Balancing rapid innovation with our commitment to the open-source community
We’re excited to share an important evolution in how Santa connects with Workshop. Today, we’re introducing a new private sync protocol that will enable North Pole Security to deliver an exceptional experience for Workshop customers while maintaining Santa as the world-class open source project our community relies on.
What’s Changing
The Santa 2025.10 release introduces a new, private sync protocol alongside the existing public protocol. This private protocol includes a limited set of features available exclusively to Workshop customers. The public sync protocol remains fully functional and will continue to be actively maintained and improved.
If you’re currently using Santa with your own sync server or third-party solutions, nothing changes for you. Everything continues to work exactly as it does today.
Why We’re Making This Change
We’ve been committed to two parallel goals: keeping Santa robust and openly available while building Workshop as an enterprise-grade platform. This dual approach requires sustainable investment in both the open source project and our commercial offering.
The private protocol gives us several key advantages:
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Faster innovation for Workshop customers: By decoupling certain enterprise-specific features from the public protocol, we can iterate more rapidly without the constraint of maintaining backward compatibility across all existing clients. This means Workshop customers get new capabilities more quickly.
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Sustained investment in Santa: A stronger commercial foundation ensures we can continue investing significant engineering resources in open source.
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Clear product differentiation: Enterprise customers choosing Workshop get advanced features, dedicated support, and rapid iteration on their specific needs. Open source users get a battle-tested, industry-proven security tool from its core maintainers.
Our Commitment Going Forward
We’re excited for what this change lets us do. As the maintainers of Santa and creators of Workshop, we feel a deep responsibility to both the open source community and our enterprise customers. This approach allows us to serve both constituencies well.