Clean Composable Architecture

Compose is the platform that makes your Composable Experience setup possible - and delightful.

Compose eases the management of data flows in your headless tech stack, ensuring you get full flexibility and adaptability without getting tangled up in a bunch of custom code.

With Compose, you get clean, reliable, and streamlined data handling from your tech stack to your frontend(s), freeing your developers from repetitive, boilerplate integration so they can focus on delivering real value for your business.

Some call it data orchestration. Others, a fully managed backend-for-frontend. We call it Umbraco Compose.

Umbraco Compose is fit for any industry and any size project.

It’s especially built for enterprise projects with complex setups that are in need of reliability, predictability, and fast adaptability.

Yes, Compose is well-suited for incremental migration rather than all-or-nothing transitions. Existing systems can continue to run while their data is gradually ingested into Compose. Frontends can then be updated to consume data from Compose at their own pace.

This approach is especially valuable for organizations with legacy platforms or complex ecosystems. Compose can act as a unifying layer that simplifies modernization, allowing teams to reduce technical debt over time without disrupting existing users or workflows.

Yes!

Umbraco Compose is available exclusively as a fully managed SaaS product. That means you get new features and improvements automatically, built-in scalability, and all the benefits of a cloud-native platform - without the hassle of managing infrastructure yourself.

You can access the full Umbraco Compose documentation online. It includes installation guides, configuration options, API references, and practical integration examples to help you get started quickly.

Go to the Umbraco Compose documentation

The main query language of Compose is GraphQL, so knowledge about this is needed.

The good news is that GraphQL doesn’t have a steep learning curve and is a versatile and highly useful skill for your developers to have. If GraphQL is new to you, tools like Altair, Nitro, Postman, and a future MCP server will help you get started writing GraphQL queries.

In the long run, this will save you a ton of development hours as there are fewer custom endpoints to maintain. A bonus is that this unified way of serving and connecting data makes it a lot easier to introduce new developers to your project.

Yes, Compose is specifically designed to integrate with a wide range of third-party tools and services. It supports a composable approach where systems like PIMs, DAMs, CRMs, ERPs, and custom APIs can all contribute data to a shared model. This allows organizations to use best-of-breed solutions rather than relying on a single monolithic platform.

Compose does not assume that Umbraco CMS is the only source of content or data, even though it integrates naturally with it. By acting as a neutral orchestration layer, Compose helps teams connect existing systems without forcing major architectural changes or technology lock-in.

Umbraco Compose is a cloud-native SaaS offering built around modern integration and API design principles. At its core, Umbracdo Compose uses GraphQL to expose structured data through a single endpoint, and it uses JavaScript for the Ingestion Function.

Under the hood, Umbraco Compose is designed as a managed service operated by Umbraco. It uses a secure, scalable cloud infrastructure so teams do not have to build or maintain their own orchestration layers. The focus is on standard, well-understood technologies rather than proprietary formats, which helps ensure long-term flexibility and trust.

Yes, one of the key benefits of Compose is that it makes switching tools and services easier over time. Because you have a data model in Umbraco Compose that sits between data sources and consumers, frontends are decoupled from individual backend systems. This means a system can be replaced without requiring changes everywhere else.

In practice, this allows organizations to evolve their technology stack gradually. A PIM, DAM, or other service can be swapped out while keeping the same APIs and data contracts in place. This reduces migration risk and supports long-term flexibility as business needs change.

Umbraco Compose is a commercial product, but it’s built on the same open and transparent principles that define Umbraco and our other add-ons.

Some key components - like CMS forwarding, the picker property editor, and our example integrations - are open source and ready for the community to explore, extend, and contribute to.

No, you do not need to know .NET to use Umbraco Compose. Compose is not something you install, extend, or customize through .NET code. Instead, it is a fully managed cloud service that you configure and consume, primarily through the APIs and tooling provided by Umbraco.

The short, and perhaps surprising, answer: no.

However, Umbraco CMS is the perfect companion with Umbraco Compose - but it’s not limited to it.

We’ve built an out-of-the-box integration that makes it easy to connect the two. With this, you get your domain model and content automatically sent to Compose, as well as a content picker feature that seamlessly links your CMS content with any data from other sources that you have connected to Compose. Easy setup for developers - and a great user experience for your content editors!

Umbraco Cloud and Umbraco Compose solve different problems and are designed to work alongside each other.

Umbraco Cloud focuses on hosting, deploying, and operating Umbraco CMS projects. It provides managed infrastructure, CI/CD, and tooling to run websites and content applications reliably.

Umbraco Compose, on the other hand, is an orchestration layer that connects multiple systems and exposes their combined data through a unified API. It does not host websites or manage deployments. Instead, it sits between your data sources and your digital experiences, making it easier to build composable, multi-channel solutions.