Claris just shipped FileMaker 2026, and it lands alongside some of the most consequential platform changes the company has made in years. Taken together, this release is another major step toward a FileMaker built for the agentic era—where the line between "describe what you want" and "ship working software" keeps shrinking.
You can read our take on Ryan McCann's announcement in our recent post. If you haven't seen the source material yet, go watch it: here's the Claris blog and the YouTube announcement.
And with dozens of platform, UI, and scripting updates, this release is also packed with love for the classic FileMaker developer experience. For the full set of release notes, check out this link.
Here are a few things that stand out to us.
A simpler name: 2026 is also v26
Maybe our favorite change. FileMaker 2026 is also FileMaker v26. Claris skipped a few version numbers to bring the marketing name and the version number back in sync. From here on, you don't have to juggle two names to be sure everyone is talking about the same release.
Artificial intelligence
FileMaker 2026 makes it easier for humans to develop AI features and for AI agents to understand your files. Being able to add context to your data and represent a database as text, gives your AI agents everything they need to make sense of your FileMaker files.
Google Gemini support. Google Gemini joins the roster of AI providers you can call from FileMaker–yay! This is good news for FileMaker customers with Google Cloud accounts. Google’s gemini and gemma are very capable models useful for text generation and embeddings.
Field and table annotations. New FieldAnnotation and BaseTableComment functions let you tell an AI what your data means, not just what it's cryptically named. cust__fName becomes "customer first name" everywhere it counts—prompts, exports, and the schema you hand to a model.
Smarter RAG. Retrieval now handles multilingual content and scanned, OCR'd PDFs, and your index survives a server upgrade instead of getting rebuilt from scratch.
If you've been following our work on ProofKit, you can see where this is going. The more FileMaker can describe your file to an agent, the easier it becomes for agents to build and maintain modern hybrid apps on top of it.
Stay online no matter what
FileMaker 2026 brings business continuity into the platform itself, with two new optional add-ons for FileMaker Server: Remote Backup and Standby Server. Both are paid (see Claris self-hosted pricing: https://www.claris.com/pricing/self-hosted.html) services you choose to add, making them available as a layer in your continuity plan. For teams hosting on Ottomatic, they complement the protections you already have.
Remote Backup. FileMaker Server can now send an encrypted offsite backup every 20 minutes, configured right from the Admin Console. Offsite backup is familiar ground for us. Ottomatic and the other established hosts have done it for years, and it's good to see Claris make it a first-class, built-in feature managed in one place. One thing worth knowing as you plan: Claris routes these backups to their own managed cloud rather than to storage you control. That's a sensible default for some shops. If your compliance posture calls for remote backups in your own infrastructure, OttoFMS by Proof has you covered.
Standby Server. Pair a second server to your primary, kept in sync by incremental backup and ready to take over when you trigger a switchover. It's a genuinely useful addition, and it pays to understand exactly what it is so you set expectations correctly: it's a manually promoted standby, not synchronous replication or automatic failover. You decide when to promote, and anything written between the last sync and the switchover is at risk. Primary-secondary pairs must run matching operating systems, macOS with macOS, Windows with Windows, Ubuntu with Ubuntu. You can also stand the secondary up from a VM snapshot, which fits fleet deployments well. With the right understanding and configuration, Standby Server is a strong foundation for a managed high-availability tier.
Claris gave server resilience a little love under the hood, too. The Data API, OData, and the Web Publishing Engine now restart themselves automatically after a crash, eliminating a whole category of after-hours alerts. Of course, it’s worth pairing this ability with a platform like Ottomatic that includes monitoring—repeated repeated restarts are a signal that something upstream deserves a closer look.
Beefed-up developer-focused features
2026 brings a round of UI and quality-of-life improvements you’ll feel immediately and appreciate throughout your work day.
Save a Copy as XML — Now you can generate XML on a per-catalog or batch basis, allowing you to better represent your database as text, diff it in source control, and then rebuild or patch your file with the FileMaker Upgrade Tool. All of which opens the door to AI-drafted schema and bulk changes you’d never want to make by hand.
Adaptive Inspector on macOS— The Inspector collapses from four tabs to two and surfaces only the controls for your current selection, so you can spend less time hunting (the classic Inspector is still available if you want full visibility).
A tidier Script Workspace — Reduced visual clutter where you spend the most time.
Granular PDF as a script steps — You can now build, assemble, and save multi-page PDFs entirely within Script Workspace—client-side or server-side—with no plug-in required. Read John Renfrew’s blog for a deeper dive.
Control field entry by calculation. Field editability is now a boolean calculation evaluated at runtime, so you can lock a field based on status, role, or any logic you define. Say goodbye to dedicated “no-edit” calcs!
My personal favorite: FileMaker 2026 comes with a new persistent data store that gives you a place to store solution-level settings, feature flags, and upgrade states that survive data migrations, restarts, and upgrades. No more one-record config tables or global-field workarounds. Plus, add-on configuration data can now survive data-migrations
Other nice touches: WebP container support, sortable custom function folders, layout zoom by calculation, and a long list of smaller fixes. The WebP is a sleeper feature as it can dramatically lower the cost of bandwidth utilization.
Security-first platform updates
Agents raise the stakes on security, and this release answers with a deep platform refresh. FileMaker 2026 upgrades to OpenSSL 3.5 LTS and Apache Tomcat 10.1.44+, certifies on Windows Server 2025, adds IPv6 support, runs fully on the latest macOS, and clears a large batch of dependency vulnerabilities. WebDirect also gains real accessibility support—proper ARIA, screen-reader compatibility, and logical tab order—which unblocks ADA and Section 508 deployments on your existing layouts. And on the server, the single script engine is no longer a hard cap: you can run more than one process in parallel, so server-side scripts stop queuing behind each other under load.
What this means for Proof customers
FileMaker 2026 brings the exciting world of agentic development closer to FileMaker’s core foundations of dependability, flexibility, and trust. If this release has you rethinking what's possible, we'd love to talk!
What's next
We're genuinely excited about the direction Claris is taking. Keep an eye out for an upcoming episode of The Context Podcast with Ernest Koe and Ryan McCann on FileMaker, AI, and where the tech is heading
Until then, catch our most recent episode: FileMaker, AI, and ProofKit, where Todd Geist, Ernest Koe, and Eric Luce dig into FileMaker's agentic turn and how it—and ProofKit—make web app development dramatically easier.
For the full feature list, see the FileMaker 2026 release notes.
AI Disclaimer: outlined by humans, drafted by AI, edited by humans
