Alternative to Umbraco

Umbraco can host many websites. But on each new website, someone has to build the design, the permissions and the publishing workflows again. With Umbraco, every website you add costs more. With Griddo, a fraction of that.

Umbraco is the most widely used open-source .NET CMS on the market. It declares more than 700,000 active installs. Its licence is MIT: free, with no cap on users, domains or sites. Its community is one of the best in the sector: 127 recognised MVPs in 2026, 852 packages and 361 partners in its directory.

That starting point is real and it deserves respect. This comparison is not about whether Umbraco is a good CMS. It is about what happens when you use it to run a whole university.

Let’s start with what it does do.

Umbraco can hold many websites in a single install. You create several root nodes in the content section and give each one its own domain. It is documented and it works well. Anyone who tells you otherwise has not read their documentation.

Three things are missing. We explain them one by one, because they are the root of almost everything else.

1. Template inheritance

Template inheritance is the ability to change a design in one central place and have that change reach every website on its own.

Umbraco does not have it. Its own forum says so, answering someone who asked how to build a multisite:

“There is no multi-level inheritance in Umbraco… you need to apply them to every page for every site separately.”

In plain terms: every template change is applied page by page and site by site. The same thread adds one detail. Umbraco publishes no official recommendation on how to build a multisite.

2. Permission inheritance

Permission inheritance means a permission given on one section applies automatically to everything below it. For example: you give access to the Law faculty, and that access covers its programmes, its news and its academic staff.

In Umbraco, user groups can only add permissions, never remove them. And there is no inheritance downwards. In an open discussion on their own repository, a contributor sums it up like this:

“one of the major weaknesses of Umbraco when it comes to growing to larger sites with more editors.”

3. A central design system

A central design system means the university’s visual identity lives in one single place. Every website draws from it.

Umbraco offers two mechanisms for reusing pieces: Compositions and two block editors. They reuse fields and components. They do not govern a brand. Umbraco does have a design system of its own, the UI Library. It is for its admin panel, not for its customers’ websites.

What all this adds up to

In Umbraco, every new website works out its templates, its permissions and its publishing rules again. What gets reused is the install.

In Griddo, a new website joins an ecosystem that already exists. It inherits the design system. It inherits the permission structure. It shares global content and keeps its own content separate. One client manages 60 websites in 8 languages from a single install.

Its reference case in higher education is the University of Oxford: 70 connected websites and 227 editors, migrated from version 7 to version 10.

It is a notable deployment. And the small print is worth reading.

It is not the University of Oxford. It is the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford. One department.

Umbraco publishes around 150 customer cases. Across all of them:

• The highest number of editors documented is those 227 at Oxford.
• The largest volume of content documented is the 30,000 nodes at Apex Group.
• There is no recommended figure for websites per install, content nodes or editors.

For comparison: IE University manages 43 websites and more than 60,000 pages on Griddo. Universidad Pontificia de Comillas has more than 200 users registered, and more than 60 use the platform every day.

Any Umbraco partner will give this answer, and it deserves a proper reply.

What Baselines is. It is an Umbraco Cloud feature that copies the design and the code of a parent project to child projects. When you change something in the parent, you push it to the children “with a click of a button”. It is a serious feature and it solves part of the problem.

Three things worth knowing before you rely on it:

It copies in one direction only. Umbraco describes it as working “similar to a fork on GitHub”. Changes flow down from the parent to the children. When a child moves away from the pattern, conflicts appear. And a faculty always ends up moving away. Umbraco has a whole help section for resolving those conflicts.

Each child is paid for separately. Every child website is a separate Umbraco Cloud project, with its own plan, its own contract and its own invoice.

The capacity figures are from 2018. The only official numbers backing Baselines at scale are “600+ Child sites” and “anything from 10 - 1000+ sites”. Both were published in 2018. There is nothing more recent.

In short: Baselines copies the starting point. It does not give you shared content. It does not give you a single place to govern the brand and the permissions.

You notice the difference the day a dean asks for a microsite.

With a platform that manages the whole set: the website is created from the design system that already exists. Permissions are assigned from the structure that is already in place. The faculty team publishes on day one. Marketing does not review the brand, because the design cannot break it.

With a platform that hosts websites: someone has to choose the template and build it. Someone has to define the permissions for that site. Someone has to check that the result respects the visual identity. It is a project, with a budget and a timeline.

Multiply that by the number of faculties, graduate schools, research centres and campuses the institution has. That is the difference.

Griddo also requires an implementation. Rolling it out at a university is a project, with a variable implementation cost. And three things are always tailored.

The design system. It is built exclusively for the university’s brand. This is not a gap in the product: it is a decision. An institution’s reputation is its most valuable asset, and its visual identity is part of that reputation. In return, every landing page and every microsite is born inside the brand, with no review rounds.

Taxonomy and catalogue. Every university offers different programmes, with different academic structures. Content types are modelled on that reality.

Integrations. Every institution has its own CRM, its own ERP and its own student system. That connection is configured for each one.

That is what gets tailored in Griddo. Note what is not on the list: the way editors work, template inheritance, permission inheritance, approval workflows, technical SEO and visibility in AI search engines. All of that ships ready.

What the project has to build	Griddo	Umbraco
Brand design system	Yes, exclusive	Yes
Taxonomy and programme catalogue	Yes	Yes
CRM, ERP and student system integrations	Yes	Yes
The way editors work and publish	Ships ready	Defined in each project
Template and permission inheritance	Ships ready	Built from scratch
Editorial approval workflows	Ships ready	Paid add-on since v16
Technical SEO and structured data	Ships ready	Third-party packages
Visibility in AI search engines	Ships ready	Built from scratch

The first three rows are a tie. With Griddo, the project goes into what makes your university different. With Umbraco, it goes into that plus building what a product should already bring ready.

There is a quick way to see how a platform was designed. Look at the units it charges you in.

These are the Umbraco Cloud limits:

Plan	Price	CPU	Memory	Disk
Starter	€45/month	20% (120 s every 5 min)	1,500 MB	7,800 MB
Standard	€280/month	35% (210 s every 5 min)	1,800 MB	9,600 MB
Professional	€730/month	50% (300 s every 5 min)	2,000 MB	10,400 MB

All three run on shared Azure servers, with 1,920 simultaneous connections for the whole group of websites, not for yours alone. And these are hard limits:

“If an application surpasses the CPU or memory limits… the app service hosting the application will automatically restart.”

Umbraco publishes these prices, and that is more than Sitecore, Optimizely, Kentico, Squiz or Modern Campus do. Transparency is not the problem. The problem is that these are the units of a hosting provider.

None of those figures answers what a university team asks. How many people can publish without asking IT for permission. How long a recruitment landing page takes to go live. Whether the Law microsite stays on brand without anyone reviewing it.

And there is a direct consequence: the Umbraco Cloud model is one plan per website. Their own page says it: “buy as many plans as you need”.

In Griddo, the University plan includes 9 websites for €5,000/month, and each additional website costs €150/month. With no contract renegotiation.

The per-website price hides two costs

This is where you have to be careful. The Umbraco model is transparent in one respect and misleading in another.

Multiply €280/month by 50 websites and you get €168,000 a year. It is an exact number, it comes from their public price list, and it is incomplete. It only measures the licence.

Two lines are missing, and they are the ones that grow.

What it costs to build each website. There is no template inheritance and no permission inheritance. So every new website needs design, access configuration and publishing workflows again. That is not configuration. It is a project with a supplier. Umbraco partners publish ranges of £15,000 to £50,000 for a corporate website. A faculty microsite costs less. It does not cost nothing.

What it costs to coordinate the whole set. Every website adds a template to maintain, a set of permissions to review and an upgrade path of its own. With two major versions a year, that work multiplies by the number of websites. It is the line no price list includes, and the one that grows most with the size of the ecosystem.

This is why the twentieth website does not cost what the first one cost. It costs more.

How to work out the real cost

These are the lines you have to add up. The third-party figures come from Umbraco partners. They work as an order of magnitude, not as a quote.

Cost line	Umbraco	Griddo
CMS licence	€0	Included in the plan
Hosting	€45 – €730/month per website	Included: 9 websites in the University plan
Additional website	A new plan, from €45/month	€150/month
Building each new website	A project with a supplier	Created from the design system that already exists
Initial implementation	£15,000 – £50,000 for a corporate website	Variable, by scope and delivery partner
Annual maintenance	£2,000 – £10,000 through an agency	Included
Major version upgrade	£3,000 – £10,000 per installation and per jump	Included, no versions
Coordinating N websites	Grows with every website	One install, one permission map
Vendor support	€8,000/year per installation	Included

The comparison that makes it clear

The two most widely used CMS platforms in British universities sell the opposite of Umbraco. These are their public tender prices (G-Cloud 14, May 2024, excluding VAT):

Platform	Model	Price
Terminalfour	Unlimited websites, capped on users	£12,856/year (5 users) to £64,453/year (100 users)
Contensis	Enterprise: unlimited websites and users	£3,000/month
Umbraco Cloud	One plan per website, unlimited users	€45 – €730/month per website
Griddo	9 websites in the plan, unlimited users	€5,000/month, extra websites at €150/month

The models are inverse. Terminalfour and Contensis charge you for how many people publish, and they let you have as many websites as you want. Umbraco charges you for each website. In a university ecosystem, that difference is what decides the TCO.

What you pay for separately in Umbraco

The CMS is free. These are the features you buy separately, with their public price:

Feature	Price	How it is licensed
Forms	€100/year	Per installation. €65/year per extra domain
Content approval (Workflow)	€2,800/year	Per installation. Free with a maximum of 5 groups
Deployment between environments (Deploy)	€2,800/year	Per solution. Included in Umbraco Cloud
E-commerce	€2,800/year	Per installation
Personalisation and analytics (Engage)	€800 – €18,800/year	Per installation, by volume
Data orchestration (Compose)	€12,000 – €48,000/year	Cloud service, by consumption
Admin interfaces (UI Builder)	€3,600/year	Unlimited projects. Free on the Cloud Standard and Professional plans
Automations (Automate)	Free	Open source
Vendor support	€8,000/year	One installation, 24/5

Umbraco public prices consulted in July 2026, excluding VAT. Their site states that prices are reviewed every 1 January.

On availability: Umbraco Cloud offers a 99.9% target on the Starter plan and 100% on Standard and Professional, with claimable service credits. Griddo guarantees 99.99% in contract on the Enterprise model, with an assigned account manager.

In Griddo there are five add-ons, and they also have public prices: File Drive, Conversion, AI Booster from €200/month, Generative Search and Personal Experience. One invoice.

On 14 December 2026, Umbraco 13 stops receiving security patches. It is the long-term support version that a large part of the current installs run on.

The version to move to is Umbraco 17, supported until November 2028. The destination is not the problem. The route is.

In version 14, Umbraco rewrote its admin panel from scratch. Its breaking-changes documentation puts it like this:

“AngularJS removed: A new backoffice built with Web Components, Lit, and fueled by the Umbraco UI Library — This is by far the most impactful update of Umbraco in years. We’ve fundamentally changed the way you extend Umbraco.”

And the technical document that planned it is clearer still: “will disrupt all existing packages that add backoffice elements”. In other words, it breaks every package that added something to the panel.

One telling detail: Umbraco did not make the deadline with its own products either. When they launched version 14, two of their five paid add-ons shipped in alpha, and a third arrived months later. If the vendor needed that much room, the cost for each university’s customisations was higher.

What that jump costs, according to estimates published by Umbraco partners:

• From v8 to v17: between £3,000 and £10,000, depending on complexity.
• From v7 or v8: between £10,000 and £30,000.

Brambla, one of those consultancies, describes it as “effectively a rebuild, not a simple update”: in practice you rebuild it, you do not update it.

Umbraco also publishes two major versions a year, and only 3 of the last 9 have had long-term support. The pace is set by Microsoft’s .NET calendar. That gives technical predictability and, at the same time, forces the institution to decide on a schedule it did not choose.

And one side effect that matters: every Umbraco AI feature requires version 17.1 and .NET 10. To get AI, you first have to do the migration that broke the panel.

Almost nobody has looked at this part yet. It is the one that best explains everything above.

What is changing

Until now, the question was whether your MSc in Biotechnology page appeared on Google. Now there is another one. Do ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or Google’s AI summaries cite your university as a source when someone asks where to study Biotechnology?

Three acronyms to understand it:

• SEO is appearing in Google’s results.
• AEO is Google taking your content as a direct answer.
• GEO is an AI model reading your site, verifying it and citing you with a link.

Why this depends on how the content is organised

For an AI model to cite you, your knowledge has to be described completely and coherently in one place. It also has to be published in the formats those machines read.

A platform where every website works out its own content model does not produce that single place. And this is where it links back to everything above: managing the whole set and being visible in AI are the same problem seen from two sides.

What Umbraco has

The headline on their site is “The Most Agent-Ready CMS. AI On Your Terms.” We went to check what sits underneath.

What is there, and it is real. Umbraco.AI, an assistant in the panel and an MCP server for developers, all in stable releases. It works with Claude, Cursor and OpenAI’s tools. You bring your own API key and pay the provider directly, with no markup. It is a sensible approach.

Who it is for. The AI available today is for building the CMS: creating templates, running migrations, modelling content types. The AI a communications team needs is still on the roadmap: rewriting a page, generating a meta description, fixing alt text, translating.

What we did not find. We downloaded the complete index of titles and descriptions from their documentation: 3,882 pages.

• The word “SEO” does not appear once.
• Nor does “schema.org”, nor “structured data”, nor “JSON-LD”. Structured data included out of the box: none.
• “GEO” and “Generative Engine Optimization”: zero occurrences on umbraco.com.
• “AEO” appears exactly once, in their roadmap, as an example of something you will one day be able to ask for: “Generate a structured AEO report for all my pages.”

There is an llms.txt on umbraco.com, but it is 3 KB written by hand, with links to their product pages. It is marketing, not a CMS feature. Their documentation does serve every page in markdown, and they attribute it correctly: “This documentation is published with GitBook”. That is a feature of their documentation provider. The same test on their own site — adding .md to a product URL — returns a 404 error.

What Griddo does

In Griddo, every programme, every event and every academic profile is structured data. Each one has a defined schema, linked translations and metadata generated automatically.

This was not built with AI in mind. It is the same structure that lets 60 websites share content without duplicating it. And once it exists, the platform publishes four machine-readable formats on its own:

• JSON-LD, so Google extracts the answers.
• llms.txt, an index so models know where the reliable information on each topic is.
• A markdown copy of every page, so agents read the content without layout code.
• Open Knowledge Format bundles, the open standard published by Google Cloud, so models cite the institution with attribution.

Griddo uses this on its own site. You can see it at griddo.io/okf/.

Umbraco makes an honest argument, and they make it on their page for the education sector:

“Instead of spending your budget on licensing fees, you can spend it on actual development of your website.”

That is true. And it describes exactly where the money ends up.

Integrations. There is no connector catalogue. Their own FAQ answers it like this: “Do I need a native connector? Usually not. Webhooks and APIs cover most scenarios.” For Salesforce, what they recommend is literally writing “a small handler”: a small program that someone has to write, test and maintain. For the student system — Banner, PeopleSoft, Workday Student, Slate, Moodle, Canvas, Blackboard — there are no official connectors. Codiance had to build course data synchronisation for the University of Bedfordshire itself.

Single sign-on. Each external login provider requires installing the package, writing two classes, creating a configuration file and registering a route. Five pieces of code per provider. And for SAML or Shibboleth, a commercial third-party package.

Automations. Webhooks cover five events: content published, unpublished and deleted, and media saved and deleted. Everything else is coded. Their documentation also warns that the default data format is outdated and will be retired: “They are inconsistent and may include data that should not be exposed or has been superseded.”

Upgrades. Two major versions a year, plus the debt from the panel rewrite for any customised install. DotSee, a consultancy specialising in Umbraco, says it without hedging: the cost of the upgrade “exceeds the cost of building the original website”.

Available talent. ITJobsWatch recorded 49 Umbraco job postings in the UK in the six months to July 2026. In 2024 there were 147. The median salary was £51,250. Six months is a short window for talking about a trend. It is enough to see how narrow the market you depend on is.

And the cost that never appears on an invoice: your team’s time. Every integration is a project. Every major version, another one. Every panel customisation is debt paid at the next jump.

At IE University, after migrating to Griddo, the engineering team went from spending 40% of its capacity on maintaining the platform to spending 5%. That recovered 35% went to product and integrations.

Griddo is a platform built only for universities. Not for business in general. Not for retail. For institutions with non-technical communications teams, many websites and a need to publish fast.

Managing the whole set. The websites are managed together from one install. Global content is shared and local content is isolated. One change to the design system reaches all of them. Permissions are defined by content type, field, workflow stage and language.

Team autonomy. The Live Author Experience shows the real result while you edit. A faculty coordinator builds the page, sees it and publishes it. At Universidad Pontificia de Comillas there are more than 200 users registered and more than 60 working every day.

Artificial intelligence. AI Booster translates with DeepL, generates metadata with OpenAI and tags images with Amazon Rekognition, inside the editor. One invoice, with no separate AI providers to contract. AI Search turns the website into a question-and-answer experience with verifiable citations, and it is live in 48 hours.

Visibility in AI. The content is structured and described, so the platform publishes the four formats models read on its own.

Stability. Griddo updates continuously. There are no major versions and no end-of-support dates forcing a decision. On the Enterprise model, the university contracts directly with AWS, chooses the region and keeps sovereignty over its data, with a 99.99% availability agreement.

IE University, CUNEF, Universidad Pontificia de Comillas, Universidad de Nebrija, Universidad Europea and Universidad Católica del Maule all work on Griddo. The platform evolves without them having to manage that evolution.

Data last verified: July 2026.

Umbraco is a registered trademark of Umbraco A/S. Griddo is not affiliated with Umbraco.