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Umbraco CMS

Umbraco CMS

Overview

What is Umbraco CMS?

Umbraco is an open-source .NET Core CMS with over 700,000 active installs worldwide and with more than 200,000 active community members. It was first released on February 16th, 2005, and is still to this day an open-source project backed by…

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Learn from top reviewers

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Pricing

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Umbraco Free

$0

On Premise

Umbraco Cloud Starter

$45

Cloud
per month

Umbraco Heartcore Mini

$49

Cloud
per month

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://umbraco.com/pricing/

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Demos

How to add link to web page with Umbraco CMS "Link" component

YouTube

How to edit link with Umbraco CMS "Link" component

YouTube

How to remove/delete link with Umbraco CMS "Link" component

YouTube

Housing Hive: Everything you need to know about the Umbraco CMS

YouTube

How to add link to document with Umbraco CMS "Link" component

YouTube

Umbraco CMS — "Link" component DEMO

YouTube
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Features

Security

This component helps a company minimize the security risks by controlling access to the software and its data, and encouraging best practices among users.

9
Avg 8.1

Platform & Infrastructure

Features related to platform-wide settings and structure, such as permissions, languages, integrations, customizations, etc.

8.5
Avg 7.6

Web Content Creation

Features that support the creation of website content.

8
Avg 7.7

Web Content Management

Features for managing website content

7.2
Avg 7.4
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Product Details

What is Umbraco CMS?

Umbraco is an open-source .NET Core CMS with over 700,000 active installs worldwide and with more than 200,000 active community members. It was first released on February 16th, 2005, and is still to this day an open-source project backed by a commercial company. To ensure Umbraco is always running the latest technology, the company has aligned with Microsoft's .NET release schedule to always have the Umbraco CMS available on the latest .NET version.

The Umbraco CMS aims to give users full control of a website and its features. They offer 2 products on top of the core features of the CMS:

Umbraco Cloud For Umbraco projects with Azure Cloud hosting, automated upgrades, and streamlined workflows.

Umbraco Heartcore is a headless CMS option with fully managed APIs, GraphQL support, and CDN.

Why use Umbraco?
The solution boasts flexibility and it is designed so the website's look and feel are exactly as desired. With open-source code and open APIs, the user can integrate, extend and scale the website to fit exact needs.

For content, Umbraco features and workflows are built into the CMS to give content editors and marketers the best possible editing experience. It is presented as capable, out-of-the-box, and to meet specific requirements developers can customize the backend.

The vendor states their main goal with Umbraco is to give users a platform that offers the freedom to do and manage things in their own way. Every project has different needs and requirements and instead of packing a system with options and buttons that may or may not be relevant, Umbraco tries to keep it neat and open.

Umbraco CMS Features

Web Content Creation Features

  • Supported: WYSIWYG editor
  • Supported: Code quality / cleanliness
  • Supported: Content versioning
  • Supported: Admin section
  • Supported: Page templates
  • Supported: Library of website themes
  • Supported: Mobile optimization / responsive design
  • Supported: Publishing workflow
  • Supported: Form generator
  • Supported: Content scheduling

Web Content Management Features

  • Supported: Internal content search
  • Supported: Content taxonomy
  • Supported: SEO support
  • Supported: Browser compatibility
  • Supported: Bulk management
  • Supported: Page caching
  • Supported: Availability / breadth of extensions
  • Supported: E-commerce / shopping cart extension
  • Supported: Community / comment management
  • Supported: Import / export
  • Supported: Website analytics

Platform & Infrastructure Features

  • Supported: API
  • Supported: Internationalization / multi-language

Security Features

  • Supported: Role-based user permissions
  • Supported: Multi-factor authentication
  • Supported: User-level audit trail
  • Supported: Version history
  • Supported: Simple roll-back capabilities

CMS programming language or framework Features

  • Supported: .NET

Umbraco CMS Screenshots

Screenshot of Umbraco 8 backoffice UIScreenshot of Umbraco 8 side by side multilingual editingScreenshot of Umbraco 8 Content AppsScreenshot of Umbraco Cloud project overviewScreenshot of Umbraco Cloud environment overview

Umbraco CMS Video

Umbraco The Friendly CMS

Umbraco CMS Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsWindows, Linux, Mac
Mobile ApplicationNo
Supported CountriesGlobal
Supported LanguagesEnglish

Frequently Asked Questions

Kentico Xperience, Sitecore Digital Experience Platform, and Drupal are common alternatives for Umbraco CMS.

Reviewers rate WYSIWYG editor and Code quality / cleanliness and Publishing workflow highest, with a score of 10.

The most common users of Umbraco CMS are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews From Top Reviewers

(1-5 of 9)

Umbraco - clean CMS based on ASP.Net MVC 4.

Rating: 7 out of 10
July 08, 2015
FW
Vetted Review
Verified User
Umbraco CMS
3 years of experience
Umbraco is used for custom projects (websites) for various clients. It is used as as framework (ASP.MVC 4) and content management system. It allows fast development of new websites, created from scratch. It allows non-professionals to create and manage content. Unlike PHP-based Drupal, Umbraco is based on ASP.Net and well fits into our company infrastructure.
  • Quick to learn. For most if cases, developer needs to know Razor coding.
  • Doesn't require back-end programming.
  • Has build in users management (developers, content managers) and members management consoles (users of the site).
  • Clear admin tool (especially in version 7)
  • Fast.
  • Creating code from scratch, so it is easier to create clean code.
Cons
  • Courier plugin, used for staging is not always working well. Tool is used to push changes (database and some files) between stages of website (dev QA staging production, or whatever the configuration is set by developer. The tool is not 100% reliable.
  • Rare incidents of publishing error.
  • Doesn't have build in support for SASS, LESS, ..., so if one of those is used, needs to be done outside admin tool.
  • Small community of developers
  • Little documentation, video tutorials are not free
  • Not many plugins for extended functionality
Umbraco is suitable when you need a clean code website with CMS or something that will work well on mobile devices. It is very scalable, [can even be ] used for a large website (100+ pages). When a company relies on ASP.Net environment, this is the CMS to go with.

Easy to use CMS

Rating: 8 out of 10
December 06, 2017
DM
Vetted Review
Verified User
Umbraco CMS
7 years of experience
We currently use Umbraco to build our company company website. It's a great tool and very easy to use, it allows me to [have] different roles from editor through to admin. The CMS is simple to use, each employee has been able to use it independently with very little training.

The system has allowed us to integrate our digital marketing into web pages, so for the end user, the process of completing forms is seamless.

We have been so impressed with the umbraco CMS that we currently use this tool to deliver [our] website to our customers.

The main reason we chose this tool was we wanted a site that could be updated and maintained by anybody, and we wanted to avoid having to wait for the development team to make a simple change to the site.
  • Simple to use
  • Different people can be assigned different roles
  • Easy to keep the site updated with the latest information, no technical knowledge needed
  • Accessibility features can be turned on
Cons
  • If you miss an update on the software, issues can happen if you jump to far ahead of where you are
  • Search could be improved on the site
Umbraco CMS is the perfect tool for a company that is looking to keep their website updated. The simple to use tools and templates means updating and creating new pages is easy. The WYSIWYG editor is a nice feature, however, for accessibility, there should be some more guidance on what is suitable to be used on the CMS.

Umbraco: The do-it-yourself framework

Rating: 7 out of 10
February 15, 2016
Other than helping to implement Umbraco for some of our clients, we use Umbraco CMS as an alternative to WordPress for a couple of our microsites. We typically only consider Umbraco for our clients (and teams) when they have one or more tech-savvy resources to help instruct and troubleshoot issues when they come up.

From a business perspective, Umbraco is very flexible (and open source). It allows for more freedom in design and data architecture (vs WordPress). For some clients, that is a necessity.
  • Umbraco has a lot of design/layout flexibility.
  • Umbraco provides a lot of control for customization.
  • You can maintain your data (product, page, entity) in a structured way.
Cons
  • Umbraco can initially be challenging for new users with limited or no development experience. After initial installation, there is a lot more work required to 'see' a site.
  • Umbraco isn't stable. For example, even on a fresh new site sometimes you'll get errors when trying to save something in the admin panel. It's not common, but it happens often enough to be annoying.
  • No out of the box contact forms. Umbraco sells their forms plugin that we've used in the past, but the plugin is disappointing. It isn't well maintained and it's very buggy. Making a new contact form with the paid plugin can take a lot of time to get everything right (fields, validation, confirmation emails, etc). This is especially frustrating for new users.
  • Documentation / resource links frequently 404. Umbraco seems to change their site URLs often enough that, when you encounter an issue, you're likely to find a number of bad links in Google's search results. This makes it difficult to research solutions to a problem.
  • Posts often go unanswered or without resolution in their community support forums. Hopefully this will improve as the community grows.
  • The update process is clumsy at best. Many people are familiar with the simple WordPress upgrade button for the core and plugins. This doesn't exist at all for Umbraco. Instead, you'll need to select specific files to overwrite and potentially update any old code references.
  • Migration between development environments is clumsy. Umbraco offers a premium plugin to address this because, as they state on the premium plugin page, deployments are "complicated, headache-inducing"
We use Umbraco CMS when clients need design flexibility, more tailored content management, and structured data. Umbraco CMS is not for clients with little to no budget for technical/developer assistance. We don't recommend it for most small companies because they don't have the budget to maintain (read: troubleshoot and work around bugs) a platform like this.

Real world experience with Umbraco

Rating: 5 out of 10
May 27, 2020
Vetted Review
Umbraco CMS
5 years of experience
We are a web development company and we set clients up with Umbraco.
  • Templating
  • Code editing
  • Back office usability
Cons
  • The update process is HORRIBLE!
  • Every release has bugs. NOT ONE release is BUG FREE!
  • Fixing issues quickly. We often have to wait over 30 days are months for something as simple as a media picker to be updated.
I like using Umbraco, but the update process is a PIA compared to WordPress. We have clients on WordPress and try to sell them on the idea of switching, but the maintenance to update Umbraco is a road block. Our clients don't have to pay to have their WordPress site updated. There are bugs in every release and the release schedule is mind numbing. Almost every other week there is a new release and with 20 web sites in Umbraco, it is IMPOSSIBLE to keep up with the maintenance and bill our clients for something that should have worked to begin with. Umbraco is more like a hobbyist CMS and is not quite ready for prime time. I would pay for a CMS to be bug free. The cloud option for Umbraco is not an option for us and honestly I find it impossible for the cloud option to be updated "automatically" while professional developers have issues with simple updates.

Umbraco CMS review and comparison to other CMS systems

Rating: 8 out of 10
March 14, 2017
AL
Vetted Review
Verified User
Umbraco CMS
2 years of experience
Currently we have one client that uses Umbraco CMS. It filled their need of moving off of static HTML pages to a .NET CMS system that did not have prohibitive costs/licensing fees. The client only has one developer on hand, so this provided a way to democratize content updates across a larger user base.
  • Data architecture
  • Templating System
  • Permissions/Workflow
  • Updating system files from CMS admin
Cons
  • Migration of data between servers. There are tools that you can pay for that help facilitate this, but like any CMS system, there are still some tricks to getting it to work correctly.
  • Running as a Web Project instead of a Web Site. Umbraco does not run compiled code, but instead compiles it on the fly. I find this to cause some performance issues that would otherwise be resolved with a compiled code base.
Umbraco CMD is well suited for users looking for a .NET based CMS system without the high licensing fees that come with a system like Sitecore. It allows the developer to easily get up and running, model data, create front end templates, and get a framework of a site out quickly. It is also easy to extend the built in functionality with your own .NET libraries. For enterprise level users, Umbraco might not have quite enough juice to model and deliver content efficiently.
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