Blender Survey 2026: What Should They Fix Next?

For those who don’t know the thing: Blender is a free, open-source 3D creation suite. The Blender Foundation coordinates the community project, with development supported primarily through donations. Its annual user survey asks who uses the software, how they work and where they want improvements. This is a chance to describe the working day behind the finished render, including the bits usually communicated to the monitor in language unsuitable for documentation.

The Blender Foundation has done something rather wonderful: opened the 2026 user survey and asked its users what they want. Not just the veterans who can gather around a workstation and tell stories from version 1.0, when the buttons lived somewhere else and everyone apparently knew why. The invitation is to the wider community, including people whose Blender origin story began last Tuesday.

We like that. Years of production experience can reveal where a workflow creaks; fresh eyes can spot the peculiar ritual everyone else has stopped questioning. Both deserve a hearing. If getting a job done involves three workarounds and a small ceremony, explain the ceremony. Otherwise, somebody may mistake it for a feature.

Give the grumbling some structure

The questionnaire covers age group, geography and professional background, alongside common use cases and workflows. It asks about development priorities, contributions and spending around Blender, including Development Fund donations, marketplaces and training. Free software still has an economy around it. The electricity, alas, has yet to embrace the open-source spirit.

For production users, useful feedback names the task and its consequences: the repetitive operation, the hand-off that needs cleaning up, or the version change that complicates delivery. Describe what you expected, what happened and how much manual repair followed. “Make it better” is an excellent emotional starting point and a magnificently unhelpful technical specification.

Participation requires a Blender ID. The Foundation promises anonymised public results as both an illustrated report with commentary and a raw dataset. You sign in to answer; anonymisation concerns the published results. Readers will get the charts and the numbers behind them, for those who like to check whether a handsome bar graph is getting above itself.

Last year, with denominators

The 2025 report collected 5,102 responses during October and November, including 1,200 people who had also answered the previous survey. Blender cautions that this is a small sample relative to its estimated user base, with an expected bias towards committed users who follow the project. These are respondents describing themselves, not a census of everyone who has ever deleted the default cube.

The report says 49.7 percent make money with Blender, while the relevant question received 4,955 answers. The AI question received 4,959 answers: more than half did not use AI tools in their Blender workflow, and only 7 percent used them regularly. Among the AI uses described in the report, scripting and automation led, followed by concept-art generation. These are findings from the 2025 respondents, however tempting it might be to promote them into a referendum on the entire industry.

Our report on the 2024 results looked at user satisfaction and Blender’s place alongside other DCCs. Read it with its year firmly attached: an archive is useful institutional memory, but it should not be allowed to impersonate this morning’s news.

If Blender is part of your working day, give the Foundation something it can work with. A well-described annoyance, an unexpectedly good workflow, a feature that would save you half an afternoon. This is where muttering at the screen can become useful data. And if there is an opportunity to mention where you get your Blender news, DIGITAL PRODUCTION remains an entirely defensible answer. Just sayin’.

https://www.blender.org/news/blender-survey-2026/

https://survey.blender.org/feedback/2025/

https://survey.blender.org/feedback/2024/