EventCatalog March 2025 update
Welcome to the monthly update for EventCatalog, here you can find what’s next, how to get started, and what’s coming next.
EventCatalog community continues to grow ❤️, now we have 1,097 Discord members, 2.1k Stars on GitHub, 820 new catalogs have been created in March and 11.2k catalogs built into production. EventCatalog continues to grow every month, and we are on track with open source sustainability.
EventCatalog sponsors OSO and Gravitee continue their sponsorship for the project (thank you!) 🙏. This sponsorship helps my goal towards open source sustainability. EventCatalog is free to use and open source, if you want to support the project checkout the tiers on GitHub or contact me directly at dave@eventcatalog.dev , I really appreciate any support ❤️
In March we introduced tiered pricing, EventCatalog MCP Server, Custom nodes to Flows, New Navigation Bar, More customization options, new components and many features were introduced.
- Introducing EventCatalog Tiered Pricing
- Introducing Architecture Overviews
- Introducing EventCatalog MCP Server
- Introducing custom nodes to flows
- Introducing MessageTable - Ability to see all messages a given domain
- Resource Groups with EventCatalog
- Improved Search results in EventCatalog
- New navigation bar for your documentation
- Customize your application sidebar
- Project improvements
- New talk - Managing Complexity with Event-Driven Architecture
- What’s coming in April?
In this blog post we will dive deeper into features and improvements that were released in March, and how you can get started.
Introducing EventCatalog Tiered Pricing
In March we introduced tiered pricing to EventCatalog, these plans include, Community Edition, Starter Plan, Scale Plan and Enterprise Plan, our aim is to help companies when they need it, and scale governance and documentation with them along their journey.
After years of working with event-driven architecture, I’ve come to see it as a journey that many companies undertake. It often begins with simple broker-based pub/sub patterns, which are easy to understand and manage early on. At this stage, governance isn't a major concern. But as the architecture scales across the organization, complexity grows—and with it, the need for stronger governance and structure becomes increasingly clear.
When you go from 10 events to 1000s of events, maintenance becomes hard and people fall into the same common mistakes around versioning strategy, lack of documentation, and wasted time trying to figure all this out. (I have a talk about all this!)
The new EventCatalog plans are designed to support you at every stage of your event-driven journey, scaling governance and documentation as your needs grow.
Begin with the Community edition to get up and running quickly. As your requirements expand, the Start plan offers additional capabilities like custom documentation and conversational architecture insights. When it's time to scale your architecture, the Scale plan introduces automation and advanced features to streamline your workflow. And for organizations operating at mass scale, our Enterprise plan provides the tools and flexibility needed to manage complexity with confidence.
You can find the plans here and features that are included in each tier, if you have any questions feel free to reach out, happy to help.
Introducing new Architecture Overviews
Architecture pages were released into EventCatalog. This is another way to quickly visualize and understand what messages are doing to and from your services and domains.
The architecture diagrams let you drill down into various different levels of information. Starting at domains, you can click into your services to see detailed information about what messages are sent/received from that service, and finally clicking on the message will take you to the documentation and schema for that message.
Using the filters you can quickly filter by message type, or search for domains, services and messages you are interested in. If you are interested to learn more you can watch the video here or view the demo.
Introducing EventCatalog MCP Server
You can now use EventCatalog inside your IDE or any MCP client. This brings a huge amount of value to EventCatalog for your teams and developers. Your team can now talk to your catalog of information in the client of their choice (e.g IDE), and use that context to create code , get schemas or understand their architecture.
Teams waste a huge amount of time trying to find the information they need. In event-driven architectures this problem scales fast. Being able to quickly find producers/consumers, schemas, messages, and context can save a huge amount of time, and now using the MCP server I believe developers can save even more time.
As developers are writing and exploring ideas, they can talk directly to your EventCatalog to get the information they need, and write code based on the context of your architecture.
This is the first release of this feature, and we look to add more value in April.
If you are interested and want to try the feature you can read more in the release blog post.
Introducing custom nodes to flows
EventCatalog gives you the ability to document business workflows (EventCatalog Flows). You can use your resource inventory (services and messages) and create business workflows. These workflows can help your organization understand and know what is happening in your architecture.
Flows can be used to help you get more value from EventCatalog. Think of a feature you have, from A to Z, and you want to document what happens and the events, messages, services, external systems that it interacts with. This is what flows help you document.
In March we released the ability to add any custom node to your flow. To give you examples, you can now document schedules, decisions, timers, processors… anything you want!
Using custom nodes you can now document any business flow you want in EventCatalog and embed these flows directly into your documentation using the Flow component.
You can get started reading the documentation or view the demo.
Introducing MessageTable - Ability to see all messages a given domain
Some users want to see all the messages that belong to a domain, so we introduced a new component called MessageTable.
The new message table component will list all messages in a domain or service on your documentation page and give your users the ability to quickly search for messages they are interested in and filter them by queries, commands or events.
To get started you can read the documentation or view the demo.
Resource Groups with EventCatalog
We introduced the idea of Resource Groups, this gives you the ability to document and group resources in EventCatalog in ways that EventCatalog wasn’t to before.
With resource groups you can also define your own documentation sections in your sidebars.
This feature just gives you more flexibility if you need it. You can read the documentation to get started.
Improved Search results in EventCatalog
Thanks to our community we now have better search results in EventCatalog. Using the search bar in EventCatalog will now return better results for your users, giving them the ability to quickly find what they need.
AsyncAPI and OpenAPI documents are also added to the search results.
New navigation bar for your documentation
In March we released a new navigation bar option to help organize your documentation. With this new navigation bar you can quickly find the information you need, use custom badges to highlight resources and also view OpenAPI and AsyncAPI specifications.
To get started you can read the documentation, to learn how to opt into this navigation bar.
Customize your application sidebar
You can now pick and choose which features are shown in your application side bar, giving you more flexibility for your catalog and documentation.
To get started you can read the documentation
Project improvements
- We moved over to MDX files for EventCatalog, for faster interactions with EventCatalog
- Custom landing pages now support components
- We added ResourceLink and Link components to help you create links in your catalog
- Tile component, now supports colors and icons
- Flows now have a sidebar to help you quickly see flow owners, versions and changelogs.
- EventCatalog Studio still on target for initial release in Q2 2025.
- OpenAPI Generator 5.0.2 is now out. Adding
httpMethodsToMessagesproperty to the OpenAPI Generator plugin. Map HTTP methods to message types easier in EventCatalog.
Upgrade your EventCatalog
To get the most of all the new features, we recommend upgrading to the latest version of EventCatalog.
npm install @eventcatalog/core@latest
New Talk - Managing Complexity with Event-Driven Architecture
Ealier in the year I gave a new talk about complexity with event-driven architecture, and how domain-driven design can help you manage complexity.
If you are interested in learning more about event-driven architecture, and how to manage complexity, you can watch the talk below.
What’s coming in April?
In April we are releasing the ability to add custom documentation to EventCatalog, this gives you the ability to bring your own docs to your catalog (e.g Runbooks, Product pages etc), this gives you flexibility on what you want to document, whilst using EventCatalog components to enhance it. We will also be adding custom docs to EventCatalog Chat and MCP server.
We also want to release the first version of our Schema API. This will let you call EventCatalog as an API to get your schemas, which could be useful for contract testing, validation and much more. We are looking to follow the xRegistry specification for this.
Introducing the ability to add drafts to EventCatalog and letting teams use EventCatalog in early phases of your journey. Documenting your thoughts and getting feedback from your teams.
We are aiming to get the Confluent schema registry plugin released, giving you the ability to pull in schemas from Confluent into EventCatalog.
We are exploring runtime components, giving you the ability to write your own runtime components/blocks on your page to extend the catalog into more personal use cases (e.g self service for producers/consumers, datadog integrations).
We want to spend more time on Event EventCatalog Studio. Giving you the ability to do all of this with a custom UI, and design your EventCatalog.
As normal, things can change but this is the direction we are heading.
If you have any questions or want to join our community of over 1100 people exploring EventCatalog and event-driven architecture feel free to join us!
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