Sitecore VS Umbraco
What's the best chose for you

Sitecore and Umbraco are pretty famous CMS systems - both presented for around 20 years on the market and both stand as two prominent contenders, each with its unique strengths and capabilities. These two platforms cater to a diverse spectrum of users, from individual website creators to large-scale enterprises seeking to manage extensive digital ecosystems. The choice between Sitecore and Umbraco often boils down to specific project requirements, budget constraints, and the desired level of customization.

In this comprehensive comparison article, I’ll try to compare core aspects of Sitecore and Umbraco by exploring the differences and similarities between these two CMS giants without digging too deep in details to keep the focus. Hopefully, this article will help businesses and developers in making an informed decision between and find out which CMS aligns best with your digital ambitions.

Available products

Sitecore’s main products is Sitecore CMS (XM and XP versions), Sitecore Managed Cloud (PASS version of CMS). It also provides numerous paid services for personalization and marketing: Sitecore Send, Sitecore Personalize, Sitecore Search, Sitecore CDP, Sitecore Order Cloud and other.

Umbraco’s most known product is free Umbraco CMS. It also provides Umbraco Cloud (paid PAAS version of CMS), Umbraco Heartcore (headless version of CMS) and paid addons - Umbraco Forms, Umbraco Commerce, Umbraco Deploy and Umbraco Workflow.

Features comparison

Both Sitecore and Umbraco provides a lot of features and most essential of them for content management system are compared in a table below:

Keeping this information in mind, let’s go thru some of the features from Content Author and Developer perspective to identify differences and similarities, features and possible bottlenecks.

Content management

Both Umbraco and Sitecore have such basic features as content editing, versioning, translation and publishing. However, difference is always in details.

While Umbraco provides only simple form-based content editing, Sitecore also has built-in WYSIWYG content editor which allows Content Authors to modify content and it’s visual representation in more natural way.

Umbraco seems to be a leader when speaking about versioning out-of-box - each change-and-save event creates new version, so, it’s easy to rollback changes or see previous versions. Sitecore forces you to create versions manually out-of-box, which may be a trick for Content Authors sometimes. Automation can be applied but this is usually skipping during instance setup.

There are not much difference in content translation - both support language versions and languages fallback which is effective and powerful feature for multilingual sites.

Publishing process slightly differs due to implementation features of each CMS. Sometimes you’ll require additional environments such as (development and staging) to test your ideas before releasing them to public. While Sitecore supports multiple environments out of box and you can push you content from one environment to another in a few clicks, free version of Umbraco CMS very limited here providing only two states - draft and live. There are workarounds, but they are paid (Umbraco Cloud or Umbraco Courier addon) or not very intuitive (DB swaping).

Development

While Sitecore CMS provides Headless services that allows you to use modern tech stack such as ASP.NET Core, NextJS or any of your chose (after implementing custom SDK), it uses Microsoft .NET Framework (4.6+) on it's core level (so, ASP.NET MVC 5) as well as bunch of proprietary (SPEAK for example) and other frameworks.

Umbraco on other hand is much smaller CMS that allows to make migrations quicker. So, it was fully moved to .NET Core since it's 9th version (current 12) and it's releases are tighten with .NET releases (v13 will introduce .NET 8 LTS, for example). It also uses well-known AngularJS as frontend framework for it's backend.

Umbraco prioritizes simplicity for content authors, whereas Sitecore, though more complex, offers an extensive feature set. Sitecore excels at scalability for large websites and enterprises, while Umbraco’s approach is more straight-forward and may cause issues when scalability will be required. Of course, it’s highly depends on developers expertise, so, there are some bad practices for Sitecore that can slow everything dramatically and some optimization techniques that allows to scale Umbraco solutions.

In terms of installation and prototyping Umbraco is more developer-friendly again - it’s quick, uses just one SQL database and easy-to-plan. In opposite, Sitecore’s installation requires more attention, but also provides more flexibility and granular control on each service which is essential when speaking about scaling.

Pricing

Umbraco, as an open-source CMS, allows you to create a solution without the need for official support, which can be a cost-effective option, especially if you have a small team of developers and a limited number of instances in your development workflow. Additionally, Umbraco provides a commercial Platform as a Service (PaaS) option with support for a monthly fee (starting from 36eur/month), which is competitively priced compared to many other commercial CMS alternatives.

In contrast, Sitecore is a fully-commercial CMS product that requires licensing for all instances. They offer both perpetual and consumption-based licensing options. Based on client feedback, the minimum entry point for consumption-based licensing can be higher than the cost of Umbraco's commercial PaaS offering. However, with a Sitecore commercial license, you gain access to comprehensive dedicated support. Sitecore's support team is there to assist you in resolving any technical issues, ensuring a high level of assistance for your CMS needs.

Recommendations

Since only Umbraco has a free version of it’s CMS, it might be good option for individuals or small businesses who can’t afford paying for license but you have to be ready for lack of support and rely only on community forums and yourself. However, you can get support on paid plans of Umbraco Cloud for pretty affordable price.

On other side, for large businesses that experience high traffic load with additional requirements of extended security, personalization, A/B testing and integrations, Sitecore sounds like the best option since it provides this features out of box.

The most controversial group is in the middle, of course. In this case I’d recommend to weight all pros and cons as well as experience of your IT-department and plans for the future.