We’ve worked with Umbraco through multiple architectural eras, from early marketing sites to today’s composable, cloud-first and AI-enabled estates. As the platform has evolved, so has the way we design, build and operate it.

Over the years, we’ve delivered everything from single marketing sites to enterprise regulated multi-tenant estates. Each major release of Umbraco has reflected feedback from its community and partners, with a clear focus on performance, security, upgradeability and long-term sustainability. Those lessons now shape how we approach platform architecture, plan migrations, and manage technical debt, not just how we implement features.

Umbraco 15

Why Umbraco 17 LTS matters now

Released on 27 th November, Umbraco 17 is the next major Long-Term Support (LTS) release.

For organisations that prioritise stability, performance, security and scalability over early feature adoption, Umbraco 17 should already be on the roadmap - or actively in progress.

One of the most common questions we’re asked is whether teams should follow an LTS or Standard-Term Support (STS) upgrade path?

There is no universal answer to this question. It depends on your appetite for risk, resourcing, budgets and business goals. What matters most is having a clear upgrade strategy and not falling into end-of-life scenarios which can introduce risk and cost into critical platforms.

Umbraco Long-Term Support (LTS)

LTS versions are designed for enterprises, business-critical sites, or projects that require stability with minimal upgrades.

Pros

  • Extended support: Three years in total, including two years of full support
    and twelve months of security updates.
  • Maximum stability: Focused on bug fixes, security patches, and
    performance improvements rather than new features to create a solid
    platform.
  • Lower maintenance costs: Fewer upgrade requirements, reducing
    operational burden and risk.
  • .NET alignment: Closely aligned with Microsoft’s most stable .NET releases,
    ensuring compatibility with a stable tech stack.

Cons

  • Slower feature adoption: New capabilities arrive later than in STS releases.
  • Technical debt: Without forward planning, organisations can fall behind broader platform and ecosystem changes.

Umbraco Standard-Term Support (STS)

STS versions are for projects or organisations that want to innovate quickly taking advantage of new features as they are released. 

Pros

  • Cutting-edge features: Instant access to the latest improvements, features and performance enhancements.
  • Early adoption: Well suited to agile organisations, startups or experimental initiatives.
  • Modernisation: Keeps the platform current with the latest .NET versions.

Cons

  • Short lifespan: Approximately six months of support, followed by a limited security period.
  • Higher maintenance: More frequent upgrades are required to avoid End of Life (EOL).
  • Package compatibility: Third-party packages may not be supported on the STS version immediately.

Both LTS and STS can work for most businesses. What matters most is aligning your choice to your goals and expectations.

Looking ahead at Umbraco’s 2026 roadmap

Umbraco Future

What’s most exciting about Umbraco’s roadmap this year isn’t any single feature, it’s the clarity and consistency of direction. The focus on composability, stronger technical foundations, and a more empowered editor experience reflects the challenges we’ve been solving for years through custom architecture, integrations, and workarounds. The difference now is that these patterns are becoming first-class citizens within the platform itself.

Umbraco Compose

Umbraco Compose represents a significant shift in how content can be delivered across complex digital estates.

Targeted for release in Q1 2026, Compose is a standalone SaaS product that allows developers to orchestrate content and data from multiple sources into a single, unified GraphQL API. While it integrates seamlessly with Umbraco CMS, it’s intentionally platform-agnostic, meaning it can also pull from other CMS, CRM, DAM, PIM, and line-of-business systems.

Historically, we’ve solved this challenge through bespoke Backend-for-Frontend (BFF) layers and custom orchestration services. These approaches work, but they introduce complexity, long-term maintenance overhead and increased risk.

For us at Shout, where most implementations involve multiple integrations, this could be a genuine game changer. Particularly for headless, composable, and multi- channel architectures.

Search Abstraction 

Layer as a package Search has long required careful architectural decisions in Umbraco projects, particularly since the move to cloud-based hosting.

Historically, Umbraco’s reliance on Examine with a Lucene.NET implementation has caused challenges at scale, especially around performance, index consistency, and operational overhead in distributed environments. As a result, we’ve often recommended external providers such as Azure Cognitive Search for enterprise requirements.

Introducing a new search abstraction layer as a standalone package is a very welcome step. It allows developers to integrate their preferred search provider without tightly coupling projects to a specific implementation. It supports both backoffice content search and server-side website search, while providing a cleaner, more flexible developer experience.

The inclusion of example implementations will also lower the barrier to entry, helping teams adopt best-fit search technologies without reinventing the wheel.

By shipping this first as a package and later integrating it directly into the core CMS, Umbraco is striking a sensible balance. Enabling faster iteration while laying the groundwork for search to become a first-class, swappable capability within the platform. When it arrives in the core CMS, it will significantly improve maintainability over time.

Global Elements

Global Elements is a feature we’ve been waiting for.

It allows editors to create content once and reuse it consistently across a site, managing shared elements such as footers, banners, CTAs and contact details from a central location. When a Global Element is updated, the change is reflected everywhere it’s used.

For editors, this improves governance and consistency. For developers, it removes the need for complex conventions, custom content trees or workaround patterns that have historically been required to support reusable content.

With a target release later this year, this feature will help streamline implementations going forward, especially for larger sites with shared content patterns and distributed editorial teams.

AI assistance for content teams with Umbraco MCP

Umbraco’s approach to AI feels like a natural extension of the principles that have underpinned the platform in recent years.

Rather than introducing a single, opinionated AI layer, Umbraco is building an open foundation. This allows organisations to connect their preferred AI agents and models, whilst keeping the CMS stable, predictable and secure. The goal here isn’t to replace people or workflows, but to enhance them.

For content teams the Editor MCP (Management Command Protocol), a hosted, task-focused AI experience built specifically for editorial workflows.

Unlike developer AI tools, the Editor MCP is intended to be outcome driven. It’s fully hosted within Umbraco, requires no setup or technical configuration, and built to support content teams with day to day tasks. Editors simply describe what they want to achieve, and Umbraco MCP handles the complexity behind the scenes.

For example: 

  • “Create a new landing page for Black Friday deals, draft a CTA, and use the latest product images.”
  • “Review images and add missing alt tags to improve accessibility.” For organisations with busy or small content teams, this has the potential to help improve productivity in a meaningful way.

Tool collections for Umbraco MCP

Tool collections provide an important layer of governance for AI-assisted workflows. They are curated sets of MCP tools grouped by Umbraco domains such as Document Types, Data Types and Media. They function as toggles and filters allowing teams to define how AI interacts with their Umbraco environment.

This is particularly important for developers working with AI assisted workflows, enabling only the tools required for specific tasks. For example, add Document Type or Data Type tools when working on schema automation or migrations.

For developers, tool collections pair naturally with Developer MCP, which supports the Umbraco backoffice and can be used locally with tools like Claude Code or Cursor. This provides opportunities for developer reviewed/approved automation to rapid prototyping or repetitive task reduction.

Why this matters

Fifteen years on, what stands out most isn’t how much Umbraco has changed, but how consistently it’s stayed true to its core values: openness, flexibility, and respect for the people building and managing digital platforms.

That’s why we continue to invest in the platform, contribute to the community, and help organisations deliver better experiences through well-architected, sustainable digital estates.

If you’re exploring how composable architectures and AI-assisted workflows could support your organisation, get in touch. We’re always happy to share what we’ve learned along the way.