Umbraco Product Update - Q1 2025

You’ll also find updates to the headless API layer with the introduction of Client Credentials for improved, authenticated, and secure integrations. 

Read the full Umbraco 15 release blog post for all the details. 

Balancing Progress, Stability, and Familiarity 

Aside from the exciting features introduced in Umbraco 15, the past year has been all about reshaping the Umbraco backoffice with a modern and future-proof architecture. Now, we’re focused on refining it - addressing bugs, improving stability and performance, and ensuring feature parity with earlier versions. 

Some features were temporarily left behind during the rebuild, but we’re bringing them back! Not just ported, but reimplemented to fully leverage the new architecture. This ensures a cohesive, and more capable back office for both editors and developers. 

Coming up

Tip tapping towards Umbraco 16

Looking ahead to Umbraco 16, Tiptap will be the only Rich Text Editor (RTE) available out-of-the-box. Introduced in Umbraco 15 alongside TinyMCE, Tiptap now takes center stage, and we’re ensuring it has everything needed to fully take over as the RTE for Umbraco CMS.

We’re currently focusing on two areas to improve the experience:

• Table editing: The basics like adding/removing columns, resizing, and merging/splitting cells are being implemented. 

• Stylesheets: We’re working on how custom styles are defined and applied, ensuring greater flexibility and customization for text formatting and layout options in the RTE.

More information about migrations will follow closer to the release of Umbraco 16. For those looking to continue using the TinyMCE interface, there is the TinyMCE Umbraco Premium package available on the Marketplace, and they are aiming to have support for Umbraco 16+ available as well. 

More Flexible Search Integration in Umbraco

We’re implementing a new search abstraction layer to make it easier to integrate external search providers. This means aligning closely with standardized search implementations in .NET, improving capabilities for cloud hosting and load-balancing, all while ensuring a good out-of-the-box search implementation. 

The Request for Comments (RFC) is still open, and we’d love your feedback - you can find it here. In the meantime, we’re working on a proof of concept, and from there, we’ll refine and expand the implementation throughout Q1. We can’t wait to share more details soon!

Containerization Support for Umbraco in Production

Improving compatibility with containerized environments such as Docker and Kubernetes to enable standardized infrastructure and smoother, more flexible deployments. 

Are you running Umbraco in containers? We'd love to hear about your experience! Share the challenges you've faced and the improvements you'd like to see. Your feedback will directly influence our future updates. Let us know how we can better support your setup by joining the discussion here.

Umbraco backoffice Load Balancing

For large-scale projects with many concurrent backoffice users, performance and reliability are key. That’s why we’re working on support for load balancing the Umbraco backoffice. This will help enterprises and organizations improve performance, enhance security, and scale more effectively.

Umbraco Cloud

Umbraco Cloud continues to evolve with new security enhancements, authentication options, and performance improvements. These updates provide greater flexibility, increased protection, and more allowing you to deliver more, faster! 

Make sure to take note of the improvements made to Umbraco Deploy as well, as these benefit both Cloud and Heartcore projects. 

External Login Providers Configurable in the Portal

The Umbraco Cloud Portal now allows you to integrate third-party authentication systems to manage backoffice user logins securely and efficiently.

Extending the CMS’s OpenID Connect support, you can now configure external authentication in the Umbraco Cloud portal, supporting providers like Microsoft Entra ID (former Azure ID), Auth0,  and Google. When configured, your users can sign in to the backoffice using both Umbraco ID and your choice of external login providers. 

The feature is already available for all projects running Umbraco CMS 13+ or Umbraco Heartcore. It is currently flagged as beta and we expect the final release at the end of March. 

See how you can start using it in the new External Login Provider documentation. 

Management API Security

Umbraco Cloud has introduced a new feature called Management API Security, which enhances the protection of your project's back-end services through IP filtering. This feature allows you to secure access to critical domains used for version control, deployment processes, and other management operations.

When enabled, the Management API Security feature applies IP filtering to two types of domains:

• Git domains (identified by the ".git" suffix)

• SCM domains (following the pattern "your-project-alias.regional-identifier.scm.umbraco.io")

To implement this security measure, you simply navigate to the "Management API Security" section under the "Security" tab in their Umbraco Cloud project settings. After enabling IP filtering, project administrators can add specific IP addresses to an allowlist, granting access only to authorized IPs. This ensures that anyone attempting to access these protected domains from an unlisted IP address will be denied, significantly reducing the risk of unauthorized access to your project's management features.

Web Application Firewall

Umbraco Cloud now offers a Web Application Firewall (WAF) to enhance your website's security by filtering and monitoring HTTP traffic, protecting against threats like SQL injection and cross-site scripting.

WAF is automatically enabled on all new projects and new environments in existing projects. WAF ensures immediate protection without any additional setup. However, for existing projects, it must be manually activated to take advantage of its security features.

By implementing WAF, your Umbraco Cloud website gains an additional layer of defense against malicious traffic, helping to maintain optimal performance and safeguard sensitive data.

For detailed setup instructions and more information, please refer to our Web Application Firewall documentation. 

CDN Caching

Umbraco Cloud Websites can enable CDN caching on all plans.

Enabling caching on your production Umbraco Cloud websites brings multiple performance benefits and is as easy as enabling a single toggle. CDN caching caches static assets such as CSS, script, or media files at a server close to the end user.

According to internal monitoring, we can see approximately 20% of traffic that could have caching enabled has caching disabled - we highly recommend you check if CDN caching is enabled on your project, and if not, you might have an easy to gain additional performance.

You can see how to enable caching on your website here: CDN Caching and Optimizations | Umbraco Cloud

TLS 1.0 & 1.1 deprecation notice

MS Azure is deprecating TLS 1.0 and 1.1 over the course of 2025 (see Microsoft documentation). Umbraco Cloud Websites use Blob Storage and SQL Databases provisioned in Azure and as such, any clients and integrations connecting with older versions of the protocol will be affected. 

• All blob storage accounts will support TLS 1.2+ only from April 1, 2025. 

• All SQL databases will support TLS 1.2+ only from September 1, 2025.

According to internal monitoring, no Umbraco Cloud customers will be impacted by the TLS deprecation.

Technical contacts on Umbraco Cloud projects will receive an email notice expanding on the above information.

Coming up

Multiple features are under development to expand the Umbraco Cloud feature set:

• Hostname Monitoring will soon allow you to create hostname monitors directly in Umbraco Cloud. We expect to release the feature in Q1, giving users the ability to track the uptime, response codes, and performance of their Umbraco Cloud projects

• Flexible Environments will allow you to create a feature environment, next to the current development environments, so you can have long-running feature branches. We aim to make this available by the end of Q1.

• External Login Providers for the Cloud Portal is a project with the goal of letting you use your own login provider when your users have to sign into the Umbraco Cloud portal. 

Umbraco Heartcore

Managing backoffice user authentication just got easier in Umbraco Heartcore with the introduction of External Login Providers. This feature, also available on Cloud projects, allows you to integrate third-party authentication systems like Microsoft Entra ID, Auth0, and Google, streamlining access management and enhancing security.

But that’s not all - Heartcore has also introduced Persisted Queries to optimize GraphQL performance, and we’re working on some exciting new workflows.

Persisted Queries

We have introduced Persisted Queries in Umbraco Heartcore - a feature designed to streamline your GraphQL API interactions, enhance security, and boost performance. Persisted Queries allow you to store predefined GraphQL queries on the server. Instead of sending the entire query with each request, you reference it by an alias, reducing payload size and minimizing network overhead.

This approach accelerates client-server communication, ensures that only authorized queries are executed, bolstering your application's security, and simplifies maintenance:

• Improved Performance: By transmitting just the alias and necessary variables, you decrease the amount of data sent over the network. This leads to faster response times, especially beneficial for mobile applications or environments with limited bandwidth.

• Enhanced Security: Persisted Queries ensure that only predefined, server-stored GraphQL queries can be executed. This prevents clients from running arbitrary or potentially malicious queries, safeguarding your data.

• Simplified Maintenance: Managing your GraphQL queries centrally means any updates or optimizations are made in one place. This reduces the risk of inconsistencies, it makes your codebase easier to maintain and it introduces a low-code approach to designing your CMS API.

To start using Persisted Queries, navigate to the GraphQL Playground within the Umbraco Heartcore backoffice. Here, you can create and manage your queries, assigning each an alias for easy reference.

Coming Up 

Umbraco Workflow in Heartcore

In the coming months, we plan to introduce Umbraco Workflow in Heartcore. This integration empowers you to streamline your content review and publication processes directly within your platform. 

Out of the box, you’ll have access to basic Workflow functionality, enabling you to manage simple editorial tasks effortlessly. And if your needs grow more complex, you can easily upgrade to unlock the full version through a dedicated license - giving you the flexibility to tailor your workflow to your team’s requirements. 

For more details, check out the Umbraco Workflow product page.

Umbraco Add-ons

The Umbraco ecosystem continues to expand with improvements across the board. From the official release of Umbraco Engage to major performance enhancements in Commerce and new content-focused Workflow capabilities, these updates help you get even more out of Umbraco.

Umbraco Engage

The biggest recent feature for Umbraco Engage is arguably that it has been officially released, Umbraco Engage is now available for Umbraco 13, evolving uMarketingSuite into a streamlined and integrated content optimization tool for Umbraco. 

Along with the release itself, several improvements have been made:

• A/B Testing Reports now provide more detailed information

• Analytics offers better insights into incoming traffic

• Goal and Forms Tracking has been refined for more accurate reporting

These updates help enhance the overall utility of Umbraco Engage, making it even easier to analyze and optimize content performance.

See the Umbraco Engage release blog post for more details.

Coming up

With Umbraco Engage now available for Umbraco 13 (LTS) development is already in full swing to expand capabilities and ensure we take full advantage of the latest developments across Umbraco products.

New Backoffice Support (Umbraco 15+)

We’re working on the next major release of Umbraco Engage that aligns with the new backoffice architecture introduced in Umbraco 14. This release will ensure a consistent and optimized user experience and be the foundation for new features and additions to Umbraco Engage in upcoming versions.

Engage and Deploy

Support for transferring Umbraco Engage data and configuration between environments is in progress. This will improve functionality and productivity for projects on Umbraco Cloud and ones using Umbraco Deploy on-premises.

Enhanced Persona and Journey Step Scoring

In addition to implicit scoring, personas, and journey steps will soon support explicit scoring.
This will allow directly triggered values to help personalize visitor experiences more dynamically.

More Improvements on the Way 

Other enhancements include Persona and Customer Step scoring at the goal level, new Pageviews segment parameters, improved indication of reliability predictions for running A/B Tests, and much more…Stay tuned!

Umbraco Commerce

Umbraco Commerce for Umbraco 15

After an extended release candidate phase, Umbraco Commerce 15 was released just a few weeks ago with significant performance improvements, and a fully async API built on .NET 9.

And “significant” is no exaggeration; throughput capacity (orders per hour) has more than doubled, request times drastically reduced, and the new async API makes it perform even better under load. These optimizations combined with the new backoffice UI, which is fully implemented, set a strong foundation for the future of Umbraco Commerce.

Performance Test Highlights:

• Order processing capacity increased from 30.000 to 70.000 per hour

• P95 response times cut from 2s to <1s in higher tier setups

• Improved scalability across a variety of server and  SQL configurations

This is a major step forward for Umbraco Commerce, and we’re excited to see how it improves real-world projects.

Drop-in Cart Now Available

A new drop-in Cart package that lets you add a working shopping cart to your project with minimal setup. Combine it with the Checkout package and you have a fully working functional shopping experience out-of-the-box - or great inspiration for implementing your own cart and checkout flows.

The Umbraco Commerce Cart package is open-source and available on GitHub and comes with detailed documentation to make it as easy as possible to get started with. 

Stable and Reliable

We’re happy to report that all issues have been reviewed and resolved from all Commerce issue trackers. Thanks to everyone for raising issues and helping test and triage where necessary. It all helps improve and stabilize the product even further. 

Coming Up

Several new features are in development to expand Umbraco Commerce’s capabilities:

• Partial Refunds and Returns allow you to return parts of an order, not just the whole thing

• Abandoned Cart Overview with customer details directly in the CMS for better follow-up

• With Order Payment Links you can create orders in the backoffice and send payment links to customers

So, there’s plenty to look forward to and more coming up for Umbraco Commerce in the future. 

Umbraco Workflow

Release Sets and Alternate Versions for Umbraco Workflow 15 are still on track for Q1 availability - as with any major feature you’ll have an RC period to explore the new functionality and provide feedback around bugs, issues, and potential improvements.

Alternate Versions will enable you to maintain multiple concurrent versions of a single document, without blocking the publication of the main version.

Release Sets will enable you to build groups of content for scheduled publishing. Used in conjunction with Alternate Versions, a single set can contain iterative changes to documents. This provides deep, granular control over publication, ideal for building complex content campaigns.

Coming up

• UI/UX polish for Release Sets and Alternate Versions

• Content Approval Workflows for alternate versions

• Extensible Submissions to allow you to add additional data alongside a workflow approval request

See the Umbraco Workflow release notes for all the latest updates.

Umbraco Forms

Multi-Step Forms Enhancements

When editing forms, you can now choose to display paging details on multi-step forms, providing the end-user with a clearer sense of progress and remaining steps.

Advanced Validation Rules

New form-level validation rules allow conditions based on multiple fields, such as: 

• Ensuring two fields match

• Validating one date occurs after another

This can help provide better guidance to the user filling out the form and ensure better data integrity of submissions.

Coming Up

Backoffice Form Testing and Previewing

To enhance productivity and user experience it will be possible to test and preview forms directly in the backoffice without repeatedly having to navigate to the content section.

See the release notes for details on the latest releases.

Umbraco UI-Builder

Support for Umbraco 14 and beyond

Umbraco UI Builder helps streamline the building and maintenance of custom backoffice UI, and with working versions compatible with both Umbraco 14 and 15 it can even help migrate to the new backoffice architecture. Instead of rewriting backoffice extensions from scratch, UI Builder provides a structured approach to building out the UI and can translate from old to new backoffice ensuring you get the right extensions with minimal effort.  

By adopting Umbraco UI Builder, developers can:

• Reduce the effort required to upgrade custom-built backoffice interfaces

• Align with Umbraco’s new backoffice framework, introduced in Umbraco 14

• Benefit from a more maintainable and scalable UI architecture for external data

If you're planning to upgrade to Umbraco 14+  and have custom backoffice extensions, it’s a perfect time to see if you can benefit from UI Builder to simplify the process.

Coming Up

More Reliability and Stability

As described with Umbraco Commerce (and Umbraco CMS) above, we’re focusing on ensuring day-to-day operation with our products continues to be a great experience. That’s why, for UI Builder, we’re adding the same focus to reviewing and addressing issues, bugs, and feedback raised on the issue tracker. This will be a key focus in the coming months.

These updates make UI Builder an even more powerful tool and focusing on the issue tracker will both improve the product now and provide input for coming features. 

Check out the UI-Builder release notes for the latest updates and fixes.

Umbraco Deploy

Umbraco Deploy has received both useful new features and some serious performance improvements.

Faster Transfers and Restores

For Umbraco Cloud and Umbraco Heartcore users, restoring and transferring content is now significantly faster. Previously, determining dependencies on large sites could result in slow response times or, in some cases even timeouts. We’ve recently introduced configuration options that help optimize performance on large sites, and introduced performance improvements to transfers and dependency calculations:

• Faster dependency resolution when transferring or restoring content 

• More predictable processing times, even for large datasets

• Better handling of timeouts, ensuring smoother deployments overall

The optimizations have been patched into Umbraco Deploy 13, 14, and 15. So if you’re projects have automated upgrades enabled, and are on corresponding Umbraco versions, you’re already benefitting from these updates. If you’re running Umbraco Deploy on-premises make sure you have at least version 13.3.2, 14.2.2, or 15.0.2 respectively.

Schema Comparison

Developers can now actively work with the schema comparison view in the settings dashboard. This helps make it easier to track and manage changes across environments.

Enhanced Export Options

Exporting and downloading content and schema from the Umbraco backoffice is about to become more flexible. New export options are designed to give you greater control over content export, queued items, as well as exporting schema and Umbraco Members.

These features help with a more seamless transition when migrating an existing site to Umbraco Cloud or with major upgrades. 

Coming Up

Umbraco Engage Support in Deploy

As mentioned above, we’re ensuring Umbraco Deploy can handle all relevant content, configuration, and data from Umbraco Engage. This can help ease development and testing both locally and in multiple environment setups. 

Details on all Umbraco Deploy releases and improvements are available in the release notes.

In other news…

Umbraco 8 Reaches End of Life (End-of-Support)

After six years (and two days), Umbraco 8 has officially reached End-of-Life (EOL). This marks the end of its lifecycle, meaning it will no longer receive security patches, bug fixes, or official support from Umbraco HQ.

For those still running Umbraco 8, this is an important milestone to consider when planning the future of your projects. While sites running on Umbraco 8 will continue to function, upgrading to a supported version is recommended to ensure continued security, stability, and access to the latest features. To help with a good transition to a modern version of Umbraco we’re hosting dedicated EOL sessions to help you explore the available options and answer your questions. 

Sign up for an EOL session

It is also a big milestone for Umbraco CMS as it is a final farewell to .NET Framework. Umbraco 8 was an important step towards support for .NET (ASP.NET Core) which was realized in Umbraco 9. It also laid the foundation for what became the new backoffice (Bellissima), introduced infinite editing, removed and re-introduced tabs, saw the dawn of Block (List) editors, and shaped the CMS in countless ways. 

Thanks for your service 🫡

Umbraco Awards 2025 - Submit Your Best Work

The Umbraco Awards are back for 2025, celebrating the most outstanding projects built with Umbraco. Whether it's a sleek website, a powerful integration, or a game-changing digital experience, this is your chance to showcase your work to the entire Umbraco community at Codegarden 2025 (Early-bird tickets are still available).

Winning an Umbraco Award brings credibility, increased visibility, and new business opportunities. It’s also a great way to celebrate the hard work and creativity of your team.

Submissions are open until April 1st, 2025, so if you’ve built something you’re proud of, now is the time to share it. We can’t wait to see what you’ve built with Umbraco.

Submit your project here.

Why We Think of Umbraco as a CMS Platform

Umbraco is more than just a CMS - it’s a platform that provides flexibility, scalability, and integration possibilities beyond “just” content management. It’s also sufficiently modular, so as not to become an overly complex all-in-one suite, but allows developers and implementors to create the best possible content management experience. 

Not a huge shift in terminology, or a fancy new marketing term, but rather a helpful way to describe the advantage of using Umbraco, whether as a classic CMS, a headless content provider, or one part of a larger composable architecture.

This blog post explores why thinking of Umbraco as a CMS Platform matters, how it aligns with industry trends, and what it means for developers, agencies, and businesses using Umbraco today.

Read the full blog post

The Umbraco Forum Has Moved

The Umbraco Forum has officially transitioned to a new Discourse-powered platform at forum.umbraco.com. A public forum remains an essential part of the Umbraco community, providing a space for collaboration, problem-solving, and shared learning.

The new forum offers an improved user experience, better organization of discussions, and stronger moderation tools to support open knowledge sharing. Whether you're troubleshooting an issue, sharing best practices, or helping others, the forum continues to be a key place to connect with the community.

The previous forum on Our.Umbraco is now in read-only mode, ensuring that years of valuable discussions remain accessible.

The new forum is live and ready for new conversations 
- explore it here: forum.umbraco.com.

You can read more about the transition on the Community blog.

… Until next time

🛣️ Remember that you can always keep yourself updated on what we’re working on “Now”, “Next”, and “Later” on the Umbraco Product Roadmap as well as check up on all released features in the Umbraco Roadmap History. 

💡 The work we do is inspired by the feedback we get from you. If you find issues or have specific feature requests, you can find the issue trackers for our products on the Umbraco Github account. We have a vibrant and friendly community on Discord and if you have product feedback, you’re always welcome to reach out to us at product@umbraco.com.

📬 To ensure you don’t miss out on this and more articles from Umbraco HQ, sign up for the Umbraco Newsletter. It’s the best way to receive the latest news, tips, and exclusive content directly in your inbox - every month.