# Alternative to Umbraco > Umbraco hosts many sites, but each one means rebuilding design, permissions and workflows. We compare multisite governance, AI visibility and cost vs Griddo. **URL:** https://griddo.io/en/alternatives/umbraco **Language:** English **Category:** Open Source --- ## Verdict Umbraco is the most widely used open source .NET CMS on the market, MIT-licensed and with an exceptional community. Hosting several websites on one installation works and is documented. The problem appears when governing them as a whole: there is no template or permission inheritance, and no central design system. Every faculty you add costs roughly what the first one did. *Umbraco can host many websites. It does not govern them as one.* --- ## Feature-by-feature comparison | | Griddo | Umbraco | Advantage | |---|---|---|---| | Architecture | Headless and API-first. Pages are generated as static files and served from a network of more than 300 nodes worldwide. Content and design are separate. | ASP.NET Core with server-side rendering. Since version 12 there is an API for serving content to other systems, but it is not switched on. You enable it in the configuration, register it in the code and rebuild the search index by hand. It does not generate static pages. | Griddo | | Managing several websites | Native. Global content is shared and local content is isolated. One client manages 60 websites in 8 languages from one install. Adding a website needs no technical work. | Three routes. Several websites in one install: the licence costs €0. Their documentation warns that it "might increase resource usage". It also warns that it "could interfere with editors' workflows", because the database is shared, and that it "limits options for developing new features". Separate installs: each one is upgraded on its own. Or Baselines on Umbraco Cloud: it copies the pattern, and each child website is invoiced separately. | Griddo | | Design inheritance | Design system with brand tokens and themes. One central change reaches every website. Each faculty publishes inside the brand with no prior review. | There is no multi-level template inheritance. On their official forum: "There is no multi-level inheritance in Umbraco… you need to apply them to every page for every site separately". | Griddo | | Permissions and roles | 6 configurable roles. Permissions are set by content type, by field, by workflow stage and by language. Globally and per website. Full record of who did what. | User groups with detailed permissions and one start node per person. Groups can only add permissions, never remove them, and there is no inheritance to the content below. | Griddo | | Content approval | Multi-level approval workflows included. Scheduled reviews and conditional publishing. | Since version 16 they are configured with the Umbraco Workflow package. Their documentation puts it like this: "Since Umbraco 16, approval processes can be configured using the official Umbraco Workflow package". Outside Umbraco Cloud it costs €2,800 a year per installation. The free version allows a maximum of 5 approval groups. | Griddo | | Visual editor | Live Author Experience: you see the real result while you edit, on mobile, tablet and desktop. No code. | This is Umbraco's best-rated quality: 4.5 out of 5 on G2 across more than 970 reviews, and 8.8 for ease of use. The difference is the starting point. The way editors work is defined in each project, within that project's scope and budget. | — | | Visibility in AI search engines | Four formats generated automatically from the content: JSON-LD structured data, an llms.txt index, a markdown copy of every page and Open Knowledge Format bundles. Griddo uses this on its own site. | The terms "GEO", "Generative Engine Optimization" and "Answer Engine Optimization" do not appear on umbraco.com. "AEO" appears once, in their roadmap, as an example of something you will be able to ask for in future. It does not generate llms.txt, a markdown copy or structured data for customer sites. | Griddo | | Technical SEO | Included in the editor: meta tags, automatic sitemaps, robots.txt, redirect manager, OpenGraph, hreflang and structured data (Organization, Course, FAQ, Article, Event). No packages. | Meta fields and redirects in the base product. Structured data, advanced sitemaps and page analysis need third-party packages. The most widely used one, SEO Checker, is built by Soeteman Software and costs between €249 and €1,125. | Griddo | | Artificial intelligence | AI Booster from €200/month: translation with DeepL, metadata with OpenAI, and image tagging and alt text with Amazon Rekognition. All inside the editor and on the same invoice. AI Search is live in 48 hours. | Umbraco.AI, Copilot and the developer MCP are published in stable releases, and it is a serious commitment. Three caveats. They require version 17.1 and .NET 10. You contract and pay the AI provider separately. And the editor MCP — the one that translates and generates metadata — is still on the roadmap. Their own integrations page answers: "Is AI built into Umbraco? Not directly." | — | | Identity and single sign-on (SSO) | SSO with LDAP, Active Directory, SAML 2.0 and OAuth. Two-step verification included. | OAuth and OpenID Connect, for the panel and for website users. SAML 2.0 and Shibboleth are not supported out of the box or documented by Umbraco. Academic federations need a commercial third-party package, or a proxy that translates one protocol into the other. | Griddo | | CRM, ERP and student system integrations | Own connectors for HubSpot, Salesforce, Dynamics 365, Zoho and Pipedrive, with real-time sync. Contact enrichment with Apollo. Configurable webhooks for student systems and learning platforms. | There are packages for HubSpot and for Dynamics 365 Marketing. For Salesforce, Zoho and Pipedrive, their documentation proposes APIs, webhooks or external tools such as Zapier. The webhooks in the base product cover 5 events; anything else requires C# code. There are no official integrations with Banner, PeopleSoft, Workday Student, Slate, Moodle, Canvas or Blackboard. | Griddo | | Database | Managed by Griddo. The university administers no database engine. | SQL Server (2016 or later) or SQLite. PostgreSQL and MySQL are not supported. | Griddo | | Where it is hosted | Two models. Griddo Cloud, with the AWS infrastructure managed by Griddo. Or the Enterprise model, where the university contracts directly with AWS and chooses the region (Europe by default). Griddo holds the AWS Qualified Software certification. | A lot of freedom, and it is a real advantage: Umbraco runs on your own servers, on Azure, on AWS or wherever you want, with no licence restriction. On Umbraco Cloud, the trade-off is the CPU and memory limits per plan and the lack of automatic scaling: "Auto-scaling is not available yet but is under consideration". | Umbraco | | Updates | Managed SaaS. There are no versions and no end-of-support dates. Updates are included and need no project. | Two major versions a year, with 3 of the last 9 on long-term support. Umbraco 13 loses support on 14 December 2026. Extended security support exists for 6, 12 or 24 months, only for long-term support versions and with no public price. | Griddo | | Performance | 95+ average on Core Web Vitals. LCP under 2.5 seconds. Only the pages that changed are published. | Since version 15 the cache uses Microsoft's HybridCache. Their documentation warns: "By default, the in-process (L0) published content cache is unbounded… On large sites this increases memory usage". The way to limit it arrived in version 17.6. | Griddo | | Price | Four public plans, from €1,500/month (Institute, 1 website) to €5,000/month (University, 9 websites). Additional websites at €150/month. Implementation is variable, depending on scope and delivery partner; the Cloud Enterprise model adds a one-off €7,500 cloud setup fee. One invoice. | The CMS is free, with no limits. Umbraco Cloud: €45/month (Starter), €280/month (Standard), €730/month (Professional), and Enterprise priced on request, with one plan per website. Add-ons are paid separately: Engage between €800 and €18,800 a year, Compose between €12,000 and €48,000 a year. | Umbraco | | Analyst recognition | No presence in independent analyst quadrants as of the date of this comparison. | No presence in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for DXP or in the Forrester Wave. Its backing comes from user reviews on G2, where it is a Leader in web content management, in headless CMS and in DXP. | Umbraco | --- ## Who each platform is for **Griddo is ideal if…** - You have several faculties, campuses or brands, and you need each team to publish without depending on IT, with design and permissions inherited - You want your knowledge to be citable by AI search engines without opening a separate project to get there - Your communications team is not technical and needs to publish from day one - You prefer a published, predictable cost, with updates included and no end-of-support dates **Umbraco is a fit if…** - You have your own .NET development team, or a trusted Umbraco partner, and you want full control over the code - You need to host on your own servers or with a specific provider, and the freedom of the MIT licence is decisive - You are going to manage one website or a few, where managing the whole set is not the main problem - You value a large, active open-source community — 127 MVPs, 852 packages, 361 partners — and you prefer building bespoke --- ## Frequently asked questions ### Can Umbraco manage several websites? Yes. Umbraco hosts several websites in one install using multiple root nodes, each with its own domain. Its reference case is the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford, with 70 websites and 227 editors. Hosting them is not the problem. Managing them as one set is. There is no template inheritance: on their own forum, "There is no multi-level inheritance in Umbraco… you need to apply them to every page for every site separately". User groups can only add permissions. And there is no permission inheritance down to the content below. Two caveats about that case. It is one department, not the whole university. And those 227 editors are the highest figure Umbraco documents across around 150 published cases. ### What is Baselines, and does it solve managing several websites? Baselines is an Umbraco Cloud feature. It copies the design and the code of a parent project to child projects. You push changes to the children "with a click of a button". It solves part of the problem. There are three limits. It copies in one direction only, so conflicts appear when a child website moves away from the pattern. Umbraco has a help section dedicated to resolving them. Each child website is a separate Umbraco Cloud project, with its own plan and its own invoice. And the only official capacity figures at scale were published in 2018. Baselines copies the starting point. It does not give you shared content or a single place to govern brand and permissions. ### When does Umbraco 13 stop being supported, and what does that mean? On 14 December 2026 it stops receiving security patches. The continuity version is Umbraco 17, supported until November 2028, which runs on .NET 10. The jump is not a normal upgrade. Version 14 rewrote the admin panel and removed AngularJS. According to their own technical document, that "will disrupt all existing packages that add backoffice elements". Any panel customisation gets rewritten, not migrated: admissions dashboards, editors for programme data, visual integrations with the student system. Umbraco partners estimate between £3,000 and £10,000 from v8, and between £10,000 and £30,000 from v7 or v8. ### If Umbraco is free, why compare it with a paid platform? Because the licence is only part of the cost. Umbraco's CMS is genuinely free, with no cap on users, domains or sites. What you pay for sits around it. Integrations with CRM, ERP and the student system are bespoke development. Content approval is a €2,800-a-year add-on since version 16. Each single sign-on provider requires five pieces of code. There are two major versions a year. And on Umbraco Cloud you pay one plan per website. The useful comparison is not licence against licence. It is what is left to build after signing. ### What does it really cost to run 50 websites on Umbraco? The CMS licence is €0. Hosting on Umbraco Cloud, at list price, is €168,000 a year for 50 websites on the Standard plan. But that number only measures one of the three cost lines. Two are missing. The first one: building each website. With no template inheritance and no permission inheritance, each one needs its own design, its own access rights and its own workflows, and that is a project with a supplier — Umbraco partners publish ranges of £15,000 to £50,000 for a corporate website. The second one: coordinating the whole set, which means maintaining 50 templates, reviewing 50 sets of permissions and managing 50 upgrade paths, with two major versions a year. An honest TCO calculation adds up all three. This is why the twentieth website does not cost what the first one cost. ### Does Umbraco support SAML 2.0 or Shibboleth? Not out of the box, and not documented by Umbraco. Their external login documentation covers OAuth and OpenID Connect, with providers such as Entra ID, Identity Server and Google. We reviewed the complete index of titles and descriptions in their documentation — 3,882 pages. There is no reference to SAML, Shibboleth or WS-Federation. For academic federations such as InCommon, eduGAIN or the UK Access Management Federation there are two options. A commercial third-party package, or a proxy that translates SAML into OpenID Connect. Griddo includes single sign-on with SAML 2.0, LDAP, Active Directory and OAuth, with two-step verification. ### Does Umbraco have artificial intelligence? Yes. Umbraco.AI, an assistant in the panel and an MCP server for developers are all published in stable releases. You bring your own API key and pay the provider with no markup. Three points for a university. They require version 17.1 and .NET 10, so most current installs have to migrate first. The AI available today is for building the CMS. The AI that translates and generates metadata is still on the roadmap. And their own integrations page answers the direct question: "Is AI built into Umbraco? Not directly." ### Can a university on Umbraco be cited by ChatGPT or Perplexity? It can, with its own work. What we did not find is product support for getting there. The index of titles and descriptions of their 3,882 documentation pages contains no "SEO", no "schema.org", no "structured data" and no "JSON-LD". Structured data needs third-party packages. The terms "GEO" and "Generative Engine Optimization" do not appear on umbraco.com. "AEO" appears once, in their roadmap, as an example of a future feature. Griddo generates the four formats those engines read on its own: JSON-LD, llms.txt, a markdown copy of every page and Open Knowledge Format bundles, visible at griddo.io/okf/. ### If we migrate to Griddo, which systems does it integrate with? Griddo has its own connectors for HubSpot, Salesforce, Dynamics 365, Zoho and Pipedrive, with real-time sync and contact enrichment via Apollo. For student systems, learning platforms and ERP, the integration uses configurable webhooks. Universidad Católica del Maule, for example, built an entry-score simulator on Griddo integrated with HubSpot. Griddo replaces the web management layer, not the business systems you already have. --- ## Sources - [Umbraco Cloud — Pricing](https://umbraco.com/products/umbraco-cloud/pricing/) - [Umbraco Docs — Umbraco Cloud Plans (CPU, memory and disk quotas)](https://docs.umbraco.com/umbraco-cloud/explore-umbraco-cloud/what-is-umbraco-cloud/umbraco-cloud-plans) - [Umbraco — Annual Price Changes 2026](https://umbraco.com/blog/annual-price-changes-2026/) - [Umbraco — Long-term Support and End-of-Life](https://umbraco.com/products/knowledge-center/long-term-support-and-end-of-life/) - [Umbraco Docs — Breaking Changes Overview (v14: AngularJS removed)](https://docs.umbraco.com/umbraco-cms/get-started/upgrading-and-migrating/version-specific) - [Umbraco RFC 0024 — Implement the New Backoffice](https://github.com/umbraco/rfcs/blob/main/cms/0024-implement-the-new-backoffice.md) - [Umbraco — Umbraco 14 Release](https://umbraco.com/blog/umbraco-14-release/) - [Umbraco Docs — Multisite Setup](https://docs.umbraco.com/umbraco-cms/develop-with-umbraco/tutorials/multisite-setup) - [Umbraco Docs — Baselines](https://docs.umbraco.com/umbraco-cloud/begin-your-cloud-journey/creating-a-cloud-project/baselines) - [Umbraco GitHub Discussion #18018 — Rework the User and Group access rights](https://github.com/umbraco/Umbraco-CMS/discussions/18018) - [Umbraco Forum — Best practices for multisite solution set up](https://forum.umbraco.com/t/best-practices-for-multisite-solution-set-up/3614) - [Umbraco Docs — Users (approval via Workflow from v16)](https://docs.umbraco.com/umbraco-cms/manage-and-publish-content/users-and-members/users) - [Umbraco Docs — External Login Providers](https://docs.umbraco.com/umbraco-cms/run-in-production/security/external-login-providers) - [Umbraco Docs — Webhooks](https://docs.umbraco.com/umbraco-cms/develop-with-umbraco/headless-and-apis/webhooks) - [Umbraco Docs — Content Delivery API](https://docs.umbraco.com/umbraco-cms/develop-with-umbraco/headless-and-apis/content-delivery-api) - [Umbraco Docs — Cache Settings](https://docs.umbraco.com/umbraco-cms/develop-with-umbraco/configuration/cache-settings) - [Umbraco Docs — Requirements (SQL Server and SQLite)](https://docs.umbraco.com/umbraco-cms/get-started/installation/requirements) - [Umbraco — AI in Umbraco](https://umbraco.com/products/ai/) - [Umbraco — AI Integrations ("Is AI built into Umbraco? Not directly.")](https://umbraco.com/integrations/ai-integrations-for-umbraco/) - [Umbraco — Developer MCP](https://umbraco.com/products/developer-mcp/) - [Umbraco — Roadmap](https://umbraco.com/products/knowledge-center/roadmap/) - [Umbraco — Integrations](https://umbraco.com/integrations/) - [Umbraco — CRM Integrations](https://umbraco.com/integrations/crm-integrations-for-umbraco/) - [Umbraco — Umbraco for Education](https://umbraco.com/umbraco-by-industry/umbraco-for-education/) - [Umbraco — Add-ons](https://umbraco.com/products/add-ons/) - [Umbraco — Umbraco Compose](https://umbraco.com/products/umbraco-compose/) - [Umbraco — Support Pricing](https://umbraco.com/products/support/pricing/) - [Umbraco — Case study: Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford](https://umbraco.com/case-studies-testimonials/the-department-of-engineering-science-at-the-university-of-oxford/) - [Umbraco — Impact Report](https://umbraco.com/about-us/impact-report/) - [G2 — Umbraco Reviews](https://www.g2.com/products/umbraco/reviews) - [Soeteman Software — SEO Checker for Umbraco](https://soetemansoftware.nl/seochecker) - [Brambla — Umbraco Upgrade Guide](https://www.brambla.co.uk/blog/umbraco-upgrade-guide-v8-to-v13/) - [DotSee — Umbraco Support Services](https://www.dot-see.com/services/umbraco-support/) - [Original Objective — Umbraco 17 Migration Guide](https://www.originalobjective.com/blog/umbraco-cms-development-your-guide-to-umbraco-17-migration) - [Codiance — Case study: The University of Bedfordshire](https://codiance.com/case-studies/the-university-of-bedfordshire/) - [ITJobsWatch — Umbraco job market](https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/umbraco.do) - [Intuitiv — Umbraco website cost](https://www.intuitiv.net/blog/umbraco-website-cost) - [G-Cloud 14 — Terminalfour, pricing document](https://assets.applytosupply.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/g-cloud-14/documents/92373/694314317857213-pricing-document-2024-05-06-1112.pdf) - [G-Cloud 14 — Contensis, pricing document](https://assets.applytosupply.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/g-cloud-14/documents/92274/482514217011962-pricing-document-2024-05-04-1004.pdf) --- *Generated from [Alternative to Umbraco](https://griddo.io/en/alternatives/umbraco)*