Umbraco

Umbraco is the free option for a team already committed to .NET: the core CMS is MIT-licensed and self-hostable at no cost, with a mature backoffice, a large package ecosystem and two decades of production use behind it.

Content, media and document types are modelled through the interface rather than code-first schemas, which keeps editors independent once a site is built. For a European buyer wary of licence fees creeping in later, Umbraco settles that question up front: the software itself never carries a price tag, whatever hosting decision follows.

Umbraco A/S was founded in Odense, Denmark in 2003 and also sells Umbraco Cloud, a managed hosting product on Microsoft Azure with an ISO 27001-certified platform, running from about €45 a month for a single small site up to about €730 for a Professional tier, with Enterprise quoted separately.

Both routes share the open-source core, so a project can start self-hosted and move to Cloud later without a rewrite. The trade-offs are real: .NET hosting is a smaller market than PHP, the admin interface feels less modern than newer headless tools, and Umbraco Cloud names Azure but not a specific region.

What Umbraco does well

• Free, open-source .NET/C# CMS with two decades of maturity
• Umbraco Cloud offers managed hosting on Microsoft Azure
• ISO 27001-certified cloud platform
• Large package ecosystem and active community
• No licence fee, whichever hosting route you choose

Where Umbraco falls short

• .NET hosting is a smaller, pricier market than PHP
• Interface is dated next to newer headless tools
• Umbraco Cloud names Azure but not a specific EU region
• Package quality varies across the community ecosystem

Standout feature. Two decades of a genuinely free core: Umbraco is the only CMS added here where the open-source software itself never carries a price tag.