I love using Umbraco CMS to build customer's and my personal websites. Umbraco is open-source, free and written in .NET. Now, with Umbraco 9, it also support ASP.NET Core, which is cross platform. Now I can deploy my Umbraco website on Linux as well. Which is pretty cool. Umbraco is mature and has wide community support.

Umbraco setup is very easy, all you need is SQL Server database. I also like Umbraco's media management. I can store my media either on Azure Storage or in AWS S3 bucket. This way I can scale my website horizontally. And the last thing which I like most is this is completely written in .NET, that's a blessing for .NET Developers.

Would love to see Umbraco supporting multiple database such as PostgreSQL and MySQL as they are open-source and free.

We have been using this CMS for many years and have used it for many of our clients' projects. There is also a two-week trial version that I think you should try and see how simple it is. It's Powerful .NET-based CMS with the possibility of using the cloud or installing on a local or custom web hosting server.

It is completely open-source, dot NET-based, and works very fast and smooth. I like the form builder section which is very simple and various forms can be easily created and used. The file and image management section is also very simple. Files and images can be easily categorized and named in custom folders. Also, it has a professional community and support team.

The online Photo editor is not professional enough and must upgrade. CMS has good facilities and performance on the windows servers and Microsoft Azure, but Umbraco developers must think about the Linux version because most projects are managed by Linux servers.

Overall, if you have in-house devs ready to roll up their sleeves and custom code stuff, Umbraco should work out just fine. But if you are looking for a CMS that 'just works' out of the box, you may want to keep looking. At least that has been my experience thus far.

When you find your way around things, it is fairly easy to use. The pages can be updated fairly quickly and the WYSIWYG page editor is straightforward. What I liked the most was how quickly a page can be saved and published. But my list of gripes is probably longer than the stuff that I like.

Basic stuff that should come out of the box like rel canonical tags etc. have to be custom coded - at least for the sites I have encountered. The search functionality within the CMS is horrible. While carrying out some image optimisation, it was impossible to find the images with their URLs. I had to put in the exact filename to find those images. Even then it was a hit or a miss which was not ideal. And even with a CDN in use, it was hard to get good PageSpeed scores with Umbraco.

Excellent!

For the purpose of what my position needed to accomplish in Umbraco, it was easy for me to enter event details which would then post onto companies website. It was useful being able to categorize by year, then save the industry events accordingly. Entering the event details was extremely easy and even allowed us to enter the events hosts URL, which was then viewable on the company website. Anytime I needed to delete or edit an event, it was easy to do so. Depending on your needs, Umbraco may be able to help you.

Unless I didn't figure this out, it would have been useful to be able to save the event allowing you to return to edit it (not post to website). More specifically, when I entered an event and needed to add a new event host name, I couldn't just save the entry, go to the tab to create a new host name and return to complete the entry. Instead, I had to reenter the event details after I created the new hosts name. Another suggestion would be to add the option of alphabetizing under the tabs or lists. Other than that, everything else was on point.

Umbraco can be built and extended with C# (using Visual Studio), utilizes MVC framework, and is simple to setup. The newest version of Umbraco is being built with .NET Core, so it will likely get faster and continue to stay relevant in today's Microsoft .NET tech stack.

Occasional hiccups when starting are not uncommon. The errors provide less than ideal guidance on how to address them. Building your own property editor is done with Angular JS (older and less used as time goes on).