Umbraco
MITA content platform your editors will actually use.
Practice led by Hannah Pryce, Practice Director, Content Platforms
What Umbraco is
Umbraco is a .NET content management system with a genuinely good editor experience and an unusually permissive licence — MIT, with no per-editor or per-site cost. We build the content model, the editing experience and the front end, on Windows or Linux hosting.
Who it suits
- Organisations on a proprietary CMS with per-editor licensing that has outgrown its value
- Marketing and communications teams who currently need a developer to change a headline
- Anyone with an existing .NET estate and the in-house skills to match
- Charities and public-sector bodies where the licence line matters and accessibility is not negotiable
And who it does not
If your team has no .NET capability and no intention of acquiring any, and you are not taking managed hosting, a platform your developers already know will serve you better long-term than the best CMS they do not.
What we do with it
Our Umbraco work
Configuration is the project. The install is an afternoon.
Content modelling and editor experience
Document types, compositions and block lists designed so editors can build pages without breaking the design system. We measure this by how rarely the editors need to call us afterwards.
Deployment on Windows or Linux
Umbraco runs on both. We deploy to whichever fits your estate, with environments, deployment pipeline and a content-transfer path between them.
Migration from an existing CMS
Content, media, URL structure and redirects brought across from WordPress, Sitecore, Drupal or a bespoke system, with the redirect map that protects your search ranking.
Accessibility built in
WCAG 2.2 AA as a delivery standard rather than a retrofit, with an audit before launch. For public-sector clients this is a legal requirement, and we treat it as one for everybody.
Shape of the work
How an engagement runs
Content audit
What exists, what earns its place, what should not survive the move.
Model and design
Document types and components, built together.
Build
Front end, editor experience, integrations.
Migrate
Content, media and the redirect map.
Launch
Accessibility audit, performance pass, cutover.
What it connects to
- Existing identity providers for editor login
- Elasticsearch or Azure Cognitive Search
- Marketing automation and CRM
- Digital asset management systems
- Azure and AWS hosting
- CDN and edge caching
The honest bit
Umbraco is MIT-licensed, which is the most permissive position of any platform we deploy — there is no meaningful licence risk to discuss. Umbraco HQ does sell commercial products around the CMS, notably Umbraco Cloud, and those are separate from the open-source core. We deploy the core. If Cloud is a better fit for you, we will say so, and we do not take a commission for saying it.
In practice
A Umbraco engagement
Charity · Umbraco
Editors publishing without a developer, for the first time in nine years
An Umbraco rebuild replacing a bespoke CMS that only its original author understood, with WCAG 2.2 AA as a delivery standard.
Thornbury TrustAt a glance
- Since the last rebuild
- 9 years
- Audited before launch
- WCAG 2.2 AA
- Pages migrated
- 1,240
- Total engagement
- 41 days
Services that go with it
Deployment & configuration
Design, deploy and configure an open-source platform against how your organisation actually works.
How it worksData migration
Profiling, mapping, dry runs at production volume, and reconciliation reporting at every stage.
How it worksManaged hosting
Patching, backups with tested restores, monitoring and upgrades — in your cloud account or ours.
How it worksSupport & maintenance
Annual support against a deployed platform, with response targets and a quarterly review.
How it worksTalk to the Umbraco practice
A scoping conversation with someone who works on this platform every day, not an account manager.