• UXP Community Edition stays free forever — no limits, no tricks
• Community providers in crossplane-contrib continue to work with OSS Crossplane and support full Crossplane 2.0 features
• The community registry at xpkg.crossplane.io remains separate from the Upbound Marketplace, and well maintained with regular updates and releases.

This ensures Crossplane thrives as a neutral CNCF project, while Upbound continues to innovate with a sustainable model.

Understanding the Provider Changes

Starting with version 2.0, Official Providers now require UXP. This reflects our goal of keeping a clear separation between upstream and vendor-driven work:

• Upbound Official Providers: Maintained, hardened, and tested by Upbound. These now run exclusively on UXP.
• Community Crossplane Providers: Maintained within the crossplane-contrib organization, and fully supported on upstream Crossplane.

Why this change? Maintaining and hardening large families of providers isn’t just about writing new code. It means tracking upstream API changes across multiple clouds, running and maintaining large-scale testing infrastructure, backporting fixes across multiple release lines, and performing regression testing across thousands of CRDs and configurations. It also includes monitoring, triaging, and patching CVEs quickly — a responsibility that demands real-time attention and heavy operational investment. Doing all of this reliably requires a dedicated, full-time engineering team and significant infrastructure resources, far beyond what an OSS project can sustainably take on.

By making Official Providers part of UXP, we can ensure they are continuously tested, secure, patched for vulnerabilities, and enterprise-ready. Meanwhile, community providers continue to thrive upstream, where Upbound and other maintainers invest heavily in their development and ecosystem health.

Your options:

• Running OSS Crossplane? Continue using pre-2.0 Official Provider versions, or move to community providers in crossplane-contrib.
• Want the latest Official Providers? Upgrade to UXP Community Edition — free, no license required.
• Prefer community providers? They remain available and supported at xpkg.crossplane.io.

We believe this approach provides clarity: upstream Crossplane continues with community-driven providers, while UXP delivers Official Providers with enterprise-grade quality.

Looking Forward

Crossplane and UXP are distinct but complementary:

• Crossplane (CNCF): The vendor-neutral control plane framework — the foundation for building cloud-native platforms
• UXP (Upbound): The AI-native distribution that extends Crossplane with developer tooling, hardened providers, and intelligent capabilities

We’re committed to both. Crossplane thrives as a CNCF project, ready to graduate alongside Kubernetes and Prometheus. UXP delivers the features and experience users ask for while ensuring Upbound can invest in the ecosystem long term.

Whether you choose OSS Crossplane with community providers or UXP with Official Packages, you’re building on the same proven control plane foundation. The choice is yours, and we’ll support you either way. We hope you’ll give UXP a try — the Community Edition truly plays no games — but if OSS Crossplane is the right fit for you, that’s great too. The important thing is that you succeed with the path you choose.