We Are Nautobot

Four years ago, we made the decision to launch Nautobot. This was not an easy choice, as it meant forking NetBox due to our differing visions of a Source of Truth. As we celebrate Nautobot’s 4th birthday, I want to take a moment to recognize how far we’ve come, highlight our growth, and address some recurring questions about the fork and our relationship with NetBox.

Not Just a Fork—We Are Nautobot

From day one, Nautobot has been a hard fork of NetBox, meaning it has followed its own independent and divergent path. While our history is rooted in a fork, some still assume we are simply downstream, regularly rebasing or pulling updates from NetBox. This is not the case. Nautobot is not just a fork—we are our own differentiated platform, ecosystem, and community with a focus to build and power data-driven network automation.

We often get questions asking if Nautobot is the commercial version of NetBox. Nope. Nautobot is an open source project. Like many open source companies, Network to Code offers commercial solutions around Nautobot such as a SaaS product, applications, support, and services. However, keep in mind the key distinction that led to the fork was our vision that automation should be more tightly coupled with the Source of Truth.

I recently had the opportunity to discuss this at NANOG 93 during a panel discussion. If you’re interested in understanding our perspective on the relationship of data and automation further, you should definitely watch the session.

A Growing Ecosystem

As we celebrate four years of Nautobot, we’re not just celebrating the project itself—we’re celebrating the broader ecosystem and its extensibility. Check out the Nautobot Ecosystem of Apps, but also the broader integration and tooling.

We’re also working hard to reduce the amount of code required to extend Nautobot, leveraging AI-driven solutions to accelerate automation adoption. We expect it to get even easier to add to and extend Nautobot as we go forward adding data models, Jobs, and Apps. Our mission remains consistent and clear: making automation more accessible, scalable, and impactful.

What We’re Celebrating

A lot has happened in the past four years, and there is much to be proud of. Here are a few key milestones outside of just highlighting major core features:

• Commitment to Stability: We follow semantic versioning, ensuring that breaking changes only occur in major releases—this applies across the entire Nautobot ecosystem.
• Nautobot Cloud: We launched a Cloud/SaaS platform to provide an “easy button” for Nautobot. If you haven’t seen the latest demo of Nautobot Cloud, reach out to learn more about its capabilities, including upgrades, clones, and backups.
• Growing App Ecosystem: We’ve built and actively maintain and fully support over 20+ Nautobot Apps (that include even more integrations) with some of the most popular being:
  • Golden Config – manage config compliance and config management directly from the templates and data in Nautobot.
  • Single Source of Truth – turnkey integrations (and a framework) for syncing data to/from Nautobot. Prebuilts include Cisco ACI, Cisco Meraki, Cisco DNA Center, Arista CloudVision, Device42, ServiceNow, Infoblox, IPFabric, Slurpit, SolarWinds, and more. 
  • Device Onboarding – easily onboard brownfield networks into Nautobot.
  • Device Lifecycle Management – model and store EoX dates and CVEs.
  • Design Builder – simplify data management and governance using Network Design Automation.  Focus on managing Network Designs instead of individual data objects. 
• Sustaining Open Source: Maintaining open source is not for the faint of heart. We’ve created and merged thousands of PRs, added countless features, had 100s of releases, and a growing number of contributors. 
• Agile Development: We adopted formal Agile software development years ago and are nearing 100 sprint cycles with planning, grooming, and retros that are required for sustainable Enterprise software development. 
• Evolution as a Company: A few months ago, we celebrated 10 years as a company. With Nautobot now four years old, we’ve evolved into a different organization—one that balances software development with our consulting roots. Our background in consulting keeps us focused on outcomes by working closely with our customers, allowing us to build software that truly addresses their challenges. This cycle of solving customer challenges with Nautobot drives continuous innovation—first delivering solutions for our customers, then evolving into open source software that benefits the broader community. Network to Code and Nautobot are like peanut butter and jelly—Individually great. Together, next level.

Building a Welcoming Community

From the beginning, we set out to build an inclusive and welcoming community for both developers and users. While fostering an open source community is never easy, we remain motivated by the discussions, feature requests, issues, and contributions from the community. The amount of community-activity over the past few years has been amazing to see, and we are incredibly grateful for that support. Most recently, it’s great to see new people joining in on the fun with 100 Days of Nautobot.