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If your organisation is still running Umbraco 13, or an earlier version, you are approaching an important decision. Support for Umbraco 13 ends on 14 December 2026, while older versions are already unsupported. But this isn’t simply about remaining on a supported CMS.
Since Umbraco 13 launched, the platform has undergone its biggest architectural transformation in over a decade. What began with the introduction of the modern backoffice in version 14 has now matured into a stable, enterprise-ready platform in Umbraco 17, bringing new capabilities across AI-assisted content operations, scalability, personalisation and cloud operations.
For digital leaders, the question is no longer whether to upgrade, but what opportunities they are missing by delaying. Organisations that invest now gain access to capabilities that improve editorial productivity, strengthen governance, increase operational resilience and provide a secure foundation for future digital transformation.
At Cantarus, we’re increasingly seeing organisations move beyond upgrading simply to remain on a supported version of Umbraco. The conversation has shifted towards how the platform can support wider digital transformation through AI-assisted content operations, improved editorial experiences, greater scalability and more personalised digital journeys.
For many organisations, the support deadline provides the catalyst, but the real value comes from taking advantage of the capabilities that have emerged since Umbraco 13. The six features below are the ones we believe will deliver the greatest operational and strategic value over the coming years.
For many organisations, moving from Umbraco 13 to 17 is more than a technical migration. It provides an opportunity to review the wider digital platform, reduce technical debt, simplify integrations, modernise editorial workflows and prepare the organisation for future digital services.
Rather than recreating an existing implementation on a newer version of Umbraco, many organisations use the project to improve content models, remove legacy functionality, review user journeys and establish a stronger foundation for the next five years.
In many cases, the greatest value comes not from the upgrade itself, but from using the project to modernise the platform.
| Capability | Umbraco 13 | Umbraco 17 |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor support | Ends December 2026 | Supported until November 2028 |
| Backoffice | Legacy | Fully matured modern backoffice |
| AI | Limited | Native AI framework |
| Editorial scaling | Single backoffice instance | Horizontally scalable |
| Personlisation | Earlier version of Engage | Modern version of Engage and Deploy support |
| Cloud | Earlier generation | Modern CI/CD and cloud operations |
When Umbraco introduced its rebuilt backoffice in version 14 (known internally as the Bellissima project), it was a significant step forward in architecture but came with the expected trade-offs of a first release. Over versions 15 and 16, Umbraco HQ and its community and partner network refined the editor experience, closed feature gaps, and stabilised the extensibility model.
By version 17, that work is complete. The new backoffice has full feature parity with version 13, a polished editing experience, and a mature extension API that packages and custom builds can rely on. This is no longer early-adopter territory. It is the settled foundation for the next several years of Umbraco development, and the base from which every future release will build.
For organisations that delayed upgrading while the new backoffice matured, that wait is over.
What this means for organisations
The modern backoffice is now mature enough to become the long-term foundation for editorial teams. Organisations can confidently invest in editor training, custom extensions and new workflows knowing the platform will continue evolving rather than requiring another significant interface change. This improves adoption, reduces change fatigue and provides confidence that future innovation will build on the same experience.
Example
A membership organisation with separate marketing, membership and policy teams can standardise editorial processes across the organisation. Editors only need to learn one modern interface, making onboarding simpler and improving consistency across multiple teams.
Particularly valuable for
Membership organisations, universities, publishers, organisations with multiple editors, and marketing teams managing large websites.
Until version 17, only the public-facing website could run across multiple servers. The backoffice, where editors create, manage, and publish content, was limited to a single machine. For organisations with large editorial teams or content-heavy workflows, this created a bottleneck that no amount of front-end scaling could resolve.
Umbraco 17 removes that constraint. The entire backoffice can now scale horizontally, meaning better performance during busy editorial periods, improved resilience with no single point of failure, and a simpler infrastructure model overall.
For membership organisations that manage high volumes of content across multiple teams or departments, this is a practical improvement that directly affects day-to-day editorial productivity.
What this means for organisations
Editorial performance can now scale alongside the public website. As organisations grow, increase publishing activity or introduce additional websites, the backoffice no longer becomes a bottleneck. This creates a more resilient content operation and supports future organisational growth.
Example
During an annual conference, a professional membership body may have communications, events, marketing and membership teams all publishing content simultaneously. Rather than competing for system performance, every team can continue working efficiently during periods of peak editorial demand.
Particularly valuable for
Large membership organisations, multi-brand organisations, enterprise websites, global organisations, and large editorial teams.
Umbraco’s AI layer, Umbraco.AI, is now available as an open-source foundation that sits inside the backoffice and connects to the AI provider of your choice. It supports OpenAI, Anthropic (Claude), Google Gemini, Amazon Bedrock, Microsoft AI Foundry, and others, all through a consistent interface.
For content editors, this translates into practical tooling they can use every day. The Umbraco.AI.Prompt package lets editors trigger AI actions directly from the properties they are working on. That includes generating SEO titles and meta descriptions, creating alt text for images, summarising page content, rewriting or improving copy with multiple variations to choose from, and translating content into other languages. These actions appear as buttons on the relevant fields, so editors can run them with a single click without leaving the page they are editing.
There is also a Copilot-style chat interface that understands the editor’s current context within the backoffice, so it can assist with tasks based on what they are working on at that moment. For teams managing large volumes of content, or dealing with repetitive metadata and accessibility tasks, this is a meaningful time saving.
What this means for organisations
AI isn’t replacing editors. It’s removing repetitive, low-value tasks such as generating metadata, improving accessibility, translating content and creating summaries. This allows editorial teams to focus on creating higher-quality content while improving consistency, governance and productivity.
Example
A charity with thousands of webpages could automatically generate missing alt text, improve SEO metadata and summarise legacy content in a fraction of the time previously required, improving both accessibility and search performance.
Particularly valuable for
Marketing teams, content editors, accessibility specialists, international organisations, and organisations managing large content estates.
Organisations choose their provider, configure tone of voice profiles and brand guardrails, and those rules apply consistently across every AI feature in the CMS. Umbraco’s approach gives organisations full control over which AI models are used and where their data is processed. That model sovereignty matters for membership bodies and not-for-profits handling sensitive member data, and it means the AI integration can be configured to meet specific data governance requirements rather than relying on a single vendor’s defaults.
What this means for organisations
Unlike many AI platforms, Umbraco allows organisations to choose the AI provider that best aligns with their governance, compliance and commercial requirements, reducing vendor lock-in while supporting existing security policies.
Example
A regulated membership organisation can choose Microsoft AI Foundry within its own Azure environment, ensuring organisational content is processed according to internal governance requirements.
On the developer side, the Umbraco Developer MCP is live with full Management API parity, and Umbraco’s roadmap includes an Editor MCP and Content Delivery MCP to extend AI capabilities further. An automations package is also planned, which would allow tasks like auto-generating alt text on image upload or summarising content on publish.
AI is also changing how audiences discover content. Increasingly, organisations need content that can be understood, summarised and surfaced by AI assistants and AI-powered search experiences. Upgrading to Umbraco 17 is not simply about creating content more efficiently. It is about creating well-structured, governed and accessible content that is ready for the next generation of digital discovery.
Umbraco Engage is the platform’s personalisation and analytics add-on, and it has been fully rebuilt for the modern backoffice in version 17. It provides segmentation, persona management, customer journey mapping, and goal tracking as a native layer within the CMS, rather than requiring a separate third-party platform.
Version 17 also introduces Deploy support for Engage, which means configuration items such as segments, personas, journey steps, and goals can be transferred between environments. This makes it significantly easier to build and test personalisation rules in a staging environment before pushing them to production.
For membership organisations looking to move beyond one-size-fits-all website experiences, Engage provides the tooling to do this within the CMS itself. That could mean surfacing different content to different member grades, tailoring calls to action based on engagement history, or tracking which digital journeys lead to renewals.
What this means for organisations
Organisations can deliver more relevant digital experiences without introducing another personalisation platform into the technology stack. Marketing teams gain better insight into user behaviour while simplifying the overall technology estate.
Example
A membership organisation could display different homepage messaging to prospective members, existing members, volunteers and corporate partners while recommending different events, publications or renewal journeys based on previous engagement.
Particularly valuable for
Membership organisations, charities, professional bodies, marketing teams, and organisations focused on engagement and retention.
Umbraco 17 is available on Umbraco Cloud from launch, and the operational improvements delivered across the version 16 cycle carry forward. These include a second iteration of CI/CD with targeted environment deployments and faster validated runs, hostname monitoring with pre-validation and managed challenges, custom identity provider support for the Cloud Portal, and daily bandwidth insights for capacity planning.
The backoffice load balancing introduced in version 17 also lays the technical foundation for horizontal scaling on Umbraco Cloud. Full Cloud-based load balancing is not available yet, but Umbraco HQ has confirmed that work is underway.
Taken together, these capabilities make Umbraco Cloud a more controlled, secure, and operationally mature hosting option than it was even twelve months ago.
What this means for organisations
The latest cloud improvements reduce operational risk, improve deployment confidence and allow digital teams to spend less time managing infrastructure and more time delivering value.
Example
A national charity delivering multiple fundraising campaigns each year can release new functionality with greater confidence, knowing deployments have been validated before production and monitoring provides earlier warning of potential issues.
Particularly valuable for
Lean digital teams, enterprise organisations, teams adopting DevOps, and organisations with frequent release cycles.
Umbraco 13, the previous Long-Term Supported release, reaches end-of-life on 14 December 2026. After that date, Umbraco will no longer issue security patches for version 13. Any vulnerabilities discovered from that point forward will go unpatched.
For organisations on versions older than 13, the situation is more urgent. Those versions are already past end-of-life and have not received security updates for some time. Every month spent on an unsupported version increases the exposure.
What this means for organisations
Remaining on a supported platform reduces cyber security risk, simplifies governance and compliance conversations, and avoids expensive reactive upgrade projects driven by unsupported software.
Example
A professional institute processing membership payments and storing personal data is likely to face increasing scrutiny from auditors and governance teams if its CMS is no longer receiving vendor security updates.
Particularly valuable for
Membership organisations, charities, organisations processing payments, organisations storing personal data, and regulated sectors.
For membership organisations and not-for-profits handling member data, processing payments, or operating gated content areas, running an unsupported CMS version is a risk that becomes difficult to justify on both operational and compliance grounds. Umbraco 17, with its three-year support window through to November 2028, provides a stable and secure foundation to build on.
Are we simply upgrading to remain supported, or should we modernise the platform? Are our current integrations still fit for purpose? Can we reduce technical debt? Could we improve the editorial experience? Are there opportunities to introduce AI-assisted content operations? Could we simplify our technology stack? Are we preparing the platform for the next five years?
The right approach to upgrading depends on far more than your current version of Umbraco.
Before beginning any upgrade, organisations should take the opportunity to assess the wider digital platform, including custom code, third-party integrations, content architecture, editorial workflows and any technical debt that has accumulated over time. Whilst some websites can move from Umbraco 13 to 17 with relatively minor changes, others will benefit from treating the project as a broader platform modernisation programme.
An upgrade is also the ideal opportunity to review how your CMS supports future business priorities. Could editorial workflows be simplified? Are there opportunities to introduce AI-assisted content operations? Is your content structured in a way that supports personalisation, accessibility and AI-powered search? Are there legacy integrations or packages that could be retired or replaced?
Starting this assessment early gives organisations greater flexibility around budgeting, planning and delivery, while reducing the pressure that inevitably comes as support deadlines approach.
Upgrading to Umbraco 17 is no longer simply about remaining on a supported version of the CMS. It is an opportunity to modernise your digital platform, improve the experience for content editors, strengthen governance, introduce AI-assisted content operations and build a more resilient foundation for future digital services.
The organisations that will see the greatest return from an upgrade won’t necessarily be those that complete it the fastest. They’ll be those that use it as an opportunity to challenge existing ways of working, simplify their technology landscape and create better digital experiences for their audiences.
Whether you’re planning a straightforward migration from Umbraco 13 or considering a broader platform transformation, the earlier you begin planning, the more opportunity you’ll have to review your digital estate, reduce technical debt and maximise the value of your investment.
As an Umbraco Platinum Contributing Partner, Cantarus helps organisations plan, deliver and optimise Umbraco upgrade programmes that do more than move to the latest version. We work with clients to modernise digital platforms, improve editorial experiences, simplify integrations and ensure they’re ready for the next generation of AI-enabled, personalised and composable digital experiences.