Umbraco vs. Contentful: choosing the right CMS for your project

Choosing the right content management system (CMS) is crucial to shaping a successful digital experience. Among the top contenders, Umbraco and Contentful stand out—each offering robust capabilities but catering to different needs. Whether you're creating a marketing website, a custom web application, or a content-rich platform, understanding the unique advantages and trade-offs of these systems is essential to making an informed choice.

Here’s a comparison of Umbraco vs. Contentful to help you decide which is best suited to the needs of your business.

Overview

Umbraco is an open-source CMS built on the .NET framework. Offering a traditional approach to content management with optional headless features, it’s well-suited to organisations looking for flexibility and full control over how their content is managed, hosted, and rendered.

In contrast, Contentful is a fully headless, API-first CMS designed for multi-channel content distribution. It allows teams to manage content in a centralised way and deliver it to websites, mobile apps, IoT devices, and beyond, making it ideal for decoupled architectures.

Developer experience

Designed to operate within a .NET environment, Umbraco is well suited to developers with experience in C# and ASP.NET and is ideal for custom builds where integration with other .NET services is a priority.

Contentful on the other hand, delivers a language-agnostic developer experience with RESTful and GraphQL APIs, making it a strong fit for modern front-end frameworks like React, Vue, or Svelte, as well as JAMstack architectures and continuous deployment workflows.

Content editor experience

For content editors, Umbraco offers a visual, intuitive interface with a familiar page-tree structure, WYSIWYG editing, media libraries, and preview capabilities - making it ideal for teams that want a CMS with a traditional, visual editing experience.

In comparison, and whilst clean and modern, the Contentful editor experience is heavily structured to allow for multi-channel content use, which can feel abstract especially for non-technical users.

Hosting & infrastructure

Umbraco can be hosted on-premises or via Umbraco Cloud, giving organisations full control over hosting, data residency, and infrastructure - especially valuable for enterprise projects or organisations with compliance requirements.

In contrast, Contentful, as a SaaS product, is fully managed and hosted in the cloud, eliminating the need for server maintenance, software upgrades, and infrastructure planning. That said, this cloud-only model can limit flexibility and control over hosting environments, which may be a potential concern for teams with strict compliance requirements, data residency needs, or a preference for on-premise solutions.

Extensibility & ecosystem

Umbraco features a mature plugin ecosystem with many open-source and commercial packages for SEO, forms, and e-commerce (like Vendr). It also allows for deep customisation through .NET code, making it ideal for projects that require bespoke functionality.

Contentful offers strong extensibility through its API, webhooks, and integrations with modern DevOps tools like Netlify, Gatsby, and Vercel, but with a still-maturing marketplace, it often relies on developers to implement custom logic.

Pricing

Umbraco is free and open-source if self-hosted, making it a budget-friendly option for developers and small teams, whilst its managed Umbraco Cloud service has tiered pricing plans that cater to both small projects and large enterprises.

Contentful also offers a free tier suitable for basic use, however its paid plans scale quickly depending on the number of content types, locales, users, and API calls, with the costs becoming significant for large-scale projects,  especially if usage is high or team size grows.

Use cases

Umbraco is a great fit for organisations that want a full-featured website CMS with control over both content and presentation and works especially well within Microsoft-based environments and for teams familiar with .NET development.

Contentful, on the other hand, is ideal for digital experiences that span multiple platforms such as website, mobile apps, voice interfaces, or IoT devices.

Final thoughts

Both Umbraco and Contentful are modern CMS platforms, but they cater to different architectural preferences and team workflows. Umbraco excels in traditional web development scenarios where design and content are tightly coupled, whereas Contentful stands out in headless, omnichannel environments where content must be delivered flexibly and efficiently across a variety of endpoints.

The right choice ultimately depends on your project’s complexity, your team’s technical strengths, and how you envision your digital ecosystem evolving. If you need centralised control and integrated content editing, Umbraco is the better option, however if you need scalable, structured content delivery across multiple channels, Contentful is likely the better fit.

Interested in hearing more?

Need help deciding between Umbraco and Contentful for your business? Get in touch with the 16i team.