It is the successor to XCP, initially created as an Open Source version of Citrix XenServer in 2010.

Several years later when Citrix stopped delivering XenServer for free and via open source, the project was revived as XCP-ng.

In December 2017, Citrix announced that they would remove important features of XenServer Free edition and make them only available on paid tiers.

[22] XCP-ng can be compared to a Linux distribution,[23] but meant to run Xen out-of-the-box.

XCP-ng provides also extra packages that aren't available elsewhere, because non-existent or closed-sources in Citrix Hypervisor.