The History of the Project

Helm began as what is now known as Helm Classic, a Deis project begun in 2015 and introduced at the inaugural KubeCon.

In January of 2016, the project merged with a GCS tool called Kubernetes Deployment Manager, and the project was moved under Kubernetes. As a result of the merging of codebases, Helm 2.0 was released later that year. The key feature of Deployment Manager that survived in Helm 2 was the server-side component, renamed from DM to Tiller for the final Helm 2.0 release.

Helm was promoted from a Kubernetes subproject to a full-fledged CNCF project in June, 2018. Helm formed a top-level governing body and several projects were subsumed under the Helm project, including Monocular, the Helm Chart Repo, Chart Museum, and later the Helm Hub.

When the Helm 3 development cycle began, Tiller was removed, bringing Helm closer to its original vision of being a client tool. Helm 3 was released in November 2019.

Helm graduated as a CNCF project in April 2020.

The CNCF Artifact Hub replaced the Helm Hub in October 2020.

In 2025, the Helm project celebrated its 10th anniversary.

Helm v4.0.0 was released on November 12, 2025 at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America — the first new major version in six years. The release was driven by the need for architectural changes that could not be made without breaking the public SDK API. Key additions include a redesigned plugin system with WebAssembly support, Server-Side Apply, kstatus-based resource watching, content-based caching, reproducible chart builds, and an updated SDK API with support for multiple chart API versions. Existing charts remained backwards compatible. See the Helm 4 Overview for more details.