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Umbraco: From friendly CMS to serious DXP contender

If you’ve been around the .NET development world as long as we have, you’ll know Umbraco as ‘The Friendly CMS’. It earned that moniker for a reason. It’s open source, accessible, and developers love it because it doesn’t get in the way of good code.

Mario Lopez

03 December 2025

4 minute read

As a Platinum Partner for Umbraco, Luminary has implemented the platform for years. We’ve always appreciated its flexibility. But let’s be honest – for a long time, when the conversation shifted from ‘content management’ to ‘digital experience’ (DXP), Umbraco was often left in the waiting room while the big commercial beasts like Sitecore, Optimizely and Kentico sat at the grown-ups’ table.

Well, things have changed.

Umbraco has been making some serious moves lately. Through smart acquisitions and a clear strategic pivot, it has effectively kicked the door down to the DXP space. The most significant piece of this puzzle? Umbraco Engage.

The evolution of the friendly CMS

For most of its history, Umbraco was a pure-play CMS. It managed content brilliantly, but if you wanted personalisation, marketing automation or deep analytics, you had to build it yourself or integrate third-party tools.

This meant that for large organisations requiring an all-in-one DXP, Umbraco sometimes struggled to make the shortlist purely on a feature-for-feature basis.

However, the landscape has shifted. We’ve seen a move towards composable architecture (picking the best-of-breed tools for specific jobs), but we’ve also seen Umbraco realise that to compete, it needed to offer more than just a blank canvas.

Enter Umbraco Engage

The game-changer arrived with the acquisition of uMarketingSuite, which has now been rebranded and integrated as Umbraco Engage.

This isn’t just a bolt-on plugin; it’s a fully integrated marketing suite that lives right inside the Umbraco back office. It transforms Umbraco from a passive repository of content into an active engine for customer engagement.

By baking these features directly into the platform, Umbraco has bridged the gap between the content editor and the digital marketer.

Why Engage is a serious option for marketers

If you are currently in the middle of a platform selection process, you might recall our guide on how to choose the right CMS. In that post, we talk about the importance of balancing capability with investment.

This is where Umbraco Engage shines. It offers the ‘holy grail’ DXP features without the eye-watering licensing costs usually associated with enterprise DXPs.

Here is what Engage actually brings to the table:

Granular analytics

Forget the anonymity of Google Analytics. Engage tracks individual visitor journeys on your site in real-time, adhering to privacy-first principles (fully GDPR compliant).

Umbraco Engage - Analytics

360-degree profiling

It builds detailed profiles of your users based on their behaviour, allowing you to see exactly how a prospect interacted with your content before they filled out that contact form.

Umbraco Engage - 360° Profiling

Personalisation

This is the big one. You can personalise content blocks based on user behaviour, referral source, device type, or persona group.

Umbraco Engage - Personalisation

A/B testing

You can run split tests directly within the content editor to see which headlines or images drive better engagement.

Umbraco Engage - A/B Testing

Marketing automation

Trigger emails or actions based on user behaviour on the site.

Umbraco vs the big players

Umbraco Engage disrupts the existing hierarchy. It provides the critical 80 percent of DXP functionality that marketers actually use (personalisation, A/B testing, analytics) but does so at a price point that is significantly more attractive.

When you combine this with Umbraco Cloud – Umbraco’s SaaS hosting offering – you have a compelling commercial proposition. You get a secure, scalable, .NET-based DXP that allows you to spend your budget on innovation and user experience design, rather than just software licensing.

See Umbraco Engage in action

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Key takeaways for your selection process

If you are reviewing your digital ecosystem, here is the bottom line:

  • Umbraco is no longer just a CMS. It is a valid, competitive DXP player.
  • Data ownership remains yours. With Engage, the data lives in your instance, not in a third-party black box.
  • The developer experience is still king. Umbraco hasn’t sacrificed its clean architecture to add these features. It’s still a dream for developers to extend and maintain.
  • Cost-benefit is hard to beat. For organisations that need personalisation and insights but can’t justify six-figure annual license fees, Umbraco Engage is arguably the best value in the .NET market right now.

The final verdict

We have always loved Umbraco for its simplicity. With Engage, we now love it for its power.

It allows us to build digital experiences that are not just beautifully designed but are also intelligent, data-driven and personalised.

If you’re currently weighing up your options and want to see how Umbraco Engage compares to other platforms for your specific needs, let’s have a chat.


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