Why pay for Sitecore when you can get Umbraco for free?

After a recent briefing with a Danish system integrator, I started speculating on whether Umbraco CMS might be on track to steal market share from Sitecore in the marketplace for .NET-based content management systems. Others have mentioned the possible trend to me in the past, but is it really happening?

Comparing open source Umbraco and proprietary Sitecore has been the norm for a couple of years in Denmark, the home market for both vendors, but we are increasingly seeing the two vendors on the same shortlists far beyond Denmark.

The question is, whether the “friendly CMS” really will be able to win business from Sitecore?

Here’s why Umbraco will beat Sitecore in the long run:

• Open source: This evergreen mega-trend is a big plus for Umbraco in terms of attracting developers, press and customers.
• Partners: Umbraco is very popular with system integrators. Nearly 60 people signed up for the LBi-hosted Umbraco 2009 UK Meetup in London. Since then we’ve heard of several consultancies that used to be faithful to Sitecore, but are now winning their bids with Umbraco. Without license costs there is more budget left for the partners.
• Price: You can download Umbraco and get started free of charge. You can buy a year of support starting at €3k. To compare, the cheapest Sitecore license starts around €10k and quickly goes up from there (and then you still need to buy support).
• Community: Umbraco has a strong, happy, positive, enthusiastic and growing community of developers.
• Simplicity: Many customers don’t require online marketing, all the different interfaces and bells-and-whistles offered by Sitecore. Several partners claim that Umbraco is simpler and hence also easier and cheaper to implement.

Here are a few good reasons why Sitecore will continue to do well, even though Umbraco might continue to gain in popularity:

• Analysts: Umbraco is not covered by any traditional industry analysts. Sitecore is covered by all the main players and Gartner even crowned them as “very innovative” in most recent Gartner Magic Quadrant for WCM (Aug 2009).
• Partners: Building a network of experienced integrators is not easy and Sitecore has been at it for many years. With well-developed skills and a traditional kick-back the partners have good reason to stay with Sitecore.
• References: In both North America and Europe, you can easily find an existing Sitecore customer. This is very helpful to further increase adoption as it means that new customers have some experience they can tap into. In addition, Sitecore has many government references where Umbraco has almost none.
• Finance: A quick look at the recent Sitecore annual reports shows they are doing extremely well. Sitecore has demonstrated that they are capable of earning money in a competitive market and posted record-numbers again back in December 2009.
• Global footprint: Sitecore is an established global player; much more so than Umbraco. Sitecore is in particular strong in the important and highly competitive US and UK markets.
• Complexity: Many customers have started to realize that they do indeed have complex requirements. Sitecore has targeted the higher end of the market for quite a few years now, which has made the product more complex and capable towards the demanding, global enterprises.

My take: If you do a proper CMS vendor evaluation, you will probably find that the license cost is only a fraction of the overall project costs. Your criteria should really be to look at which system will meet your requirements most efficiently.