#1 most frequent
United States of America
32.0%332 installations of 1,036
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.
Categories & Use Cases
Media
1 / 5
Screenshot of Umbraco 8 backoffice UI
Top Performing Features
WYSIWYG editor
What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editing tool allows users to build pages without writing code.
Category average: 7.9
Code quality / cleanliness
Code generated by WYSIWYG editor is clean and validates according to W3C standards.
Category average: 8.3
Publishing workflow
The software allows users to set up a custom workflow for updating the website, including approval processes.
Category average: 8.2
Areas for Improvement
Mobile optimization / responsive design
The CMS helps users build webpages that work well on mobile devices – whether m-dot pages or responsively designed pages.
Category average: 8.5
Content taxonomy
Users can create multiple levels and types of content categories including tags.
Category average: 8.2
Community / comment management
Users can put post/page comments through an approval process, auto-approve commenters based on their email addresses, block commenters by IP address, delete comments, etc.
Category average: 7.4
Who Buys & Uses Umbraco CMS
#2 most frequent
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
23.5%243 installations of 1,036
#3 most frequent
Denmark
6.3%65 installations of 1,036
Best CMS for .NET Developers
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We used Umbraco CMS for a customer who wanted to move from WordPress to Umbraco. We used Umbraco to migrate existing blogs, also built modules to create product marketing pages. We also leveraged Umbraco's multilingual capabilities to create localized versions of the website for customer's European and Asian markets.
Pros
- Custom page management with document types and templates
- Excellent razor support for scripting
- Multilingual support
- Easy-to-use WYSIWYG editor
- Fast page load times and efficient in-built caching
- Role-based access control
Cons
- Umbraco hosting on AWS cloud and containers
- Official support with Amazon S3 for media management
- Quality (dive deep) tutorials on YouTube
Return on Investment
- Cost Savings - average 30-40% reduction in licensing costs compared to enterprise CMS solutions
- Operational Efficiency - Average page load times improved
- Initial learning curve is higher than other CMS, but as long a you're a .NET dev, the learning is worth
Usability
Alternatives Considered
WordPress
Other Software Used
QuillBot, Notion, start.me, Jira Software
Umbraco is a No Go
Pros
- Very simple content management.
- Secure, no hacking because no one knows how to use it
Cons
- Not user friendly.
- Need to be a programmer to do anything cool.
- Not compatible with common digital marketing applications.
- Very cumbersome, blocky.
- Horrible user interface.
Return on Investment
- Just cumbersome and took forever to learn.
Other Software Used
RubyMine
Couldn't and wouldn't live without Umbraco.
Pros
- Content Hierarchy/tree
- Media section
- Plugins (Custom made)
Cons
- Out of the box web-templates
Return on Investment
- Our entire business strategy is based upon Umbraco. That's positive!
Alternatives Considered
Episerver CMS and Sitecore Web Content Management
Other Software Used
Microsoft SQL Server, Visual Studio IDE, Bitbucket
Umbraco is the friendly CMS
Pros
- The ease to use compositions (= interfaces)
- Media handling, Image scaling
- The user interface
Cons
- Umbraco Heartcore is too expensive
Return on Investment
- Development is faster in Umbraco than other CMS I have worked with
Alternatives Considered
Episerver CMS and Sitecore Experience Platform
Other Software Used
Visual Studio IDE
Umbraco our 2nd and final choice
Pros
- customization
- good prepared SEO
- integration with other software
Cons
- a little more ready templates
- e-commerce integration out of the box
- easier URL configuration
Return on Investment
- It's a .net solution and we program in .net so it was faster
- thanks to their good SEO, we have more leads
Alternatives Considered
WordPress and Orchard Harvest LIMS
