Here is the whole release notes template. Copy what you need from the block below, or take the file, and there is no form in front of either.
## 2.4
Released 9 September 2026.
One or two sentences saying why this release matters, written for
somebody who does not know your internal vocabulary.
### Breaking changes
- The v2 API stops accepting requests on 1 November. Move to v3,
which takes the same fields.
### New features
- Search the board by heading, tag or the name of the person who asked.
- Export your voters and what they pay as a CSV.
### Improvements
- The board loads in about half the time on projects with more than
a thousand requests.
### Bug fixes
- The vote count no longer drifts after two requests are merged.
### Security
- Session tokens are rotated when a password or email address changes.
Take the file, with the guidance notes still in it. It is Markdown, it is under three kilobytes, and it may be copied, changed and used commercially with no attribution and no link back. If it is useful, use it.
Nine dollars a month for one project, with weighted voting on it.
What goes in a release note that people read?
The order, more than the wording. Everything else on this page is preference and this part is not.
Breaking changes first. Somebody opening a release note is asking what is about to stop working. Answering that in the last section means answering it after they have closed the tab. If nothing breaks, delete the heading rather than writing none under it.
Then what is new, then what got better, then what got fixed. That is descending order of how likely a reader is to care, and it lets somebody stop reading at any point without missing something that affects them.
Security gets its own heading even when it is one line. Buried in a list of fixes it reads as routine. On its own it reads as something you take seriously, which is the impression you actually want and, if you did the work, the accurate one. Say what you changed and never describe the exploit.
One line per item, written from the reader's side. Not the name of the module. What a person can now do that they could not do yesterday. If an item needs a paragraph it wants its own post, and the note should link to it instead.
If you want to see the output on a real board rather than in a text box, the demo is open without an account.
Does this work for a shipped build as well as a web application?
Yes. A release note has the same job whatever ships, which is to tell somebody what changed and whether they have to do anything about it.
What a bigger project usually adds is a second audience. The same release often needs a customer facing note and an internal one with the migration steps and the rollback.
Write the customer one from this template and keep the internal one wherever your runbooks live, because a note that tries to be both gets read by neither.
Is there a Word version?
Yes. Take the docx. It is the same five categories with the guidance lines already set in grey so you can see at a glance what to delete, and it opens in Word, in Pages and in Google Docs.
The plain text above still works if you would rather paste. It goes into Word, Google Docs, Notion, a pull request or an issue tracker exactly as it appears, and the headings survive the paste in all of them.
Both are free to copy, change and use commercially, with no attribution and no link back.
Where is the free download?
Three files, all on this page, all free.
The Markdown file is the one to keep in the repository next to the code, because it diffs cleanly and the person writing the entry is usually already in an editor.
The Word document is the one to send to somebody who does not open a text editor, which in most companies is the person who signs off the wording before it goes out.
Plain text is the third, and it is the block printed further up this page. Select it and copy it.
There is no email wall on any of them. A template behind a form is a lead magnet wearing a template's clothes, and you would have to give an address to find out whether the file was any good.
Is there a release notes template for a software project?
This is one. A release notes template for a software project needs exactly two things a generic document template does not have.
The first is a breaking changes section that comes before the new features, because the reader of a software release note arrived asking whether anything they depend on is about to stop working. Putting that answer fourth is the single most common mistake in the format.
The second is a version heading that a machine can find. If your notes live in the repository, somebody will eventually want to pull the entry for a given version into a dialog inside the product, and they can only do that if every release starts with a predictable heading.
Both are already in the file. If your project does not use version numbers, a date in the same position works and nothing else changes.
What does a release notes template for software development change day to day?
It moves the writing to the moment of shipping.
The reason a release notes template for software development is worth having at all is not the formatting. It is that the categories force a decision while the work is fresh. Is this a breaking change or an improvement? Did anybody outside the team notice this bug? Those questions are easy on the day and impossible three weeks later.
Teams that fill the template in at release time write two lines and move on. Teams that keep a document to catch up on at the end of a quarter write nothing, and then write a paragraph of apology at the top of the page in March.
What does a real release notes example look like?
The filled in version on this page is one. Every line in it is written the way a customer would say it rather than the way the ticket said it.
Compare a line that says the search index now uses trigram matching with a line that says searching the board now finds a request when you only remember two words of the title. The first is true and tells the reader nothing. The second is the same change described from the side of the person reading.
The test for any release notes example is whether somebody outside the team could tell you what changed for them after reading it once. If the entry only makes sense to the person who wrote the code, it belongs in the commit message.
Why do teams stop writing these?
Not because of the template. Formatting a note takes a few minutes. Writing one every time something ships is what stops. Of 327 public Canny and Featurebase changelogs read on 3 October 2026, 198 had gone 90 days without an entry, and 99 had posted none in the year before. The full measurement.
The fix is structural: make the entry out of work you already tracked, so there is no second list to keep in sync. If you want a draft assembled for you instead of a file to fill in, the generator does that as you type.