Feature
The Gist
- Market evolution. DXP market growth has led to diverse choices, accommodating varied digital project needs.
- Technology shift. Increasing sophistication of simpler DXPs like Umbraco provides more options beyond just scale and cost considerations.
- Developer perspective. From a developer's viewpoint, Sitecore and Umbraco differ notably, especially in terms of source code access and customization.
Over the past few years, the Digital Experience Platform (DXP) market has received sustained investment and increased competition to evolve to a position where there is now considerable choice for digital teams in selecting the right platform for their digital project.
Previously choices were heavily dictated by the size and scale of what you were trying to achieve, with more complex needs leaning toward the large sophisticated, integrated platforms like Sitecore and Adobe. While scale and cost are still very important in determining foundational technology choices, the increasing ability to deliver more sophisticated experiences using a less complex DXP like Umbraco means that teams perhaps looking for a “mid-market” solution now have more options. While it’s a nice problem to have, it also means teams can agonize over the right choice to make.
In a previous article, we compared the advantages and disadvantages of Sitecore and Umbraco from a business and marketing sense, covering aspects such as complexity, cost, time to market and digital marketing options. In this follow-up article, we’re going to look at the same question through more of a technology and developer lens.
Before we jump into a comparison, it’s quickly worth considering what Sitecore and Umbraco have in common. They are both .NET-based platforms. They are both extremely customizable with the benefit of flexibility and extensibility. And they are both capable of creating strong digital customer experiences.
But beyond this, specifically from a developer perspective, they are both very different. One major difference is that Umbraco is open source, which means developers can utilize Umbraco’s source code, both to better understand the platform and making it considerably easier to customize and extend the platform without any licensing constraints. Sitecore, as a closed-source platform, does not have that advantage.
There are also considerable differences across a number of other factors.
1. Getting up to Speed
One of the perceived problems with a monolithic and complex DXP like Sitecore is that it can involve a steeper learning curve than a simpler DXP like Umbraco. This is certainly true for business users in marketing, but it is also true for development teams. First, the development set-up is extremely quick in Umbraco — it takes around 15 minutes — while setting up a dev environment with Sitecore can take up to two days.
Getting up to speed and feeling comfortable for a Sitecore developer can take anywhere up to a month. There are lots of moving parts with databases, indexes and functions that are less than straightforward. We think it can take two weeks to just get your head around the basics and get used to some of Sitecore’s nuances, and after that it can continue to be stop/start as you explore the full stack.
One of the big advantages of Umbraco is that there are fewer features and points of integration; that means it's far easier to focus on the essentials. The truth is an experienced .NET developer will find it easy to work with relatively quickly.
Overall, when it comes to getting new developers up and running, Umbraco has a clear advantage.
Related Article: Umbraco vs. Sitecore: It's All About the Marketing Use Case
2. Personalization and Optimization
One of the traditional strengths of Sitecore has been its digital marketing toolset. For a long time, its personalization capabilities were considered industry-leading and were often the unique selling proposition that led to a buying decision. Sitecore’s support for personalization, optimization and analytics is still very strong, but it's no longer the only offering out there.
Sitecore’s current offering is centered around the “Personalized” product, which provides full-stack A/B testing, omnichannel support and developer-friendly tools with an SDK and robust APIs.
Personalization and analytics aren’t specifically native Umbraco features but the recommended third-party product — the uMarketingSuite — is effectively an Umbraco module, and it wouldn’t be that surprising if one day this was eventually acquired by Umbraco HQ and presented as such.
The uMarketingSuite extends personalization and analytics to Umbraco, and, while not as sophisticated as Sitecore, it is more than adequate for most needs. You can set up personas and associated goals, and then tag personas to pages and assign the necessary points. There is support for A/B testing.
Meanwhile the out-of-the-box analytics have standard traffic and behavior metrics that match those in Google Analytics 4 and can be viewed at the page level; it sits within the Umbraco admin console, a distinct ease-of-use advantage of Umbraco, allowing staff to quickly and simply access analytic data for any page. Conversely, with Sitecore you need to dig deeper to track down the same data.
The point here is that, though Sitecore and Umbraco (with the uMarketing Suite) share many key features on paper, Sitecore’s are designed to be used within the context of an enterprise marketing team that has the bandwidth and budget to spend a lot of time configuring, customizing and managing those features.
Umbraco, on the other hand, has a focus on ease of use and optimizing for typical usage patterns. If your digital project has straightforward digital marketing needs around personalization, measurement and A/B testing, the extra power that Sitecore gives you might not be necessary. Umbraco could potentially serve you equally well, or better.
Related Article: 10 Things to Know About Umbraco's Content Management System Updates
3. Other Products and Tools
One of the clear advantages of Sitecore over Umbraco is the feature set. Sitecore has a Customer Data Platform, a dedicated search product, a DAM product, various content collaboration tools, forms, an email marketing product and an ecommerce platform. To a certain extent these will be integrated experiences with the direction of travel enabling more power for business users to perform actions across these modules without the need for development support. But it’s also true to say that not all of Sitecore’s products and features are perfect, and there is still more integration to do.
Umbraco offers a core set of “add-on” features, available for either a one-time or monthly fee, ranging from $300 on the low end to up to $10,000+ for enterprise-level add ons. These include:
- Umbraco Forms, a flexible forms tool that meets the needs of most organizations in building custom forms with the potential for more sophisticated areas such as conditional fields.
- Umbraco Deploy, a deployment tool that does some of the heavy lifting around deployments and allows content and code by respective marketing and development teams to be worked on simultaneously with confidence.
- Umbraco Workflow, supporting flexible approval workflows, content expiry and more to support a decentralized publishing model.
- Umbraco Commerce, a straightforward ecommerce solution that has recently been acquired by Umbraco HQ.
All these tools have been tried and tested by the community. For features that are required beyond this, development teams can expect to get involved in integrating with additional third party tools that come at extra cost, although again some of these such as uMarketingSuite are relatively mature.
4. Developer Support and Resources
One fundamental difference between Sitecore and Umbraco is the area of developer support. Umbraco is, of course, open source, which means there is a culture of support from other Umbraco developers. It is true that there is a vibrant and active community of developers, which ensures ongoing support, regular updates and a wealth of extensions and packages available through the Umbraco package ecosystem. However, as an open-source project, official support may not be as comprehensive as Sitecore.
Sitecore, being a commercial DXP with a large organization behind it, offers extensive customer support, documentation and professional services, which also comes with a significant price tag. The official support ensures timely updates, security patches and access to knowledgeable resources, which can be crucial for large enterprises.
If you need to go beyond support and hire additional resources, this is going to be considerably easier for Umbraco where strong .NET developers can learn and adapt. With Sitecore, you’ll need to hire individuals with in-depth experience in Sitecore development. But these people are scarce and often command high salaries.
Webinar
Sep
25
CMS Briefing: A Live Look at What’s Next in AI-Driven Platforms
Learn how leading organizations are using AI‑driven tools to publish faster, personalize smarter and stay secure.
Register
Webinar
Sep
25
Call Spoofing Trends Financial Institutions Can't Afford to Ignore
Don't let robocalls sabotage your customer relationships. Learn how to secure your voice channel.
Register
Webinar
On demand
Ready or Not: How Data-First Organizations Are Unlocking Agentforce Potential
Learn how to cut through the noise, activate Agentforce and build a Salesforce AI strategy that actually delivers.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
CX Reality Check: What Your Customers Are Really Thinking
Register now and get the insights you need to not just meet rising expectations, but exceed them.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
Content Leaders Collective: What a Good CCMS Actually Looks Like
Discover how content leaders transform clunky systems into growth engines — and why your competitors are ahead.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
From Hype to High-Impact CX Strategies That Actually Scale
Turn buzzworthy AI and outsourcing trends into measurable CX wins with fresh 2025 data.
Watch Now
5. Performance and Scalability
When it comes to performance and scalability, Umbraco is often considered more lightweight and suitable for smaller to medium-sized projects. Its simplicity and less resource-intensive nature make it easier to host on lower-end servers, but with the availability of cloud offerings, in many ways this perceived difference between platforms becomes more blurred.
Sitecore, designed to handle large-scale enterprise projects, offers powerful performance optimization features and can efficiently manage high traffic loads. It provides a plethora of caching options and scaling capabilities, which makes it a robust choice for projects with high performance and scalability demands. However, that enterprise robustness can come at a cost for developers, with Sitecore being far more complex to maintain and requiring significant resources to run, even in a development environment.
6. Administration and Deployment
Umbraco as a platform is significantly less complex than Sitecore and that means administration and deployments are simpler, too. The Umbraco Deploy tool is helpful here; in Umbraco Cloud, deployments happen with the push of a button and a wait of a few minutes. The non-Cloud Umbraco DXP also provides simple deployments, as the DXP solution exists within the site root itself, making deployment easy.
There also aren’t stacks of ongoing admin. For example, even for a new developer setting up Umbraco for the first time, this can be done in minutes, and administrative tasks vary between minimal and non-existent.
Sitecore, as befits an enterprise platform, is insanely tunable and configurable at the administrative level. That can be great for performance, but it can make life difficult for developers, whether they are configuring their local environments or tracking down issues with functionality that may be impacted by the very complex back-end.
Sitecore, however, does have one trick up its sleeve. Sitecore PowerShell Extensions is a brilliant scripting environment based on the Microsoft PowerShell model that is insanely powerful. This enables large-scale content changes that can be actioned by a custom script and then automated going forward. You can also create various reports such as keeping an eye on broken links on key pages. Umbraco doesn’t have something quite as flexible or versatile.
Sitecore, as an enterprise platform, in many ways assumes a custom enterprise deployment process that would, in most cases, be built and maintained outside of Sitecore itself. Generally, deployment processes for Sitecore will be more complex, more custom, require specific expertise to build and maintain and the deployment process itself will be a longer multi-step affair.
Conclusion: Umbraco vs. Sitecore Comes Down to You
The choice between Umbraco and Sitecore for developers hinges on a thorough evaluation of project requirements, team expertise, scalability needs and budget considerations. While Umbraco's open-source accessibility, streamlined learning curve and straightforward administration make it a compelling option, Sitecore's comprehensive feature set, advanced personalization tools and enterprise scalability offer distinct advantages.
They are both great platforms, but the decision ultimately rests on aligning the platform's technical capabilities with the project's objectives, development resources and long-term goals to determine which is right for you.
