Umbraco Product Update - Q1 2026

• Product News:

  • AI everywhere Umbraco is

  • CMS

  • Cloud

  • Compose

  • Engage

  • Commerce

  • Forms

  • UI Builder

  • Deploy
    

• In other news…

  • Umbraco is ISO 27001 certified

  • 100% SLA

  • Umbraco 13 LTS

  • Security Advisory for Umbraco 16 and 17

  • The Umbraco Winter Keynote

AI everywhere Umbraco is

Let’s start this Product Update with some exciting AI news and how you add AI to your project, entirely on your own choice and terms. At the Umbraco Winter Keynote, we introduced an evolution to our AI strategy that offers a dedicated foundation for you to add AI in the backoffice, and control and govern how AI is used in your Umbraco project.

You can look forward to adding AI features exactly as your project requires, whether they are built by Umbraco HQ, partners, or the community, knowing they all rely on the same stable foundation expanded and maintained by Umbraco HQ.

Ultimately, our updated strategy boils down to three core principles:

• Choice: You decide the LLM providers and models that fit your project. No vendor lock-in, no “one-size-fits-all” models.
  

• Control: With the Umbraco.AI foundation, you define the governance, tone of voice, and permissions before AI even touches your content.
  

• Connection: Wherever Umbraco lives, we support it with AI. That means inside the Umbraco backoffice, and connections to external agents via Umbraco MCP and Claude Skills.

The Umbraco AI strategy takes shape across two connected tracks: AI in Umbraco and Umbraco in AI. If you want to dive into Umbraco’s AI Strategy, you can find it here.

For now, let's look at the features actually landing in your hands.

AI in Umbraco

Since the Winter Keynote we’ve added updates to the first example of AI feature for the backoffice, Umbraco Prompts. We prepared the upcoming feature Umbraco Agent and Copilot with permissions and context aware tools, and finally we introduced test and evaluation to the AI foundation of AI in Umbraco.

Check out a presentation of these new features and updates here: 

Umbraco in AI: Building with Agent Skills

As development shifts toward AI-native environments like Claude, Cursor, and Codex, you’ll find Umbraco evolving to be more than just compatible, it’s becoming a primary tool in your AI tech stack. You can now bridge the gap between your CMS projects and the LLMs you use every day.

Shaping AI Behavior with Agent Skills

To supplement the connection to external tools, you can now take advantage of Agent Skills, a structured pattern for shaping AI agent behaviour to help you build projects more efficiently.

With the first release, the Agent Skill: Backoffice Extension package you get 66 individual skills (or AI-powered code generators and helpers). These guide your agent to build extensions for your Umbraco backoffice exactly how you want them.

You can also look forward to new agent skills currently in exploration for initial implementation and content modeling, giving you a comprehensive suite of practical tools to feed your AI agent whenever you’re building with Umbraco.

Stay Updated: Check out our recent blog post series: The Agent-Ready CMS on how Umbraco is available for AI-native development.

Empowering Your Workflow with MCP

Building on top of the Umbraco CMS Developer MCP, we’ve introduced the Umbraco base MCP implementation. This is a great starting point for agency or community developers looking to build their own MCP Servers. You get an automated setup that guides you through creating a MCP server tailored to your package.

At Umbraco HQ, we are already using this same base implementation to build MCP servers for the Umbraco Add-ons, ensuring you have a consistent experience across the entire platform.

AI assistance for Content Teams with Umbraco MCP

You can soon bring the power of AI directly into your editorial workflow without any developer involvement or complex setup.

Simply open your preferred LLM (like Claude or ChatGPT), connect to the Hosted Editor MCP, and describe your next content task in plain language. You get to watch the LLM and the hosted MCP carry out the work directly in the backoffice of your Umbraco project.

Imagine having AI help you:

• Create a new autumn campaign landing page, draft the hero copy, and pull in the latest product images. The MCP handles the layout and content for you.
  

• Tell the agent to rewrite existing pages to match your tone-of-voice guidelines or generate optimized meta descriptions in seconds.
  

• Translate entire pages for new markets or automatically fix accessibility issues across your site, all through a simple conversation.

You gain a natural, integrated AI assistant that gets you started on your next content task.

Umbraco CMS

Let’s look at how the CMS - the engine of your Umbraco platform - is evolving to support your growth. You can look forward to better scalability for large-scale content sites through a new modular approach for Umbraco Search and the introduction of Global Elements.

Beyond new features, the primary focus for Umbraco CMS is stability and being responsive to the many projects currently on the upgrade path to Umbraco 17. We’re committed to responding to the open issue tracker and putting out corrections and guidance on the predictable 6-week minor releases of Umbraco 17. We’re pleased to see so many of you already, or plan to, upgrade to this latest Long-Term-supported version of Umbraco.

Umbraco CMS: Coming up

A new era for search in Umbraco

Get ready to level up your search experience! The new Umbraco Search package is nearing completion, and it’s all about features, flexibility, and you being in control.

Native search power

Umbraco Search introduces many new advanced features out-of-the-box, which previously required custom implementations. You can look forward to:

• Faceting and filtering

• Full integration with languages and segments

• Secure search results that respect member permissions

• Seamless indexing of Umbraco property editors

• And of course, free text querying

All this means smarter, more powerful search results as a standard.

Built for flexibility and scalability

While Examine remains the default search provider, the architecture is now fully pluggable. If your requirements evolve or you need a specific engine, you can swap providers without having to rework your entire search implementation.

Roadmap and support

Once completed, the Umbraco Search package will be made for Umbraco 17 and 18. If you want to get started now, the beta release is available here.

Looking ahead, we plan to bring the Umbraco Search into the CMS core for Umbraco 19. This means you can be confident using the package, as we’ll support it through Umbraco 21 LTS, taking you seamlessly into the next Long-Term Supported cycle.

Elements: create content once - use everywhere!

Managing content at scale can be a headache, especially when keeping it in sync. That’s why Elements is such a high priority for our roadmap.

In its essence, Elements allows you to create content once and reuse it across as many pages as you need. Instead of having the same content replicated on a per-page basis, Elements can serve as a single source of truth, enabling editors to manage content updates at speed and with confidence.

Phase 1: the Foundation

We’ve already laid the groundwork for this feature. In Umbraco 18, you can manage elements in the new Library section of Umbraco 18 and reference them in your content using the new element picker.

Phase 2: Block Editor Integration

We’re now diving into the next phase: bringing this “create once, use everywhere” power directly into the Block Editor. This allows editors to select and use elements directly within their Block List and Block Grid editors.

Soon, with just a few clicks, editors will be able to:

• Mix and match reusable elements alongside standalone, one-off blocks in the same block editor

• Transfer a standalone block to the Library to make it a reusable element

• Disconnect a reusable element and make it a standalone block.

• Settings are still available on each block, for page-specific tweaks, for example, background or size.

Ultimately, this is about making Umbraco more enjoyable and efficient. No more jumping from page to page to update the same piece of information. Update it once, trust the system, and get back to the creative work that matters.

ETA: Q2/Q3 2026.

The EF Core project

Finally, work continues on the EF Core (Entity Framework Core) project. This is an “under the hood” architectural shift that will modernize how Umbraco interacts with the database. It’s a long-term play that will ultimately lead to better performance, easier testing, and a much more standard experience for .NET developers working with Umbraco.

We’re currently aiming for a Q4 2026 release for the EF Core project, but we’re ensuring that the current provider, Npoco, remains fully supported all the way through to Umbraco 21.

Umbraco Cloud

Running Umbraco at scale means your platform needs to run smoothly without you having to think about it. The less time spent managing infrastructure, the more time you have to deliver value for your customers. This round of Cloud updates focuses on three different areas that directly affect day-to-day operations: Stronger security, more reliable and flexible deployments, and visibility into how your projects are performing. There’s something for everyone here, whether scale means quantity or size of projects, and there’s even more in the release notes and the “Coming up” section.

Stronger security, less effort

Managing access and protecting your site just got a lot easier. Three recent additions work together to give you layered security with less manual effort.

Custom Identity Provider support is now generally available. If your organization uses Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, Google, or another OpenID Connect provider, you can now connect it directly to the Umbraco Cloud Portal. Team members sign in with their existing credentials, and you manage project permissions and roles from your identity provider. That means faster onboarding, cleaner offboarding, and one less set of credentials to worry about.

Learn more in the Organization Login Providers documentation.

On the traffic side, Managed Challenges now help protect your projects from bots, scraping, and traffic surges. When a request looks suspicious, a lightweight verification is served automatically, your real users get through, bots and bad traffic don't. You can apply challenges globally, per hostname, or even per continent, and it works seamlessly alongside the built-in Web Application Firewall (WAF) features.

New projects also ship with new TLS cipher suite defaults. This provides a more secure configuration out of the box, with no action required on your part. Legacy cipher suites are now off by default, while Compatible and Modern suites remain enabled.

If you need to support older clients or tighten security further for compliance, you have full control to toggle individual cipher suites under Security > Transport Security.

See the Managing Transport Security documentation for the full details on Managed Challenges and cipher suite configuration.

Faster, more transparent CI/CD

If you use CI/CD pipelines to deploy to Umbraco Cloud, the experience has improved significantly over the past few months.

CI/CD Flow now has its own dedicated page under Configuration. From there, you can also download deployment artifacts directly, handy when you need to verify exactly what was deployed.

A new deployment detail view in Project History gives you process logs, Kudu logs, artifact metadata, and deployment options, all in one place. Simply put, easy access to all details regarding your deployments means less time debugging and less need for support interactions. Click "See More" on any CI/CD deployment event to get the full picture.

Deployments are also both faster and more reliable. When a deployment contains no new changes, unnecessary steps are skipped automatically, cutting down deployment time. A new verification step ensures your changes have actually reached the App Service.

Read more in the CI/CD on Umbraco Cloud documentation.

Improved visibility and predictability

A few updates that make it easier to keep up with what's happening across your Cloud projects and plan ahead.

A new Usage graph gives you a rolling 31-day view of your bandwidth consumption. Have you reduced image sizes or changed your caching strategy? You can see the effect within a day instead of waiting for the monthly summary. An additional graph displaying daily usage has recently been added to complement the accumulated graph, making it even easier for you to identify usage spikes and patterns.

Usage notifications have also been improved. Daily warning emails are gone, and alerts have been tweaked to be less noisy and more helpful. For media storage, you now get a fresh alert each time usage climbs back above the limit after you've reduced it, so you're never left wondering if a second breach went unnoticed.

For longer-term planning, a new End-of-Service policy is now available with predictable timelines and milestones for support of major CMS versions on Cloud.

And if you're migrating a production site to Umbraco Cloud, Hostname Pre-Validation lets you prepare domains, issue TLS certificates, and verify routing before switching DNS, so you can go live with zero downtime.

For the full details on recently released features and improvements, check the Umbraco Cloud release notes for 2025 and 2026.

Umbraco Cloud: Coming up

Deploy to any target is just around the corner

A new “Deploy to any target” option under CI/CD Flow configuration gives you full control over which environment each deployment reaches. Previously, CI/CD Flow always targeted the left-most environment in your project. Now, you can deploy to any environment directly from your CI/CD pipeline.

It is an advanced option for teams who manage the full deployment chain through their own CI/CD setup, rather than the Cloud Portal, making it straightforward to push a critical fix as well as small tweaks, without disturbing ongoing development in your other environments.

The finishing touches on UI and documentation is being applied as we speak, so you can expect the new feature to be available withing the next week or so.

ETA: March, 2026

Load Balancing for business-critical projects

Load Balancing is now in active development, with a target release window of June. Once available, you'll be able to horizontally scale your Cloud projects, keeping performance and stability high during traffic spikes or on resource-intensive applications. You'll get more updates on the feature and how it will benefit your projects as work progresses and it takes shape.

ETA: June, 2026

Self-service edge analytics

Edge Insights is targeting an April release, bringing Cloudflare traffic analytics directly into the Cloud Portal as a new section under Availability & Performance. The aim is to give you self-service access to key areas like traffic volumes, cache usage, and request origins per hostname. Combined with the already existing analytics, you'll get full visibility into both app performance and traffic.

ETA: April, 2026

Flexible Dedicated Resources for all plans

An update to Dedicated Resources has recently been added to the product roadmap. The goal is to make all Dedicated Resource options available across all Umbraco Cloud plans, giving you more flexibility to find the right fit for your project. The options will be based on newer Azure App Service Plans, which will also bring improved performance. More details to come as we get closer to release.

Umbraco Compose

On February 3, we launched the new Umbraco Compose platform (find the launch blog post here). It gives you the data orchestration layer you need to truly realise a clean, composable architecture for your enterprise projects. It simplifies managing complex data flows, freeing you from a lot of custom code and ensuring you can adapt fast to new business needs.

Streamlined Data Orchestration with GraphQL

• Umbraco Compose acts as a fully managed backend-for-frontend, connecting your systems (CMS, PIM, CRM, ERP, DAM, etc.) and translating all that data into one unified, headless API output.
  

• It uses GraphQL as its main query language, which is technology-agnostic and ensures you only retrieve the data you need. This means faster load times for your applications, no over-fetching of data, and happier visitors.
  

• Key components like an Ingestion API, a Management API, the Delivery API described above, Webhooks, Caching, and a Global CDN are included, ensuring performance and reliability right out of the box.

AI-Readiness Built-in

• AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on structured, reliable data to perform accurately. Since Compose and GraphQL are structured by nature, they provide the perfect foundation for connecting your favorite AI tools and getting reliable, effective results that ease your workflows.

Seamless CMS Experience

• As a fully managed SaaS platform, Compose is built to scale effortlessly with your business.
  

• For those of you using Umbraco CMS, you get out-of-the-box integrations, including a Content Picker that allows your editors to seamlessly reference data from any source connected to Compose as if it were stored directly in the CMS. This ensures quick developer setup and a delightful editing experience.

Umbraco Compose Show and Tell

If you want to learn more about this new offering by seeing it in action or taking a peek under the hood, we have 3 videos we recommend:

• Want to really understand what you’re able to do with Compose without diving too much into the code? Check out this 9:34-minute Compose Demo by Umbraco CTO, Filip Bech-Larsen: 

• Unboxing Umbraco Compose - a technical deep dive into how you work with Umbraco Compose
  
  

• UmbraCoffee: Compose Yourself - a technical walkthrough of the tech behind Compose and how to get content into Compose, combine it, and get it back out again

Umbraco Compose: Coming up

Ingested Content Payload View

The Ingested Content Diagnostics view currently displays metadata like IDs and timestamps. We are extending this to include the actual content payload, providing developers with deeper visibility into ingested data and simplifying troubleshooting.

ETA: Q1 2026

Ingestion Function UI & Logs

Managing JavaScript-based Ingestion Functions via JSON can be cumbersome. We are introducing a dedicated Management UI with integrated execution logs, making it easier for developers to build, iterate, and debug their webhook transformations.

ETA: Q2 2026

Umbraco Engage

More precise personalisation with explicit scoring

You can now move visitors into the right customer journey stage or persona faster and with greater precision. With explicit scoring in Umbraco Engage, you decide exactly how specific actions influence how a visitor is classified.

You already use implicit scoring to evaluate behaviour based on content consumption, campaigns, and inbound traffic. Now you can complement that with explicit scoring, where clear signals such as key interactions or defined actions directly move a visitor into a specific journey stage or persona.

Both scoring models work side by side:

Implicit scoring helps you understand interest over time.
Explicit scoring lets you react immediately to strong intent.

What this means for you:

• Direct classification control: assign scoring values that intentionally move visitors between journey stages or personas.
  

• Faster personalisation: trigger relevant content and campaigns as soon as intent is clear.
  

• Greater precision: combine behavioural insight with defined business logic.
  

• Flexible strategy: use implicit and explicit scoring together to match your marketing and sales setup.

This gives you tighter control over segmentation and ensures personalisation reflects both engagement patterns and clear intent signals.

Upgrade to the latest version of Umbraco Engage to start using explicit scoring

Umbraco Engage: Coming up

Engage MCP

Umbraco Engage will be extended with MCP capabilities that support both working with Engage data and managing Engage configuration. This includes the ability to work with personas, journey steps, content scoring, goals, segments, and A/B tests. The result is a more efficient way for marketers, editors, shop owners, and developers to set up, adjust, and automate personalization strategies.

ETA: Q2, 2026

Improved Bot Detection

Bot Detection will be enhanced to better identify and filter non-human traffic across analytics and personalization features. This update improves data quality, ensures more accurate reporting, and strengthens segmentation by isolating real visitor behavior from automated activity.

ETA: Q2 2026

Umbraco Commerce

Richer insights from your shop data

We’ve expanded the Analytics overview in Umbraco Commerce with new widgets that give you clearer insight into how your shop performs and where you can drive growth. These are available in the latest Commerce release.

New Analytics widgets you can use today:

• Top Selling Products: understand what’s selling best and what drives your revenue.

• Applied Discounts: see how discount rules are actually being used.

• Most Popular Discounts: identify which offers resonate most with customers.

• Refund Rate: monitor returns and protect your margin.

• Top 50 Buyers: recognise and nurture your highest value customers.

• Stock Forecast: see which products are likely to go out of stock soon so you can act before it impacts sales.

These additions make it easier to turn shop data into action, directly from your Analytics dashboard.

Upgrade to the latest version of Umbraco Commerce to access the enriched Analytics overview

Umbraco Commerce: Coming up

Customer Management

A new Customer Management area will give you a clear overview of all shoppers interacting with your store. You will be able to review customer details, order history, and engagement patterns in one place. This provides better insights into buying behavior, helps you support customers more efficiently, and forms a solid foundation for future features.

ETA: Q2, 2026

Umbraco Forms: Coming up

Analytics; enhanced insight into performance and conversions

You can now see how your forms are performing and when they convert best. With Enhanced Form Analytics in Umbraco Forms, you get clearer insight into submissions, trends, and conversion patterns both per form and across all forms.

New analytics capabilities include:

• Submissions overview: track how often your forms are submitted over time and spot trends instantly.
  

• Best performing forms: identify which forms drive the most engagement.
  

• Conversion timing insights: understand when users are most likely to convert.
  

• Workflow performance: monitor triggers, successes, and errors to keep processes running smoothly.
  

• Source page tracking: see where submissions originate and optimize high performing pages.

Analytics is available on individual form level and as an overview across all forms, giving you both detailed insight and a broader performance picture.

Enhanced Form Analytics will be released on April 16 as part of Forms 17.3

Umbraco UI builder

Async Support

Umbraco UI Builder is extended with async support to enable more flexible and performant data handling. This allows UI Builder integrations to work smoothly with asynchronous data sources and external APIs.

Check out the release notes here

Umbraco Deploy: Coming Up

Improved UI and UX

The Deploy interface will be updated to offer a clearer and more intuitive workflow for transferring content and schema changes. This includes improved visibility of deployment states, better guidance during conflict resolution, and a more streamlined experience for editors and developers working across environments. The goal is to make deployments easier to understand, faster to execute, and more predictable for all users.

ETA: Q2, 2026

In other news…

Umbraco is ISO 27001 certified

We're super proud to officially call Umbraco’s product organisation ISO 27001 certified. This is an official seal of approval that demonstrates Umbraco's strong commitment to information security. A certification that benefits the entire Umbraco ecosystem, and we’re so happy to see how well this certification has been received by our community and partners.

Find the official ISO announcement blog post here.

100% SLA on Umbraco Cloud, Compose, and Heartcore

It’s not 99.9% anymore - on the Professional and Enterprise Plans, we now promise 100% uptime on our services: Umbraco Cloud, Compose, and Hearcore. This change reflects our level of confidence in the services. If availability falls below targets, you may claim a service credit. Find the details under the terms and conditions.

Umbraco 13 LTS will reach EOL on Dec 14, 2026

This is a friendly reminder, that Umbraco version 13 will reach End-Of-Life at the end of this year on Dec 14, 2026. To make sure your projects say secure, we recommend upgrading or migrading your Umbraco 13 projects before this date. If you need more time, feel free to contact us and let’s have a talk about your Umbraco 13 XLTS (Extended-Long-Term-Support) options.

Security Advisory for Umbraco CMS version 16 and 17

Three moderate-to-high vulnerabilities have been found and fixed in Umbraco version 16 and 17. All Umbraco Cloud sites have been fixed automatically. Find the security advisory here.

If you want to be notified directly about security advisories, make sure you’ve signed up for the dedicated security email list.

The Umbraco Winter Keynote - all updates in one

Some of the big product news was also shared during the Umbraco Winter Keynote, including updates on commercial news and plans from Umbraco HQ - if you missed the keynote, you can find it on YouTube.

… 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.

A large part of 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. If you have product feedback, you’re welcome to reach out to us at product@umbraco.com.