Davidson: A release candidate (RC) is when a company puts out a release that is “feature complete.” It’s better than a beta release, but it’s still pre-release. With an RC, the company isn’t going to add features anymore, and they want people to test it out and find any straggler bugs that need to be fixed. Usually, RCs are nearly 100% complete, except for work to improve speed and performance of UIs and perhaps to strip out any additional debugging/tracing code used during the alpha and beta stages.