Claris comes out with a new version of FileMaker every year, but 2025 really felt like a game changer. So many new features landed, and so many new possibilities opened up. We covered most of this in an earlier blog, but as the year ends, it’s helpful to look back and highlight what we’re still excited about after living with these changes for a few months.
In other words: now that the rubber has hit the road, what actually stands out?
Generative AI has made its way into every part of our daily lives, and the FileMaker toolset was no exception this year. There’s a lot to unpack, but two pieces continue to rise above the rest.
This lets users perform searches simply by typing a question:
“Show me invoices from July.”
That’s it. FileMaker works with generative AI to translate natural language into a real find request or SQL query. It’s a straightforward but powerful way to make solutions more intuitive for everyday users.
One of the biggest concerns we hear from clients is how to take advantage of AI while still protecting sensitive data. With FileMaker Server 2025, you can spin up your own in-house LLM using the built-in installer. Everything stays inside your network. For many organizations, this removes one of the biggest barriers to adopting AI tools. It also sparks curiosity about the platform - we’ve had more than one IT person ask us about how the new AI server works, and how to get it installed.
Claris Studio also received a major glow-up this year. One of the long-standing hurdles in using Studio alongside FileMaker has been syncing data cleanly between the two systems.
In 2025, that changed. Studio now connects directly to FileMaker data and keeps everything synced automatically. It’s simple, effective, and fast — and it removes a lot of friction. We expect to see many more Claris Studio projects moving forward.
This one doesn’t have the excitement of AI or the shine of Claris Studio, but if you’re a developer working in the trenches every day, these functions might be your favorites of the year.
It’s now easy to save a found set and return to it — essentially giving us the “back button” clients have been asking about for years. It also provides a faster, cleaner way to grab a list of record IDs and pass them to server-side scripts. These aren’t glamorous features, but they’re incredibly useful and noticeably more performant than the older methods we’ve relied on.
Like #3, this is a simple change that every developer will lean on constantly. We do a ton of data manipulation, cleanup, migrations, and backfilling. Avoiding accidental modification-field updates has always required extra care.
Now we can simply check a box to prevent modification fields from updating during Replace Field Contents. It’s a small change, but it eliminates a persistent annoyance.
FileMaker continues to integrate more tightly with external systems, and JSON has become central to how we pass data around. Even within FileMaker itself, using a chunk of JSON is often easier than building out an entire table structure.
With JSONParse and the overall JSON speed improvements introduced this year, working with JSON is faster and smoother. These upgrades make JSON an even more essential tool for everyday development.
This year’s FileMaker feature set delivered both the headline updates (secure, in-house AI and synced Claris Studio) and the under-the-hood improvements developers rely on (like GetRecordIDsFromFoundSet and non-destructive Replace Field Contents).
These changes weren’t minor; they reshaped how we think about performance, workflow, and integrations.
If these features have you thinking about how to use natural-language AI, integrate Claris Studio more effectively, or optimize your existing FileMaker code to take advantage of the latest improvements, we’re here to help. We’ve been using these tools all year and are ready to put them to work for your organization.
Contact us to schedule a conversation about upgrading and future-proofing your FileMaker solution.