OneStream Platform 9.1: What's New and What It Means for Your Upgrade

OneStream Platform 9.1, announced at Splash 2025, is a meaningful release that brings new productivity tools, a modernized browser experience, and infrastructure improvements that matter for both administrators and end users. Rather than incremental polish, 9.1 delivers capabilities that directly address long-standing pain points around performance diagnostics, allocation modeling, and browser-based administration. Here is what you need to know and how to plan your upgrade.

Modern Browser Experience Improvements

The Modern Browser Experience receives significant enhancements in 9.1, and the headline addition is the Cube View Designer -- now available directly in OnePlace. Permitted users can view and edit Cube View configurations without leaving the browser, eliminating the need to switch to the Windows client for what has historically been one of the most common administrative tasks. Beyond the Cube View Designer, OneStream has delivered performance and accessibility improvements across the board, including faster load times for dashboards and improved keyboard navigation. For organizations still maintaining the Windows client in their deployment, this release is OneStream's clearest signal yet that the desktop application's days are numbered. If you haven't started migrating your power users to the browser experience, 9.1 makes that transition considerably easier to justify.

Profiler for Performance Troubleshooting

The new Profiler tool is arguably the most impactful feature in 9.1 for implementation teams. It captures every event in a user session -- Business Rules, Formulas, Workspace Assemblies -- and lets you inspect the input and output of each method or function. If you have ever spent hours adding debug logging to a complex consolidation rule trying to figure out why a particular step takes longer than expected, you understand the value here. The Profiler gives you a structured, session-level view of execution flow, making it straightforward to diagnose performance bottlenecks and validate that calculations execute in the expected order. For complex implementations with layered business rules, this tool fundamentally changes how you approach troubleshooting and optimization.

New Productivity Tools

Three major productivity additions arrive in 9.1: Allocations, Analytic Drill-Down, and Admin Assist. The Allocations tool provides no-code allocation model management, allowing finance teams to define and maintain allocation logic without writing custom business rules. Analytic Drill-Down enables multi-dimensional variance analysis directly within the platform, giving users the ability to decompose variances across dimensions without building custom dashboards. Admin Assist bundles over 35 utilities for simplified administration, covering tasks that previously required navigating multiple screens or writing scripts. The common thread across all three is reducing the need for custom development in scenarios that nearly every implementation encounters. That translates to faster implementations, lower maintenance burden, and fewer places where custom code can introduce bugs during upgrades.

Dimension Renaming and Metadata Management

OneStream now handles dimension renaming more gracefully, automatically updating references in Cube Integration settings and Transformation Rule Groups when a dimension member is renamed. This may sound like a minor quality-of-life improvement, but anyone who has had to manually chase down broken references after a rename -- across data integrations, business rules, and reporting configurations -- knows how much time and risk this eliminates. In large implementations with hundreds of dimension members, a single rename could previously trigger hours of manual reference hunting and testing. The automatic propagation in 9.1 makes metadata management significantly less error-prone and removes a common source of post-change defects.

Security: Web Application Firewall

SaaS customers on Platform 9.0 and above automatically receive OneStream's Web Application Firewall (WAF) protection, which covers the OWASP Top 10 attack types including SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and broken authentication. This is especially relevant for organizations in regulated industries -- financial services, healthcare, insurance -- where security posture documentation matters for SOX compliance, SOC audits, and regulatory reviews. The WAF operates at the platform level, meaning individual customers do not need to configure or maintain it. For teams that have been fielding questions from internal security or audit about application-layer protections, this is a straightforward answer that requires no additional effort on your part.

Certified Power BI Connector

The certified Power BI Connector provides native integration with Microsoft Fabric and Power BI, allowing finance teams to pull OneStream data directly into Power BI dashboards without relying on custom connectors, flat-file exports, or workaround integrations. For organizations operating in Microsoft-centric environments -- which describes the majority of OneStream's customer base -- this is a practical improvement that removes friction from a common reporting workflow. The connector supports DirectQuery and Import modes, giving teams flexibility in how they balance data freshness against performance. If your organization has been building and maintaining custom data extraction pipelines to feed Power BI, this connector should simplify that architecture considerably.

Planning Your Upgrade

Start by testing in a sandbox environment. This applies to every upgrade, but it is especially important with 9.1 given the breadth of new features. Pay close attention to any custom business rules that overlap with the new productivity tools -- if you have built custom allocation logic or admin utilities, evaluate whether the native tools can replace them and plan the transition accordingly. The Profiler should be your first stop after upgrading: use it to benchmark your current performance baseline so you have a clear before-and-after comparison. Plan for user training on the Modern Browser Experience changes, particularly if your organization has power users who are still defaulting to the Windows client. Finally, review your security documentation to incorporate the WAF protections, especially if you have an upcoming audit cycle.

Final Thoughts

Platform 9.1 is a solid release that addresses real pain points rather than just adding surface-level features. The Profiler alone justifies the upgrade for any complex implementation where performance tuning has been a manual, time-consuming process. The productivity tools reduce custom development overhead in areas where nearly every implementation ends up writing similar code. And the browser experience improvements continue to close the gap between OnePlace and the Windows client. If you are still on 8.x, this is a good time to plan your path forward -- the cumulative improvements across 9.0 and 9.1 represent a meaningful step up in platform capability, and staying current ensures you benefit from ongoing security and performance enhancements.