Umbraco for Education

A perfect content management system for education

You deserve the most flexible, customizable, and user-friendly website - after all, it might need to accommodate thousands or even millions of visitors! Umbraco is the solution of choice for many schools and institutions of higher education.

Wondering if our Friendly CMS is the perfect fit for your school, college, or education project? We'd love to answer your questions and point you in the right direction.

Let's have a chat

Umbraco might just be the best CMS for higher education

The debate of ''Best-of-Breed vs. Suite CMS'' is ongoing and there's no right or wrong here - we even wrote an entire whitepaper about it. Choosing the right tech stack can have a big impact on your business. So what sets Umbraco apart from the rest?

Free and open-source

There are no licensing fees, no hidden costs, and no limitations on our open-source version. Instead of spending your budget on licensing fees, you can spend it on actual development of your website. Lovely, isn't it?

We do offer direct support, hosting, and multiple add-on products to make it a stronger platform, but you're also welcome to use Umbraco for an entire implementation lifecycle without ever paying us a dime.

Best of breed

There is a reason we mention flexibility and customizability a lot because we've realized there are only so many use cases that can be covered out-of-the-box with any CMS.

Instead of forcing extra features you’d never use into the product, we've built Umbraco on a solid foundation that you can enhance and mold endlessly until it's just right for your goals.

No technical debt

Umbraco is in a constant development cycle from both the open-source Community and Umbraco HQ, which ensures you always have an updated CMS where bugs are squashed regularly.

Plus, any code written by you or an agency partner will never come back to haunt you later on. Using an open-source CMS means you always have access to the code, even if you change platforms or agencies.

Real-world success stories

Umbraco is not plug-and-play, and it requires development before it can meet all of your demands. Since no company is the same as another, it's precisely the functionality, scalability, and flexibility of the Friendly CMS that make it a perfect match. Put another way, every iteration of Umbraco is unique. 

The only reason Umbraco can keep improving at the current rate is thanks to a constant stream of feedback from our Community. We collect this feedback in all forms: reviews, case studies, and video testimonials.

Want more? take a look at our curated list of Umbraco solutions for education to see what Umbraco can do.

Editor-friendly user experience

At the end of the day, the fate of every CMS is decided at the altar of "ease of use for the editor." A great editing experience is something we pride ourselves on.

Umbraco's out-of-the-box editor experience gives you the tools and integrated workflows you need to stay focused on getting your content just right. Let your editors create pages, upload new images, and preview - all without ever losing the context.

This is true whether you have 10, 100, or even 1,000 editors. With customizable user roles, versioning, audit trail, and rollback functionality, you’ll always know when a page was published and by who.

And if your editors ask for more personalized tools or workflow improvements, a developer can always extend the backoffice to fit their needs!

Explore the Content Management Features Umbraco has in its toolbox. 

Permissions structure and user groups

When handling large-scale publications on a professional website, you need a clear permissions structure for your users. This is often a complex experience that requires a lot of manual work... unless, of course, you choose Umbraco:

1. A new team member is only a single invite away
2. The onboarding experience is intuitive out-of-the-box and requires very little customization (if any)
3. You can pick from predefined user groups or create your own to easily control user permissions. Administrator? Content editor? One-time contributor? Anything is possible.

Customizable member administration to suit your needs

Building an intranet or an advanced course list based on student enrollment?

You can create a personalized experience for teachers, students, and administrative employees with our built-in member area. This allows external users of Umbraco to register or be authenticated for access to forums, the intranet, weekly schedule, or course materials.

The member section can be integrated with external software like CRM, ERP, or learning management software through APIs.

Easy multilingual editing for global websites

Finding it hard to edit and manage a website with several languages? 

Umbraco has you covered. The CMS's split-view feature allows you to edit language versions side-by-side, so you can translate from English to Spanish to Japanese without having to switch between windows or tabs in your browser. (Très cool.)

This means that when your company expands into a new market, it only takes a few steps to set up a site for your target market and language.

Curious about multilingual websites in Umbraco? Check out our case study from the European Union, which has more than 800 translators. For a more technical introduction, read our blog post on how to build an international eCommerce site with multilingual capabilities.

Integrations? Yes please.

Part of what makes Umbraco flexible is its extensibility, which makes it possible to build and add anything. Whether it’s your learning management software, CRM, active directory authentication with SSO and 2FA, your marketing automation software, or your on-premise legacy business systems, you can add it all to your Umbraco project.

Umbraco’s full API for both front-end and back-end allows you to combine your data with beautiful content.

With Umbraco, you’re never trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. We provide a flexible and semantic content model that ensures Umbraco matches your content - not the other way around. We even provide APIs for developers to extend and tailor user experience for the type of content your specific project requires.

Take a look at Umbraco's Integrations and Extensibility Features and discover the possibilities.

Accessibility made easier

Web accessibility is important - especially in the public sector. With Umbraco, we've made it easier to live up to the web standards and accessibility laws for education and other public-sector sites.

The flexibility of the CMS allows your developers to customize the front-end to ensure that everything from content to global code and appearance is accessible to everyone and complies with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

With the customizable back office at your service, you don't have to rely on your editors to do extra work. Your developers can customize it to fit their workflows while still ensuring that any content they publish complies with the accessibility guidelines.

Learn all about Umbraco's Web Accessibility Features.

New sites and landing pages in no time

If you need a multi-site setup, we've made it possible with reusable project components, part of our Baselines feature in Umbraco Cloud.

If you need to make sure multiple websites look and feel the same, you can do that too.

And if you need to make updates, you can do it in one place and push the changes to all of your sites in a fast and efficient manner.

Data privacy and security

Umbraco and GDPR? We got you covered. As a company located in the EU, we comply with industry security standards and follow best practices.

The Umbraco CMS is open-source, but only we at Umbraco HQ can approve changes to the core CMS and make them available to everyone through updates. All development is done with security in mind and is regularly tested to ensure any project using Umbraco is safe and secure. Apart from internal testing, we also have an external security company doing thorough penetration testing every 6 months.

If you choose to build your solution on Umbraco Cloud, we've made it even simpler to stay secure. Umbraco Cloud comes with automated upgrades, so all security patches are automatically applied to your project. As the cherry on top, automatic TLS certificates via Cloudflare are standard with Umbraco Cloud.

Read all about the Security Features. 

Beyond security, GDPR, and UX

As a platform, there's only so much we can do to comply with security and accessibility standards: Ultimately, full compliance will always come down to the implementation - especially when customizing the website to fit your needs like a glove. Umbraco's flexibility makes it a great enabler for developing applications that support any industry-specific technical standards.

Umbraco HQ also takes the proactive approach even before the first line of code is written. That's why we've made an official security training course that gives Umbraco developers best practices for handling security in Umbraco. The developers who have taken this course are listed on our website, so if you need help from a partner agency, you can check if their developers are well-versed in the ways of our CMS.

Get the best teammates for your project

We know that letting experts be experts it’s usually the best thing you can do, no matter if it’s in research or development. That’s why you don’t need to stress about developing a website that will not fail any test all by yourself. Our Umbraco partner agencies are exactly the experts that can help your website get an A+!

Through these partnerships, Umbraco ensures that we are ready to get you fully started with an online home for your activities. Our partner agencies are well-versed in the CMS, experienced, Umbraco-certified, and always up-to-date on the latest Umbraco knowledge.

When you browse through our partner agency list, you can select an agency to partner with based on your industry, skills you are interested in, and region. Here is a list of our agency partners that specialize in Education.

Would you like some help with deciding on an agency that would be the best for you and your project? Let’s get in touch with the contact form below - we’re ready to help.

Don't just take our word for it

The only reason Umbraco can keep improving at the current rate is thanks to a constant stream of feedback from our Community. We collect this feedback in all forms: reviews, case studies, and video testimonials. You can see everything - good and bad - the Community is saying on our ''reviews'' page.

Find more reviews from our users working with education here:

• Education Management
• Higher Education
• E-learning
• Read all reviews of Umbraco

Want to know if Umbraco is a fit for your website?

We're happy to help you out any way we can. Have a question that wasn't answered on this page - or need help finding the perfect partner agency to develop your new site?

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Frequently Asked Questions about Umbraco