Over the last couple of years the .NET-based open source CMS, Umbraco, has grown significantly. I recently attended a seminar, where founder Niels Hartvig announced that the system has been used in more than 61,000 active installations. In comparison, the Danish CMS-vendor Dynamicweb has around 4,500 installations (according to co-founder Nicolai Pedersen). Since we first came across Umbraco at cmf2005 they have certainly come a long way. The question is: will the "friendly CMS" really be able to rule the CMS world?
In the crowded open source marketplace, the clear differentiator for Umbraco is that it is based on Microsoft's .NET-platform, where most others are usually based on PHP, Python or Java. In September 2008 Umbraco launched a paid version called Umbraco Pro, which for $4,300 a year gives you:
"(...) access to developer tools, rebranding rights, enterprise level support and architectural advice directly from the core team."
It is unclear how many of the 61,000 installations have signed up for the Pro Edition, but this number might be a more fair way to compare alternatives.
If you are among the many organisations that have .NET skills in house, Umbraco might be an interesting choice. The brand certainly seems to have some success within the IT departments as an attractive and low-cost alternative to Microsoft SharePoint. However, as a buyer, don’t forget that just because your team has got many Microsoft certifications, they still need to learn how to work with Umbraco. Luckily it's relatively easy to obtain training via umbraco.tv (launched in Octobter 2008 - subscriptions starting at $20 per user per month). Documentation is also available, although some customers report that this area leaves a lot to be desired – as is the case with most open source alternatives.
Umbraco is not alone as a .NET open source CMS, but the number of active installations is impressive, and demonstrates that Umbraco seems to have found a niche in the market that, combined with the attractiveness of openness and low-cost, has made it highly popular. Needless to say: the fact that it is generally popular does not mean that it necessarily meets your requirements. We always recommend that you pay more attention to specific references than to sheer numbers. Make sure to talk to actual users before you get started.
It will be exciting to see how Umbraco evolves and whether adoption will continue to happen at the same rate. Will Umbraco rule the world of content management systems?
Our venture into the world of umbraco has already prooved that certain things are much more straightforward than others. As with any other CMS. :-)
At our current stage, it would seem to me that Umbraco is a decent choice when you need a fairly standard CMS. Though if you work with more advaced functionality such as webparts, or start creating a lot of your own code, it becomes slightly more cumbersome to work with.
One reason that shows potential to become a very big open source CMS, is that it has some of the feel of earlydays wordpress…
I’ve been implementing websites with Umbraco for 3 years.
The big advantage for me is that Umbraco allows me to implement whatever I need without giving me any trouble. Regular sites is implemented only by customizing with Umbraco Document Types and XSLT macros. This means no visual studio development at all in most implementations.
When you add the fact that you can extend Umbraco’s features using nothing but standard usercontrols and more then Umbraco suddenly becomes the right choice for most website projects out there.
This is of course also an advantage for the client/customer.
/Jesper
umbraco is a real cool product but i dont really see it as a sharepoint alternative. sharepoint, although it has CMS capabilities, is more geared as a collaborative platform, with other elements in addition to content management – document management, forums, contact management, wiki collaboration etc. solutions like HyperOffice fit the profile of a “sharepoint alternative” better, since the bring a mix of content management capabilities and collaborative tools.
Can Niels explain how they calculate the number of installations if this is an open source product that anybody can download without any registration? I think the number is highly misleading.
@Jeff:
> “I think the number is highly misleading”
I don’t think so as we’re quite pessimistic in how we calculate this number. I don’t know what knowledge your statement is build on, but let me tell you how we calculate the number.
The number is calculated by tracking unique host header referrers from outgoing links from the umbraco back office to our umbraco sites. So when back office users (not website visitors) click links inside the back office, such as the help button, upgrade info, etc. we track that. Then we gather all referrers from these links the past 12 months and calculate the number based on the host headers (ie *.mysite.com).
This is as accurate as we possibly can atm and it’s more accurate than registrations or debtor numbers as these are *active* installations. There’s a chance that the number is too low as it doesn’t calculate installations where people don’t click the links and of course there’s also a chance the development installations are calculated, but this is quite low as for instance “localhost” is only tracked once.
In Umbraco 4 we’ve added an update checking service which checks for updates to Umbraco every seven days (only when administrators logs in). This will give us a more accurate number of Umbraco 4 installations and this will be the number we’ll use when Umbraco 4 is fully adopted.
Umbraco 4 is currently downloaded more than 20.000 times a month. Contrary to many open source projects we don’t use neither download numbers or user registrations to promote the number of Umbraco installs.
@Jeff: What is your statement (the number is highly misleading) based on?
[...] In comparison, Umbraco, another popular open source CMS, is only downloaded 20,000 times each month according to founder Niels Hartvig (in March [...]
Its great to see another .NET CMS get some traction! The DotNetNuke CMS project has been around since 2003 and gets more than 100,000 downloads per month. It is estimated to have more than 500,000 active installations worldwide, making it by far the largest open source CMS project native to the .NET platform. DotNetNuke also released a commercial version of its product in late February 2009 ( for $1999 per year ) and has already signed up more than 100 customers to date.
DNN isn’t like Umbraco a CMS focusing at content and editing.
I’ve released several DNN sites as well as Umbraco sites and when it comes to editorial support DNN fails. DNN is great but more of a .net portal framework.