In January 2026, Epicor made it official: all new features for Kinetic, Prophet 21, and BisTrack will be developed exclusively for the cloud going forward. Final on-premises releases are scheduled for 2028, with active support tapering off through 2029. After that, on-prem customers receive only security patches and limited phone support, with no new features or new modules.
Most ERP vendors have been shifting development resources toward the cloud for years. What is drawing attention with Epicor is the manner of the transition. The way this has been handled has not landed well with a portion of the customer base, and those conversations have been showing up in user forums for months.
If you are an Epicor customer evaluating your options, here is a straightforward look at what is happening and what alternatives are worth considering.
Your on-premises system will continue to function after 2028. What changes is the innovation gap. Cloud customers will receive new AI capabilities, updated user experiences, and platform improvements on a continuous basis. On-prem customers will see that gap widen every year.
The support timeline looks like this:
Panorama Consulting, an independent ERP advisory firm, published a useful breakdown of the three paths available to Epicor customers: stay on-prem temporarily, migrate to Epicor Cloud, or reassess your ERP strategy entirely. Their takeaway is that no company should make this decision based on vendor pressure alone.
Other ERP vendors have gone through similar transitions. SAP set deadlines for moving customers off older platforms and has extended them multiple times as customers pushed back.
Epicor’s situation has drawn more friction. The user community has been vocal about feeling pushed into a migration on the vendor’s timeline, and for manufacturers with tight margins and limited IT resources, that pressure is real.
If that describes your situation, it is worth asking whether this is still the right platform for your business.
The cloud transition is real and unavoidable regardless of which ERP you choose. The relevant questions are about the vendor relationship, the migration experience, the total cost, and what you gain on the other side.
A few things worth evaluating:
Infor has continued to support its on-premises products without forcing a migration, which gives manufacturers control over their own timeline. For those ready to move to the cloud, the upside is concrete: Infor CloudSuite Industrial comes with Infor Velocity Suite, a native AI package that includes industry-specific agents, process mining, workflow automations, and generative AI built directly into the ERP.
The AI capabilities are built for manufacturing operations: make-or-buy decisions, production scheduling, service management, AP automation, order processing. For manufacturers who have been waiting for cloud ERP to deliver something beyond a hosting change, this is where that value shows up. If you are evaluating alternatives to Epicor, Infor is a serious option worth putting on the list.
If you are an Epicor customer working through what comes next, start with a free assessment and we can talk through what a transition might look like and whether Infor is a fit for your environment.