Umbraco is a flexible and powerful Content Management System (CMS) that has become very popular among both developers and end-users. Umbraco offers a user-friendly interface combined with robust functionality, making it ideal for building everything from small personal websites to large, complex corporate sites. As an open-source platform, it is also supported by the Umbraco community, ensuring continuous improvements and updates.
What is Umbraco CMS?
Umbraco CMS has always been called 'The Friendly CMS' - and it's no wonder!
Umbraco CMS makes it easy for both technical and non-technical users to manage web content. One of the greatest advantages of Umbraco is its user-friendliness. The intuitive system allows users to create, edit, and organize content without the need for extensive technical knowledge.
As an open-source platform, Umbraco is supported by an active and engaged community of developers and users, ensuring continuous improvement and both free and commercial extensions. This community helps keep Umbraco at the forefront of the latest technologies and best practices.
Whether you need a new website or have complex requirements for an e-commerce solution, Umbraco offers the tools and resources necessary to meet your needs.
Why should you build an Umbraco website?
Here are 7 reasons why you should build your site with Umbraco:
1. User-Friendliness
Umbraco is known for having an intuitive user interface, making it easy for teams across the organization to work effectively with the website.
2. Flexibility
Umbraco handles flexibility exceptionally well, meaning you can customize your website precisely to your needs—whether you need a simple blog or a complex corporate site. And there is, of course, a focus on web accessibility.
3. Scalability
Umbraco is designed to grow with your business. The platform can easily handle everything from small websites to large, complex, and unique solutions with many pages and high traffic levels.
4. Integrations
Umbraco gives you direct access to seamlessly integrate with a wide range of third-party applications and services. This means you can connect your website with other systems such as CRM, ERP, and marketing tools to create a fully integrated digital experience.
5. Security
Security is a top priority for Umbraco. The platform offers advanced security measures and regular updates to ensure that the system remains secure, stable, and equipped with new features that keep your website at the forefront of technological advancements.
6. Cloud and Heartcore
With Umbraco Cloud, you get a fully managed hosting solution that makes it easy to develop, test, and deploy changes. Umbraco Heartcore offers headless CMS functionality, providing even greater flexibility.
7. License-Free
An Umbraco solution has no licenses, meaning it can be downloaded for free, allowing you to use and customize the platform. This makes it an economically attractive choice for both small startups and large enterprises.
Why choose Umbraco Commerce for your webshop?
Many people do not know that Umbraco can also be used to run e-commerce. For this purpose, Umbraco Commerce has been developed.
You can therefore benefit from:
Fully integrated with Umbraco CMS: Umbraco Commerce is closely integrated with Umbraco CMS, providing a seamless experience for both developers and editors. Integration means you can manage your webshop and other website content from the same user-friendly interface, saving time and reducing complexity.
Multi-store functionality: Commerce is unlimited, no matter how many stores, countries, currencies, or different languages you need in one solution.
Product catalog and order system: Commerce has an integrated product catalog feature that makes it easy to create and manage products and categories and a robust order engine that handles the entire checkout process.
Flexible discount and gift card options: Commerce comes with a range of common discount options, such as product line discounts, bundle discounts, cart discounts, and discount codes. They are also customizable, so you can easily create your own rules.
Order processing and return handling: Commerce allows you to manage the entire order process, including order processing, shipping, and handling of returns and refunds.
Easy customization of payment providers: Commerce comes standard with several popular payment providers such as PayPal and Stripe. If one is missing, Commerce provides an API so you can easily create your own.
Built-in email functionality: Commerce includes a built-in system for configuring and sending emails for order confirmations, shipping information, and receipts. All emails are fully customizable.
User management and customer information: Commerce includes a user-friendly user management feature that allows you to manage user access and permissions, as well as an integrated customer information system to collect and store customer information securely.
B2B and B2C functionality: Umbraco Commerce supports both B2B and B2C business models, making it possible to serve different customer groups from the same platform. With features such as customer-specific pricing, volume discounts, and customer group segmentation, you can offer tailored experiences to both businesses and individual customers.
Marketing and reporting: Commerce also includes a range of reporting and marketing features, including the ability to set up customer-specific prices, integrate with Google Analytics, and generate various reports on sales, orders, and customer information.
What is the difference between Umbraco Cloud and Umbraco Heartcore?
Umbraco Cloud is a fully managed hosting solution that makes it easy for you to work with Umbraco CMS. The platform offers automatic updates, backups, and a workflow designed to ensure smoother processes between developers and editors.
One of the biggest advantages of Cloud is the automatic updates, which ensure that your Umbraco installation is always up to date with the latest features and security improvements without the need for manual intervention.
Additionally, Umbraco Cloud offers advanced deployment tools that make it easy to move changes from development to production.
Umbraco Heartcore is a headless Umbraco solution, which means that the backend and frontend are separated – all digital content is managed from one place but can be distributed across a multitude of channels. This gives you full control over how and where content is displayed, whether it’s on a website, a mobile app, or another form of digitalization.
Like Umbraco Cloud, Heartcore is also a cloud-hosted solution. This means you get all the benefits of a cloud-based service, such as high availability, scalability, and security, but with the added flexibility that comes with a headless CMS architecture.
Is Umbraco the right choice for you?
Umbraco fits several segments.
Here are some of the industries and business areas where Umbraco can be a particularly good match:
Small and medium-sized businesses: Umbraco is ideal for small and medium-sized businesses that need a cost-effective, flexible, and scalable solution to manage their website.
Large enterprises: For large enterprises and corporations that require advanced features and scalability, Umbraco is an excellent choice. The platform can handle complex websites with many pages, users, and integrations. Umbraco's multisite management feature makes it possible to manage multiple websites from a single platform.
E-commerce businesses: Umbraco Commerce offers a powerful solution for e-commerce businesses. The platform supports both B2B and B2C models, making it possible to sell products and services to both businesses and consumers. With features like advanced inventory management, customer-specific pricing, and integration with popular payment gateways, Umbraco Commerce is a great choice.
Public institutions: Public institutions and government organizations can benefit from Umbraco's robustness and security. The platform meets high security standards and can be customized to meet specific requirements and regulations, making it a safe choice for public websites.
Educational institutions: Schools, universities, and other educational institutions can use Umbraco to create and manage their websites. With Umbraco, educational institutions can easily share information, create intranets, and manage content for students, teachers, and staff.
Use a wide range of Umbraco integrations – or contact Umbraco developers to create custom integrations
Umbraco CMS offers an impressive range of integration options that can help enhance the functionality of your website and optimize your business processes.
Here are 5 of the most popular integrations supported by Umbraco:
1. CRM integrations
Umbraco can easily integrate with various Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and HubSpot. These integrations allow data to be synchronized between your website and your CRM system.
2. ERP systems
For companies using Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, Umbraco offers integrations with solutions such as Microsoft Dynamics. These integrations help synchronize business data across different systems, improving efficiency and data consistency.
3. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)
To ensure fast and reliable content delivery, Umbraco can integrate with CDNs like Cloudflare. This helps improve loading speeds and performance for your website globally.
4. Marketing Automation
Umbraco can integrate with marketing automation platforms like ActiveCampaign. Such integrations help automate marketing processes, track user behavior, and personalize user experiences based on data insights.
5. Analytics and Business Intelligence
Integrations with tools like Google Analytics and Tag Manager allow you to collect, analyze, and visualize data regarding your website's performance. This helps you make informed decisions and optimize your digital strategies.
If you are missing an important integration, perhaps to eliminate siloed work, MCB with its skilled developers can be your Umbraco Partner. Contact us to learn more about your options. We particularly focus on providing accurate advice regarding versions with either short or long-term support.
MCB as your certified Umbraco developer and Umbraco Gold Partner
MCB is your Certified Umbraco Gold Partner with 20 years of experience in .NET development. And of course, we are ISAE3000 certified!
Our experienced developers have a proven track record in custom Umbraco design and development, including complex integrations, e-commerce solutions, self-service solutions, multisite solutions, international solutions with language versions, and many other solutions based on .NET technology. For you, this means qualified advice and professional support from specialists.
We have helped customers all over the Nordics for years, such as Billund Airport, Design Eyewear Group, Topas Travel, ZBC, PRIMO, AMUkurs, Transporterhvervets Uddannelser, and many more. See for yourself here.
Would you also like to be our partner?
As a Certified Umbraco Gold Partner, our team is committed to passing official Umbraco certifications to maintain knowledge and understanding of the powerful open-source CMS. We are also active in the Umbraco Community and have an Umbraco MVP (Most Valued Person) on staff.
For our many partners, this means close dialogue with an Umbraco Partner who is not only certified but also recognized for the design and development of custom Umbraco websites.
Umbraco vs. WordPress
When choosing a Content Management System (CMS) for your website, both Umbraco and WordPress are popular options, but they cater to different, specific needs and preferences.
User-Friendliness: WordPress is known for its user-friendliness and is often the preferred choice for those who want to build and maintain a website without extensive technical knowledge. Umbraco is also user-friendly but offers a deeper level of customization and control, making it particularly well-suited for ambitious solutions.
Flexibility: Umbraco is known for being flexible and adaptable. As an open-source CMS based on .NET technology, it gives developers the freedom to create tailored solutions without limitations. WordPress offers many customization options through themes and plugins but can be less flexible when it comes to handling very specific or complex requirements.
Scalability: Umbraco is designed to handle everything from small websites to large enterprise solutions, making it an excellent choice for companies expecting growth. The platform can easily scale to accommodate increasing traffic and complex features. WordPress can also be scaled, but it often requires additional optimization and maintenance to handle very high traffic levels and large amounts of data.
