Umbraco CMS

Score6.7 out of 10

54 Reviews and Ratings

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

Screenshot of Umbraco 8 side by side multilingual editing

Screenshot of Umbraco Cloud project overview

Screenshot of Umbraco Cloud environment overview

1 / 5

Screenshot of Umbraco 8 backoffice UI

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

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

Verified User

Engineer in Professional Services (10,001+ employees employees)

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

Lori Jerome View profile

Digital Content Manager in Marketing at Premier Building Systems (201-500 employees employees)

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

Janus Kamp Hansen View profile

Developer in Information Technology at attityde.dk (1-10 employees employees)

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

Jerker Edenborg View profile

System Developer in Engineering at Net Relations (501-1000 employees employees)

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

Jakub Wilk View profile

President & Co-Founder in Information Technology at Enovatio (1-10 employees employees)

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

Drupal

Sitecore Digital Experience Platform

Kentico Xperience

Umbraco CMS

What is Umbraco CMS?

Categories & Use Cases

Media

Key Features

Top Performing Features

WYSIWYG editor

Code quality / cleanliness

Publishing workflow

Areas for Improvement

Mobile optimization / responsive design

Content taxonomy

Community / comment management

Reviews

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Cons

Return on Investment

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Other Software Used

Pros

Cons

Return on Investment

Other Software Used

Pros

Cons

Return on Investment

Alternatives Considered

Other Software Used

Pros

Cons

Return on Investment

Alternatives Considered

Other Software Used

Pros

Cons

Return on Investment

Alternatives Considered

Related Products