Umbraco Product Update - Q3 2026

"A mature platform that developers love and businesses trust"

None of the work with AI, Skills, and MCPs would be worth much without a solid foundation underneath it. So the second message this quarter is one I've said before, because it's still the sentence that sums up where Umbraco is at and heading. This quarter, that maturity shows up loudest in Umbraco Cloud. Load Balancing, Readiness Gating, and new Dedicated Resource tiers are already live, and Notifications & Alerting, Scheduled Updates, and Artifact Deployments are all coming soon, giving enterprise projects the resilience, visibility, and flexibility they need at scale.

All in all, Umbraco is getting smarter, and it's getting sturdier, at the same time. 

Let's start with the smarter part, and with a helpful AI feature right in your backoffice: Copilot Workspace.

AI in Umbraco

Work across your whole site with the new Copilot Workspace 

Until now, Copilot only worked in the context the editor was already in, the page or media you had open in front of you. 

Copilot Workspace is its own section in the backoffice, next to Content and Media, and it's available now as a Release Candidate. In the Copilot section: 

• Conversations stay put, so you can close it and pick the thread up tomorrow.
  

• Projects group related work and carry their own instructions and resources, so you set the tone of voice once and every conversation in that project inherits it.
  

• And because it works across your content rather than only within the context you’re in, Copilot Workspace can find, create, update, and publish pages you haven't even opened e.g. "Update these five product pages" becomes one request.

An editor still signs off, where it counts. Anything the Copilot does can always be rolled back by the editor (via the roll-back function). And when it comes to the final publishing, unpublishing, or scheduling, it will always ask for your approval. The irreversible few, like permanent delete, always ask you to type the alias. The point is to spend your attention where it changes the outcome, because an approval on every single write produces clicks, not review.

Copilot Workspace is also where the AI work in the other products shows up. The Umbraco Engage AI agent runs in the same conversation, so you can ask which autumn landing pages underperformed and then rewrite the intros on the weak ones without switching tools. Commerce AI will follow the same route.

AI in Umbraco: Coming up 

Editors working side by side

We are exploring letting several editors work together in the same Copilot Workspace project, so a campaign is a shared space rather than one person's conversation. 

ETA: exploratory, no date yet 

Umbraco in AI

Work in Umbraco from any AI tool, with the new CMS Editor MCP 

The CMS Editor MCP is out in public beta, hosted by us on Umbraco Cloud. It exposes the everyday editorial actions- find, create, update, and publish - as things an AI Client can do on your behalf. 

"Update the opening hours on all our location pages" 

"Create the 12 event pages for next year's conference from this spreadsheet." 

"Draft the news post from these notes, put it in the right section, and leave it unpublished for review."

This is for the editor whose work starts outside Umbraco rather than in the backoffice, where Copilot already helps. Today, when editors work in their preferred AI Client, they create, copy the result, open the backoffice, find the page, paste it into the right field, fix the formatting the paste broke, and start over for the next one. 

With the Editor MCP, this is no longer needed. The AI Client reaches into Umbraco directly, so content lands on the right page and in the right field as part of the same conversation, and the agent can read what is already there. And it is not limited to one page at a time. Working through a set of pages, a handful at a time, is part of what it does.

Hosting is what makes it reachable. AI Clients that run in the cloud, which is most of them now, can only talk to an MCP server that lives at a URL. ChatGPT, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Claude on web and mobile, and European options like Mistral's Le Chat all work this way. 

The CMS Editor MCP runs as a remote MCP that AI clients can reach, and setting it up takes one deliberate step. Install the package on your Umbraco Cloud project, which is how you turn MCP on, and the project gets its own authenticated endpoint. Point your client at it and the setup is done. Updates ship from us, it is already covered by your existing Cloud Data Processing Agreement, and it is free on all Umbraco Cloud tiers. 

And because it runs in the cloud, your other remote MCP servers, Google Drive, Slack, Figma, Notion etc, sit alongside Umbraco in the same client. Your editors get an AI that can work inside Umbraco and reach the rest of their tools at the same time.

Editors sign in with their own account and bring their backoffice permissions with them, so an agent can never do more than that person could. Per-action confirmation sits with the AI client.

It is a beta, so come and kick the tyres. 

The Editor MCP is in public beta, with final release expected early November, so now is the time to try it and tell us what you find. Download the package, read the documentation, and report any issues here.

Engage Developer MCP and Forms Developer MCP in beta

Engage Developer MCP and Forms Developer MCP are both in public beta, opening up the same "find, create, update" pattern to your marketing and forms data.

"Pull last month's top-performing landing page segments from Engage and this week's contact form submissions, and sync both into HubSpot as one campaign list."

That is one request instead of two exports and a spreadsheet in between. Because your AI client can run several MCP servers side by side, Engage and Forms sit next to whatever else you already connect, HubSpot, Salesforce, Mailchimp, so the data moves without you being the one moving it.

Coming up: Umbraco in AI 

Global Actions for CMS Editor MCP

Today the Editor MCP works from wherever you are in the content tree, so it handles pages that sit together, a batch at a time. Global actions let it search the whole site first and find exactly the pages that match what you asked for, wherever they sit: "find every page that still mentions our old product name" becomes one request. The change is in the finding, not in editing more at once. 

ETA: Q4, 2026

Set up triggers just by describing them, with the new Automate Developer MCP

Setting up or adjusting a trigger, "when a form is submitted, add the contact to this segment and notify the team", becomes something you ask for instead of wiring up by hand. You describe what should happen, the agent sets up the trigger and the actions behind it.

ETA: Q3, 2026

Umbraco CMS

One way to pick content, everywhere

Until now, browsing Content worked a bit differently depending on where you were in the Backoffice. Navigating to edit a Content item gave you one experience; picking Content from a picker gave you another. In Collections with large data sets, you didn't have the tools you were used to for finding and identifying the right Content.

We have aligned this by bringing the full Collection UI into the picker for Content, using the configuration you already have. Toggle between views, compare items with your custom columns, sort items the way you do in the Collection, and jump straight to a page with numbered pagination.

Tree-based browsing in general is being aligned too. Trees now support multiple views, such as table and cards, and let you drill into folders and back out with breadcrumbs. This is the experience you know from picking Media. It has been generalised and will be applied to tree-structured data across the Backoffice.

The tree data browsing is built on a generalised implementation, and Tree Views are a new extension point. Package authors and HQ's commercial products can register their own tree-based data and get the same browsing experience for free, and we are already looking at where the commercial products pick it up. 

For developers: the Tree View foundation shipped in 17.6, the Documents Tree View implementation in 17.7, and fuller collections for Documents follow in 17.8. PRs #23151, #23642 and #23712. 

Coming up: Umbraco CMS

Umbraco Search: The Examine provider is final, and Search moves into core

At Codegarden in June,  we announced the final release of the Umbraco Search abstraction. Now the picture is complete, with the default Examine provider implementation release for both Umbraco 17 and 18.

The main headline for this is “options”. Stay on Examine, or swap in Elasticsearch, Typesense, or something else, without rewriting your search logic. With it comes a good deal that used to be custom work: filtering and faceting on page properties, full language and segment support, and results that respect who is allowed to see what, so protected content stays protected. Rebuilds no longer take your search down, as a shadow index is built and validated before the swap, and a new management UI in Settings lets you inspect indexes, check health and document counts, and trigger rebuilds. 

Umbraco Search becomes part of the CMS in version 19, and once it is in core, we will put it to work in the backoffice itself.

You do not have to wait for Umbraco 19, though. It is available as a package for 17 and 18 today, so a site on 17 can move its search over now and have the migration behind it before the 17 to 21 LTS upgrade, rather than doing both at once. 

For developers: Umbraco Search is open source at umbraco/Umbraco.Cms.Search, with the Examine provider as Umbraco.Cms.Search.Provider.Examine. Kenn Jacobsen has written up trying out the new search,  tailored indexing, and how to migrate from the older Examine to Umbraco Search using the Examine provider, and has working Elasticsearch and Typesense providers.

Update content once, everywhere it's used; Elements will work inside Block Editors 

Umbraco 18 gave you the Library and Elements, so you could create a piece of content once and reuse it across pages. Umbraco 19 puts it where reuse actually matters, inside the Block Editors.

Pick a Library Element in a Block List or Block Grid, change it once in the Library, and every block referencing it follows. The content is shared but the block's own settings stay with the page it sits on, so reusing something never quietly changes its configuration somewhere else. Reusable Elements sit alongside ordinary blocks, a block you have already built can be turned into one, and a dedicated permission now decides who may edit fields shared across languages, replacing a setting that has caused its share of confusion.

Blocks and Elements can also vary by segment, following the personalisation already set on the page, so wanting one block to speak differently to one audience no longer means duplicating the whole page. One limit for 19: this covers blocks that live on the page, while Elements pulled from the Library render their default content. Personalising a Library Element once for everywhere it appears, and running several segments live on one page at the same time, is what Umbraco Engage is aiming at for Umbraco 20. 

Umbraco Cloud

The big release in Q3 was undoubtedly the new scaling options for Umbraco Cloud. Load Balancing, Dedicated Redis (cache), and new Dedicated Resource tiers arrived together, so you have more flexibility in sizing a project to its exact needs. And, when traffic demands it, spread it over multiple instances to ensure optimal performance.

Two other smaller additions to Umbraco Cloud make restarts and planned downtime less noticeable to your visitors, along with several fixes and improvements for the Baseline functionality, Sustainability Dashboard, and more.

Later in the year, you can look forward to the all-new Alerting and Notification configuration, Hosting Recommendations, Scheduled Upgrades, and the biggest change to Umbraco Cloud in years with Artifact Deployments and Rolling Updates. 

Size it right, then scale it out, with Load Balancing and Dedicated Resource tiers

Load Balancing spreads a site across several instances. Traffic that would strain a single instance is shared between instances, and if one drops out, others keep serving. For high-traffic projects, a campaign, a launch, or a busy season, load balancing is the feature that ensures performance.

Load Balancing relies on Redis, a managed cache that runs alongside your application rather than inside it. Sessions live there instead of in-process, acting as a coordination layer that keeps track of one site across multiple instances. Redis can also pay off on single instances by acting as a second-level cache for Umbraco, improving both boot time and database load.

Under both, Dedicated Resource tiers have been reworked and are now four plan sizes: Extra Small to Large. A size means the same thing across plans, so choosing one is a matter of matching it to the project. The price point has also been adjusted so you can now get more headroom for your projects within the same budget

Explore Cloud scaling, or read the Load Balancing documentation.

Quiet restarts, always on brand, with Readiness Gating

Restarts, upgrades, and recovery now pass with less for a visitor to notice, and what they do see is in your control. 

Readiness Gating holds back public traffic until your site reports ready, rather than letting everyone through at the first response. A site that is still warming up is no longer flooded with requests, but will instead ensure resources are spent on getting ready. There is nothing to configure. Readiness Gating is available for all Umbraco Cloud sites running the latest version of Umbraco 13+ (specifically Umbraco.Cloud.Cms 13.1+ or Umbraco 17.6+/18.1+). 

Custom error pages now show when an environment is stopped, as well as during restarts and deployments.

You can rely on the default maintenance page or upload your own, assign it per hostname, and planned downtime looks like your site rather than a platform default.

See the Error Pages documentation for more information.

Not to forget, new Baseline and Sustainability Dashboard improvements 

• The Baseline overview now loads faster, allowing you to manage child projects more efficiently. You also get more information on versions, pending updates, and running updates are now easier to see with improved activity monitoring.
  

• The Sustainability Dashboard adds the CO2 from network egress as its own bandwidth component to the lineup of components. Along with the recently released improvements to calculations, the Sustainability reporting on Umbraco Cloud is more useful and relevant than ever.

Umbraco Cloud: Coming Up

Three very useful operations features land within the next month or so. Later in the year, an entirely new deployment model will change the way you build, test, and deploy changes to your Umbraco Cloud projects. 

Know the moment something needs attention, with Notifications & Alerting

Notifications & Alerting lets you subscribe to alerts on your projects and have notifications delivered, by email or webhook, to a place that makes sense for your team, whether that’s a shared inbox, Slack channel, or incident management system. 

All configurable at the organization and project level, so you can ensure the right people are in the know. The first set of events, including DDoS attacks and deployment status alerts, ships with the initial release, and more will follow. 

ETA: September 2026 (very soon!)

Is your project optimized? Cloud Hosting Recommendations will tell you 

Cloud Hosting Recommendations checks each environment’s setup for security, performance, operations, and best practices, and tells you what can be improved. It is deliberately opinionated to encourage optimization and adoption of new features. 

Checks can be suppressed, so you are in control of what is important for a specific project. Hosting Recommendations are available per environment, and you have access to project overview, as well as your entire portfolio at the organization level. 

ETA: October 2026

Upgrades on your schedule

Automatic upgrades keep every project on Cloud current without anyone lifting a finger, and until now they have run on our timetable. Scheduled Upgrades put the timing in your hands.

For each project, choose one or more windows in the week when an upgrade of Umbraco CMS, Forms, Deploy, and Cloud packages may run: a quiet hour for a busy site, a weekday morning when your team is around to check the result, or whatever a client has told you suits them. Choose every window, and upgrades simply run as soon as they are available - and allowed.

ETA: October 2026

Full control of your pipeline and seamless releases, Artifact Deployments and Rolling Updates coming soon

Artifact Deployments is a new project type. Your own CI/CD builds a ready-to-run artifact, pushes it to Umbraco Cloud, and we deploy that artifact as it is. Today, a pipeline pushes your source code to the Cloud Git Deployment Repository, and Cloud builds its own artifact a second time - so what goes live is not, strictly, the thing you tested. With the new Artifact Deployments projects, that second build goes away. You keep your own toolchain, including whatever front-end build your team depends on, and you can run one release process across every project you have, on Cloud or off it. It is the deployment model .NET teams already use elsewhere, brought to Umbraco Cloud rather than reinvented for it.

Rolling Updates changes how the new version goes live. It starts up alongside the current live site, you check it on its own preview URL, and a single call switches them over. Visitors see the old site and then the new one, and nothing in between, so a release can go out the moment it is ready rather than when the calendar allows.

Git deployments remain fully supported. This is an additional way of working, not a replacement for the current one.

Early access opens later this year. Sign up now for progress updates from the team and to be among the first to try when the features are out for Early Access. 

ETA: Q4, 2026

What’s changed on the Cloud roadmap:

One new addition and a few updates to the Product Roadmap:

• Artifact Deployments and Rolling Updates are now in active development, moved from Next into Now with a Q4 target.
  

• Autoscaling for Load Balancing has moved up to Next, ETA Q4. Set a minimum and a maximum number of instances and let the platform scale between them as traffic rises and falls, so you are not set up for peak capacity all day, only when it makes sense.
  

• Database Scaling Options is new, under Next. When a project needs more database than its plan provides, the options we are exploring are to scale the database it has, move to a dedicated one, and add a second alongside it for custom data and add-ons that work the database hard.
  

• Cloud Hosting Recommendations and Scheduled Upgrades have moved to October. Both were targeting Q3 and have been moved back slightly to ensure adequate time for UX and final testing.

Umbraco Compose

A big update to the user interface for Umbraco Compose is now live directly inside the Umbraco Cloud Portal. This update allows you to manage everyday data orchestration tasks visually, inspect stored content, and easily explain project setups to team members and stakeholders.

Manage everyday data orchestration visually, right in the Cloud Portal:

• Environment Dashboards: Get a high-level overview of project environments (e.g., Development and Production) with real-time metric counters for Collections, Type Schemas, Ingestion Functions, and Webhooks.
  

• Type Schemas: View all defined schemas in your environment and inspect their raw JSON definitions to verify entity structures and field mappings.
  

• Ingested Content Inspection: Filter and audit stored data across Collections, Type Schemas, Content IDs, or Variants. Inspect full JSON payloads, payload values, and modification timestamps directly within the portal.
  

• Ingestion Functions: Manage serverless transformation functions and get an overview of failed/succeeded invocations
  

• Persisted Queries: View or create persisted GraphQL queries without leaving the portal.
  

• Webhook Configuration: Set up webhooks with options for HTTP methods, endpoint URLs, header definitions, and specific event triggers, or look into the log for insights.

Umbraco Automate

Your automations can make decisions now, and so can your colleagues with Control flows

Real business rules have exceptions, and until now an exception meant either several automations stitched together or a developer writing code. Now the Control flow feature lets an automation branch and come back together, so one automation covers the whole rule.

For example: A new product image is uploaded. If the alt text is missing, an AI agent writes it and saves it. If it is already there, the flow moves on. Both paths then check the file size, and anything over the limit pauses for marketing to approve.

A person can be the deciding factor too. When a step pauses for approval, a rejection no longer stops the run, it follows its own path, and what the person typed carries into the next step. So you can send the piece back for a rewrite with the reason attached, notify whoever needs to know, or log it and move on. 

Automate media housekeeping with new media actions 

New media actions let a flow find a media item and read its properties, which is what most "do something with the image that was just uploaded" automations have been waiting for. Uploading a photo can now check whether it has alt text, hand it to an AI agent if it does not, and pause for a human before anything is published. The dull parts of media housekeeping can now be automated via the backoffice. 

For the step that no action quite covers

The new script execution sandbox runs a bit of logic inside the flow and hands a defined output to the next step, so a single calculation or reshaped value no longer means building a custom action. Alongside it, code editors for HTTP request bodies and headers make calling an external API far less fiddly.

Umbraco Automate: Coming up 

Let others build on Automate, and set it up from outside Umbraco with Agent Skills and Automate MCP

Agent Skills will help partners and package builders create their own custom triggers and actions, so the ecosystem grows faster than we could grow it ourselves. And an Automate MCP will let automations be set up from outside Umbraco. 

ETA: Q3, 2026.

Umbraco Engage

Ask why a campaign underperformed; get the answer with Engage AI 

Engage AI shipped in full on Thursday 17/9. Ask it why last week's campaign underperformed, which A/B variant is winning, or how a segment is set up, and get the answer in plain language, right there in the Engage section. It's the same Copilot you already know from the CMS, now reasoning over your marketing data too. Read the documentation. 

Understand your data faster, with a refined Engage Analytics experience

We're polishing and optimizing the Analytics experience in Umbraco Engage, making it easier to understand your data and get to the insights that matter, faster. 

Umbraco Commerce

All your customer data, in one place with Customer Management

Customer Management landed in Commerce 17.2 and 18.1 (12 August). You now get one consolidated customer record profile, addresses, order history, and communication timeline in one place, plus tagging and segmentation.
Read the release notes.

Coming up: Umbraco Commerce

Ask your shop questions, with Commerce AI 

Commerce AI is next up: plain-language insights on orders, products, and store configuration, so you can ask questions about your shop instead of digging through dashboards. 

Umbraco Workflow

Approve tasks straight from your inbox, no backoffice login needed, with External Approval

Reviewers can now approve or reject a task straight from the notification email, either via a secure, time-limited link or simply by replying - no backoffice login required. That means your boss, a client, or anyone outside the team can review and sign off without ever needing a backoffice account, cutting the back-and-forth of chasing access and reducing the manual errors that creep in when content gets copied between systems. Available in Workflow 18.1 - read the release notes. 

Umbraco Forms

Pre-fill forms for logged-in members, with Forms' new member data connection

Map form fields to member properties to pre-fill known data for logged-in members, and track submissions per unique member for cleaner analytics. Shorter, friction-free forms mean fewer drop-offs and higher completion rates as well as cleaner data for marketing and sales. 

Coming up: Umbraco Forms

Never lose a form again, Forms lifecycle tools coming soon

Umbraco Forms is getting the same content lifecycle tools you already know from the CMS: a recycle bin so deleted forms and entries aren't gone for good, plus versioning and history, so you can see how a form has changed and who has changed it over time and roll back if needed. 

Umbraco Deploy

See every transfer, import, and export in one place with the new Deploy UI/UX 

The old dashboard is replaced by a single workspace: see your environment, transfer queue, and import and export queue in one place. Add content straight from the content tree, and schedule a release for your own time zone instead of the server's. 

Coming up: Umbraco Deploy 

Know who moved what, and when, with Deployment History

Deployment History shows you a full log of every transfer, restore, import, and export: who did it, between which environments, how much it moved, and whether it worked. It lives in the Deploy workspace, so if something fails, you can check the log right there instead of digging through the server. For agencies with several editors working across several environments, that turns "what happened to live last Thursday" into a quick lookup. 

ETA: Q4

Keep deploying smoothly no matter which server answers with stateless load balancing 

Deploy already works in a load-balanced setup, and we're taking it further by making it stateless, so whether you're on Cloud or hosting on-prem, deployments don't depend on a single server to keep running smoothly.

ETA: Q4

In other news… 

Umbraco is now an official Certified B Corporation

We’re thrilled to annonce that Umbraco has passed B Lab's independent audit across governance, workers, community, environment, and customers, and is now a Certified B Corporation. It's third-party validation of things you already knew about us: an inclusive team (53% of this year's new hires were women), a Support NPS of 82, and ISO 27001-backed security. If your organization's procurement process asks for audited ESG credentials for Umbraco, you now have one to point to: Read the full story.

Not ready to move off Umbraco 13? Get more time with XLTS

Umbraco 13 reaches End-of-Life on 14 December 2026, after which it stops receiving publicly available security patches. If your project isn't ready to upgrade by then, Extended Long-Term Support (XLTS) keeps critical security updates coming for 6, 12, or 24 months beyond EOL, delivered through a private NuGet feed. So if you need more time or want to talk through your options, why not book an EOL 13 call with one of our experts. 

Meet the Umbraco HQ team in person 

It's Partner Summit and Umbraco Festival season! With events running across the world right now, alongside the festivals and meetups, it’s a great chance to meet like-minded Umbraco users and agencies as well as catch up directly with the people behind all the Umbraco products. See if there’s an event near you.

Watch: From Running Projects to Growing Portfolios

A lot has happened and will happen with the Cloud platform - and we’re not talking in a few years, we’re only talking weeks and months from now. Whether you’re already using Umbraco Cloud or perhaps have been a bit hesitant, this is an all-round update that you don’t want to miss, as it might change how you choose to do Umbraco projects now and in the future: 

… Until next time

Remember you can always stay updated on what we’re working on “Now”, “Next”, and “Later” on the Umbraco Product Roadmap, and check all released features in the Umbraco Roadmap History. 

Much of our work 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.