SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 21 is now generally available (GA)

Today we are thrilled to announce the general availability release of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 21! After months of hard work, collaboration, and feedback-driven development, SSMS 21 is here – rebuilt from the ground up with powerful new features and enhanced performance. This was a monumental effort from the team with a lot of learnings along the way; we can’t wait to hear what you think of SSMS 21.

Download SSMS 21.0.0

There are many exciting improvements packed into this latest version of SSMS. A Visual Studio-based solution with 64-bit support, SSMS 21 is the recommended release for SQL Server 2025 Preview, includes Copilot in SSMS (Preview), and has initial dark theme support.

Highlights

As always, you can read the entire list of new functionality and bug fixes in our release notes, but a few highlights include:

• Installation and automatic updates via the Visual Studio Installer
• Git integration available via the Code tools Workload
• Smaller installation footprint and customizable installation via Workloads and Individual Components
• A new, Modern connection dialog experience (Preview)
• New options for customizing your SSMS experience (vertical tabs, tab coloring by project or file type, minimum and maximum tab width, font and background color for results grid cells containing NULL values, and more)
• Always Encrypted Assessment available via the Always Encrypted Wizard
• Migration assistance via the Hybrid and Migration Workload

Install SQL Server Management Studio 21

One notable change from previous SSMS releases is the installation mechanism for SSMS 21, which is managed using the Visual Studio Installer. To learn more about system requirements and installation instructions, see Install SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS).

If you have the SSMS 21 preview release installed, installing SSMS 21 GA will not replace it. The GA version is delivered via our Release channel. Please note that we will no longer be servicing the SSMS 21 Preview, including security fixes. Any updates to SSMS 21 will land in the Release channel, and you can install earlier versions of SSMS (e.g. 20.x) side-by-side.

SSIS and Maintenance Plans

We made the difficult decision to hold back SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) support for this release. This includes the import/export functionality and Maintenance Plans. In the spirit of full transparency, during the final weeks of testing, we recognized that SSIS needed additional time to ensure the quality and stability our users expect, so we made the decision to temporarily hold it back while we continue to enhance the experience. Our primary focus for SSMS 21 was to move to Visual Studio 2022, provide initial support for SQL Server 2025 Preview, and support the Copilot in SSMS Preview. Our team is actively working to bring these features back in an upcoming release. For now, if you rely on SSIS we recommend using SSMS 20, which you can install side-by-side with SSMS 21 GA.

Support Policy

With the release of SSMS 21, previous versions of SSMS will no longer receive support, as per our support policy. We strongly recommend upgrading to SSMS 21 to access the latest features, security updates, and critical fixes.

Let us know what you think

We hope you’re as excited about SSMS 21 GA as we are! As always, we’d love to hear from you with any feedback or feature suggestions (using our new and improved Developer Community feedback site, which you can read more about here). We review posts and comments regularly, and your feedback helps shape the future of SSMS.

Thanks for joining us on this journey and for being a part of the SSMS community ❤️