It has been influenced by digital compositing software such as Avid Media Illusion, Apple Shake, Blackmagic Fusion, Autodesk Flame and Nuke, from which its user interface and many of its concepts are derived.

The prize was a 12-month employment contract to develop Natron as a free and open-source software within the institute.

[5] Subsequent beta releases brought additional features such as motion blur, color management through OpenColorIO, and video tracking.

Version 1.0 was released on December 22, 2014,[6] together with a large sample project by François "CoyHot" Grassard, a professional computer graphics artist and teacher, demonstrating that Natron could execute interactively graphs with more than 100 nodes.

In January 2015, the Art and Technology of Image (ATI) department in Paris 8 University announced that they would switch to professional-quality free and open-source software for teaching computer graphics to students and artists, including Blender, Krita and Natron.