Umbraco is a free, open-source .NET CMS. See its history, features, MIT license, and Umbraco Cloud pricing plans for 2026.
Umbraco is a free, open-source content management system built on Microsoft's .NET (ASP.NET) framework, used by developers to build and manage websites and intranets.
It was created by Niels Hartvig, who began development around 2000 and released Umbraco as open source in 2004, with the CMS becoming fully open source at version 2.0 in 2005. Since version 4.5 the codebase has been licensed under MIT.
The company behind Umbraco, Umbraco A/S, is headquartered in Odense, Denmark, with a U.S. headquarters opened in Charlotte, North Carolina in 2020, and more than 500,000 live websites currently run on Umbraco.
Umbraco provides a flexible content editing interface built around customizable document types, allowing developers to define exactly what content editors can create and edit.
It supports a headless/hybrid delivery model through its Content Delivery API, multi-site and multi-language content management, member and role-based access for building portals or gated content, and a large marketplace of community and commercial packages that extend functionality.
As a .NET application, Umbraco integrates naturally with Microsoft Azure hosting, Visual Studio tooling, and existing enterprise .NET codebases, which is a key reason it is favored by organizations already using the Microsoft stack.
The core Umbraco CMS is free and open source under the MIT license, with no cost to download, self-host, or modify the code.
Umbraco Cloud, the company's managed hosting service, is tiered at roughly 55 dollars per month for Starter, 330 dollars per month for Standard, 900 dollars per month for Professional, and custom Enterprise pricing for dedicated infrastructure and SLAs.
Yes, the core Umbraco CMS is free and open source under the MIT license; Umbraco Cloud managed hosting is a separate paid service.
Umbraco was created by Niels Hartvig, who began development around 2000 and open-sourced it in 2004.
Umbraco is built in C# on Microsoft's .NET (ASP.NET) framework.
Umbraco A/S is headquartered in Odense, Denmark, with a U.S. headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Umbraco Cloud starts around 55 dollars per month for the Starter plan, rising to around 330 for Standard, 900 for Professional, and custom pricing for Enterprise.
More than 500,000 live websites run on Umbraco CMS and Umbraco Cloud.
Umbraco supports headless and hybrid delivery through its Content Delivery API, in addition to traditional server-rendered pages.
Umbraco has been available under the MIT open-source license since version 4.5.