XIAO 2025 in Review: Trends Shaping the XIAO Ecosystem
Explore the latest insights from the XIAO community, including popular boards, expansion trends, project categories, and preferred development platforms shaping our 2025 roadmap.
XIAO has now been part of your builds for another full year—and this marks Seeed Studio’s 17th year building alongside the global maker and developer community. As the XIAO community continues to grow—with more developers contributing code, projects, and reference designs—we wanted to listen more closely. A few weeks ago, we launched the Seeed Studio XIAO 2025 Annual Survey. We were genuinely excited to see 490 of you take the time to share your thoughts. That level of engagement means a lot to us.
Remember the surprise?
Five survey participants will receive early samples of all new XIAO products released in 2026—including Dev Boards, Add-ons, and Gadgets.
Huge congratulations to the five winners below! (Please contact Josie to claim your prize.) We are immensely grateful to each participant who contributed to the enhancement of our XIAO series.
What the Community Is Focused On
1️⃣ The Most Popular XIAO Board and Variant
The Most Popular XIAO Board: XIAO ESP32S3 remains the community favorite.
The Most Popular Variant: Pre-soldered versions gained strong traction in 2025, making prototyping faster and more convenient.
In 2025, beyond launching new boards, we focused on improving usability and packaging options based on your feedback. We introduced:
2️⃣ Add-ons & Expansion Boards: How You Prototype
Most frequently used XIAO add-ons: Expansion Boards.
Nearly three-quarters of respondents have used XIAO Expansion Boards. It is especially designed to integrate XIAO with the Grove ecosystem. Standardized Grove connectors make prototyping genuinely plug-and-play, reducing wiring complexity and development friction.
For many of you, this combination is what makes XIAO powerful: Small core board. Flexible expansion. Rapid iteration.
3️⃣ Development Platforms: What You Build With
The Most Frequently Used Development Platform: Arduino IDE, leading by a wide margin (nearly 50%). It is followed by PlatformIO, with ESP-IDF ranking next among advanced users.
The takeaway is clear: accessibility still matters. Arduino remains the primary on-ramp for many developers, while advanced users continue to push performance and control through more specialized frameworks.
Although our Wiki documentation is primarily structured around Arduino to ensure a smooth onboarding experience, we have also expanded support across other platforms and languages. These include MicroPython, CircuitPython, Swift, and more. You can visit our Wiki to explore the full list of supported platforms and development environments.
4️⃣ Reference Designs & Enclosures
In 2025, we expanded our lineup of XIAO-based Gadgets with enclosure designs—and opened the door for the community to contribute their own. Nearly two-thirds of you told us that reference enclosure files matter. That tells us something important: finishing the build is just as meaningful as starting it.
Currently, we share 3D-printable files on Thingiverse, Printables and MakerWorld. If you’ve designed your own enclosure, we’d love to see it. Tag us or share it with the community.
5️⃣ Favorite Community Project Categories
This year, several project themes clearly stood out across the community. The most frequently mentioned project themes:
- Smart Home
- Display / ePaper
- Meshtastic
- AI-related applications
In our first livestream of the year, we showcased the Top 20 XIAO Projects of 2025, highlighting practical builds and technical depth from across the ecosystem.
To further support your development, we’ve also prepared Reference Designs of XIAO to help you move from concept to implementation more efficiently.
Introducing the XIAO Project Hub (on GitHub)
One piece of feedback kept coming up: “It’s hard to find XIAO projects all in one place.”
And honestly, you’re right. Great builds were scattered across forums, blogs, and social feeds—but not structured in a way that made learning easy.
So we’re fixing that. We’re launching a dedicated XIAO Project Hub on GitHub—a centralized space for reference designs, official examples, and community-contributed projects. It will include:
If you’ve built with XIAO, we invite you to be part of this. Open a PR. Share your repo. Contribute a guide. Even a small example can lower the barrier for someone else. Let’s build more than projects—let’s build a resource that grows with the community!
Join the Open Roadmap & Shaping What Comes Next
In thissurvey, many of you shared thoughtful suggestions on how XIAO could evolve further. The most frequently mentioned improvements included additional I/O pins, solar power support, and integrated charge/discharge management modules, among others.
In response to the demand for more I/O, we introduced the XIAO Plus series to expand pin availability while maintaining the compact form factor. As for the other requests—such as solar integration and power management—we are actively evaluating them and will continue developing corresponding solutions based on community feedback —and yes, XIAO RP2040 Plus is coming next.
But here’s the bigger picture. XIAO has come this far because of you. It evolves through feedback, experiments, criticism, pull requests, and bold ideas from the community.
If you have thoughts about:
- Core boards
- Add-ons and expansion boards
- Documentation improvements
- Or entirely new directions we haven’t explored yet
- ......
We want to hear them.
Our Open Roadmap is a space where ideas are discussed early, priorities are visible, and community voices directly influence product decisions. We read every suggestion. We value every perspective. And many of the improvements you see today started as community feedback. Let’s build the next generation of XIAO together.
One More Teaser 👀
Chinese New Year is almost here. Our team will be taking a short break to celebrate.
But right after the holiday, a new XIAO core board is launching!
Ready to guess which one it is?
Stay tuned—and as always, thank you for building with us.
Notes at the end.
Hey community, we’re curating a monthly newsletter centering around the beloved Seeed Studio XIAO. If you want to stay up-to-date with:
🤖️ Cool Projects from the Community to get inspiration and tutorials
📰 Product Updates: firmware update, new product spoiler
📖 Wiki Updates: new wikis + wiki contribution
📣 News: events, contests, and other community stuff
Please click the image below👇 to subscribe now!
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