The Blender Foundation’s annual user survey is open until 31 October 2026. It takes a few minutes, every question is optional, and the results will be published “both as an illustrated report with commentary and as a raw dataset.”
That last clause is why this is worth five minutes of your time rather than someone else’s.
What it asks
The opening sections are standard: age, location, profession, and which Blender version you started on. The version question quietly produces one of the more interesting numbers in the dataset — a distribution of when people arrived, which maps the growth of the user base against the release history.
Then it gets more pointed. After asking what you use Blender for and which design tools you pair it with, it asks whether you currently use AI in your workflow.
Blender has no native AI tooling; the only route today is third-party plugins and add-ons. So this is the Foundation measuring something it does not currently supply. And in the development section, where you pick the research topics you want the team to focus on, AI and ML is one of the selectable options.
Also in there: what you spend on other software, your budget for third-party Blender tools, and how much you have donated to the Blender Foundation.
Why answering actually does something
Most software surveys are a formality. This one is not, for a structural reason: the Blender Foundation has no customers. Blender is free, there is no licence revenue, there is no sales team reporting what enterprise accounts are asking for, and there is no telemetry-driven product org inferring intent from click data.
That means the Foundation’s picture of who uses Blender and what for is assembled from the development forum, from studio partnerships, from the Development Fund, and from this survey. The forum and the fund are self-selecting toward people already deeply engaged. The survey is the only instrument that reaches people who just use the software.
Which makes the composition of respondents consequential in a way it rarely is. If the people who answer are disproportionately one kind of user — hobbyist versus studio, animation versus archviz, enthusiastic about AI versus hostile to it — the published distribution says so, and the roadmap conversation proceeds from that distribution.
The AI question is the one to answer carefully
Whatever your position, this is the moment it counts for something.
The Foundation is asking the question before building anything, which is the right order and not the usual one. A great deal of 3D tooling has had generative features added on the assumption that users wanted them, discovered by shipping. Blender is asking first, and the answer will be public and auditable, because the raw dataset is being released.
If you think native AI tooling is the wrong priority for the project, the survey is a more effective place to say so than a forum thread, because it gets counted. If you think it is overdue, the same applies. The research-topics selection is a direct vote.