Umbraco9 Rocket Light

Umbraco 9

The first version of Umbraco CMS running fully on .NET and ASP.NET Core.

Umbraco 9 has reached EOL (End-of-Life). We recommend upgrading to a supported version.

The latest and main major version is Umbraco 12, launched on June 29, 2023. Umbraco 12 runs the latest version of .NET(7) and introduces a new headless Content Delivery API, EF Core Support, and much more. You also have the option of going with Umbraco 10, which is a LTS (long-term support) version.

The kick-off to a continuously modern Umbraco

With every new release of Umbraco, you get a CMS that’s simpler. Simpler for editors, developers, web agencies - the daily users of Umbraco. With Umbraco 9, you get the highly praised editor-friendly CMS with a modern engine under the hood, allowing developers to do more, better and faster, and hereby create impressive websites and digital solutions that look and work exactly the way you need them to.

Umbraco 9 

  • The main version of Umbraco CMS (released: September 28th, 2021) ✔️
  • Maintained with bug fixes, new features, and security fixes by Umbraco HQ ✔️
  • Open-source software protected by the MIT license ✔️
  • Free to install and use ✔️
  • Available on Umbraco Cloud ✔️
  • C# programming language ✔️
  • 100% .NET 5 and ASP.NET Core ✔️
  • Extendable with packages ✔️
     

The latest major version - Umbraco 11 - is now available. Read the Umbraco 11 release blogpost  for the full story on the release.

Umbraco 9 Rocket Beige (1000X711)

The renowned Umbraco experience 

With Umbraco 9, you get a CMS that has built-in support for multilingual sites, a structured media library, Infinite Editing that ensures a smooth workflow for editors, and a fully customizable interface so you can build exactly the digital project or website you need. And with a long list of extension possibilities, you can pick and mix in order to build e-commerce sites, member sites, campaign pages, and the likes.

If you know Umbraco 8, you’ll be pleased to hear that Umbraco 9 ships with the exact same beloved features and workflows. The new improvements are found under the hood 👇 

Flexibleblog Post For Com 1000X400px Transparant

100% .NET 5 and ASP.NET Core.

For the first time, and as one of the few CMS’ on the market, Umbraco is fully on .NET 5 and ASP.NET Core.

This allows you as a developer to take full advantage of all the improvements and performance enhancements provided by Microsoft ASP.NET Core and gives you access to new tech like Razor TagHelpers, Microsoft Dependency Injection, and View Components. 

Compatible with macOS, Linux, and Microsoft Windows 

Welcome, macOS and Linux users! By version 9 being on .NET 5, Umbraco is now cross-platform compatible with not just the Microsoft Windows platform but with all platforms that work with .NET such as macOS and Linux. This makes the CMS accessible for more developers who are now able to do their magic in Umbraco on their preferred platform. Nice, let me try this out!

An illustration of a penguin holding an apple with a bite taken out of it
Hand picking pear from tree animation

A wider range of options for hosting and tooling 

As a developer, you can now pick your favorite tool! If you’re a VSCode user you can get proper IntelliSense in your Umbraco projects. Visual Studio and Rider are also popular choices and can also be used to full effect in Umbraco 9.

When it comes to hosting options, we recommend our SaaS platform Umbraco Cloud that’s built as the perfect place for Umbraco websites and with Umbraco 9 it’s more versatile than ever before! But if you need another type of hosting, you’ll find that Umbraco 9 and .NET 5 opens up for a wider range of options. 

Rocketing performance and scalability 

.NET 5 is built from the ground up with performance in mind. It takes advantage of new hardware and software architecture in a way older frameworks simply don’t. And by Umbraco being on .NET 5, you now reap these improved performance benefits too!

Depending on what operations you’re doing this can mean 100s, if not 1000s, percentage increase in performance compared to older versions of Umbraco 🚀
And with support for the upcoming .NET 6, you'll be ready to take performance even further. Additionally, the scalability on a hardware level is much more powerful.

Future Proof Rocket (1000X711)
Rainbow graphics in Umbraco CMS colors

Future-proof software and future-proof bliss 

With the new “under the hood” improvements, Umbraco is now easier to learn and maintain as well as more flexible and developer-friendly than ever before. As a developer, you’ll discover pure bliss when working with Umbraco 9. You'll find improvements to all the familiar APIs and services as well as new and exciting .NET 5 specific goodies such as MSDI (Microsoft Dependency Injection), Hosted Services, Razor TagHelpers, .NET CLI. 

You know what they say - happy developers, impressive solutions, happy clients! 

How to learn Umbraco 9

We offer various resources when it comes to learning how to use Umbraco 9:

Three ways to take Umbraco 9 for a spin

Umbraco Cloud

Let us take care of your project setup, deployments, patch upgrades, and hosting for you. Umbraco Cloud is our complete SaaS option, built to be the perfect home for your Umbraco website.

Take a free trial

Install the open-source version

Umbraco CMS is open source so you can always install the latest version for free and take care of the entire setup and hosting yourself. View the documentation on how to install Umbraco 9 on Our Umbraco: 

How to install Umbraco

Migrate your existing site

Do you already have an Umbraco site? Migrate it to the newest major version of Umbraco and make use of the stronger performance, scalability, and cross-platform compatibility .NET 5 brings.

How to migrate to Umbraco 9

 

Umbraco 9 FAQ

This depends on what type of functionality your project(s) contain and how tightly coupled to .NET Framework the implementation is.

You will find that many of the Umbraco conventions you know and love are the same, or similar, so getting started with Umbraco 9 should be a familiar experience. For some tips on some of the larger changes see the What has changed from Umbraco 8 to 9 blog post.

No, migrating Umbraco to .NET Core is focused on getting the backend and source code updated to run on the new framework. The backoffice will look the same and editing capabilities will be on par with Umbraco 8.

You won’t find an upgrade button - but you will be able to migrate existing projects to Umbraco 9. This goes both for the open-source CMS and for projects on Umbraco Cloud (Uno and Heartcore projects will be upgraded automatically to Umbraco 9 at a later stage).

All projects can be migrated. How big of a task it will be, depends on your current project setup.

The biggest change is the move from ASP.NET to ASP.NET Core, so the biggest deciding factor in your projects migrations is how tightly coupled you are to ASP.NET and .NET framework. 

We have created a basic migration guide for your projects on Umbraco Cloud. The guide includes Cloud-specific terminology but the overall approach would apply to non-cloud sites, too.

Here are some of the main areas that need your attention during the migration:

Content migration

Your content will “just work”, as there are very few database changes (and there are automatic migrations in place for these). 

Packages and dependencies migration

Your packages and other dependencies will need to work with Umbraco 9 and .NET 5+. Many Umbraco packages are already available for version 9, but in some cases, you might need to look for alternatives or reach out to the package creator and ask for their plan to upgrade to Umbraco 9. 

Code migration

As for your own code, there will be some work needed. For templates, the changes are mostly syntactical, and some namespace changes. For the pieces of your code that interact with Umbraco, please refer to the “What has changed from Umbraco 8 to 9” blog post where you’ll find a description of the areas you should be aware of. 

For more details, take a look at the migration guide in our documentation.

If you can, yes. Umbraco 9 is better than previous versions in many ways, including runtime performance. 

For projects that are no longer in development and where runtime performance is not important, we recommend you take the Long Term Support of Umbraco 8 into account when considering whether to take the plunge or not. 

When Umbraco 9 is released, it will be the main Umbraco release which means that you’ll get access to new features and fixes every 6 weeks as part of the Minor release cadence.

Nothing 😉


When the final minor version of Umbraco 8 is released (TBD - we’ll communicate about this in future Product Updates), that version will be supported for 2 full years + an additional year of “security”-updates. 


So you can stay safe on Umbraco 8 for quite a while. After the release of the final minor version of Umbraco 8 no more features will be added to version 8.

For Umbraco 7 projects, the Security phase started in July, 2021 and EOL is September 2023. 

Yes! 

From 2022, all Umbraco training courses will be taught in Umbraco version 9. 

But no need to wait to upgrade your skills! 

The changes and improvements you'll see from going from Umbraco 8 to 9 are only in certain areas of the CMS. This means that the knowledge you'll gain by going on courses today will still be valid in Umbraco 9. 

4 courses will change significantly, but for these courses, you'll get free access to the Umbraco 8 to 9 bridging courses which will be available in 2022. In short - no need to wait if you want to upgrade your Umbraco skills today. 

Learn more about the bridging courses and the upcoming new structure for certification in this blog post. 

Yes! 

From Umbraco version 10 (ETA H1 2022), Umbraco will be aligned with Microsoft .NET LTS releases. This means that you can be sure that projects on Umbraco LTS versions get access to needed bug and security fixes for 24 months + 12 months security-only fixes. 

Learn more about the Umbraco release cadence and versioning here

And more about Long-Term Support (LTS) and End of Life (EOL) for versions here 

Umbraco 10 is planned for release in H1 2022. This is earlier than previous Major versions of Umbraco but reflects our new plan for release cadence and semantic versioning. This plan is based on a Major LTS version every two years allowing Umbraco to follow Microsoft .NET LTS release cadence closely. Thus, Umbraco 10 will be a LTS version aligned with .NET 6 LTS. 

You can learn more about the new release cadence for Umbraco CMS as well as plans for LTS (Long term support) and EOL (End of life) here.

When Umbraco 10 will be released in H1 2022 it will be an LTS version. So should you wait to migrate or hold off new projects? No. Our recommendation is that you go with Umbraco 9 in order to reap all the benefits of the new framework. The project migration from Umbraco 9 to 10 will not be like the move from version 8 to 9. The process will be more like upgrading from an old Umbraco 8 minor to the latest Umbraco 8 minor. New Major versions will include breaking changes, but we will keep these to a minimum and add automatic migrations when possible and therefore expect the move between future major versions to be relatively straightforward - especially if you keep up with the cadence. 

When we get closer to the Umbraco 10 launch, we’ll communicate more about this. 

The short answer is: Pretty much like it always has! You still get all the great features you’re used to on Umbraco Cloud such as one-click installs, multiple environments with built-in schema and content synchronization, automatic upgrades, and much more.

The longer (and more interesting) answer: With Umbraco 9 running on .NET 5 (ASP.NET Core), we seized the opportunity to improve Umbraco Cloud projects both from a structural and functional standpoint.

  • You now get access to using .NET 5 command-line tools to manage, build and run your project locally. 
  • It is much easier to create a Visual Studio solution and collaborate with your colleagues on these. 
  • Deployments rely on .NET build steps and NuGet for a better and safer experience. 

And on top of this, you get all the benefits of a faster and more performant Umbraco CMS.

If you're curious about how Umbraco 9 will work on Cloud, we highly recommend you read the "Umbraco 9 on Cloud" blog post. 

Umbraco 9 will, of course, be ready in Umbraco Cloud from day 1! 

This means that by launch, new projects will by default be on Umbraco 9, and when you spin up an Umbraco Cloud trial, it will be in Umbraco 9.

Through the portal, you will still be able to create new projects on Umbraco 8 for a while. The creation of Umbraco 8 projects will be possible until ​​the “Support” phase of Umbraco 8 is over (24 months after the final minor release of Umbraco 8).

If you want to migrate an exiting Umbraco Cloud project to Umbraco 9, this is possible - please see the “How can I migrate from 8 to 9?” question/answer above and keep an eye out for a basic Umbraco Cloud migration guide which will be published after the launch. 

Umbraco Uno and Heartcore projects will be upgraded automatically to Umbraco 9 later this year. We’ll communicate more around this directly to our Uno and Heartcore customers and in future Product Update blog posts.

When you have an Umbraco support plan, you can get support on your Umbraco project(s) on a Microsoft platform. 

Umbraco 9 is able to be used on macOS and/or Linux, but currently, this is not part of the Umbraco HQ support offering. 

No, packages will need to be migrated to the version. How much work involved in this will be based on the functionality of the package. When we get closer to a release candidate of Umbraco on .NET Core we will publish information on what is necessary when upgrading packages. See the Umbraco .NET Core documentation for latest updates and blog posts.

Loved by developers, used by thousands around the world!

One of the biggest benefits of using Umbraco is that we have the friendliest Open Source community on this planet. A community that's incredibly pro-active, extremely talented and helpful.

If you get an idea for something you would like to build in Umbraco, chances are that someone has already built it. And if you have a question, are looking for documentation or need friendly advice, go ahead and ask on the community forums.

Want to be updated on everything Umbraco?

Sign up for the Umbraco newsletter and get the latest news and special offers sent directly to your inbox