Seven key takeaways and product updates from Umbraco Codegarden 2026

Umbraco’s annual Codegarden conference was held last week and this year we attended in person. It was great for Bryan, Andrew and I to be able to meet face to face with so many people from across the Umbraco professional community and attend many of the sessions. It was also a great excuse to take some early morning runs across Copenhagen, a beautiful city.

Codegarden 2026 had the usual recipe of keynotes sessions, product updates, technical deep dives, case studies and also some more business themed talks. Note that Bryan will be posting separately about Umbraco’s AI strategy and developments, while Andrew will be writing some more technical updates.

My overall impression from Codegarden is that Umbraco is in great shape at what is a time of significant change for the industry. And a key reason for that is the collective strength and drive of the professional Umbraco community – a theme continuously reiterated through the sessions.

Here’s my view of some of the key themes from the conference, as well as the main product updates.

1. It was the biggest Codegarden yet

This was the biggest Codegarden so far with 700 in-person attendees, mainly from Europe, but with a number travelling from further afield. The decision to move the conference to Copenhagen after many years in Odense may have attracted a greater number of people, with easier international travel.

One notable shift from previous years was more business-focused sessions, for example on how agencies need to change in the era of AI, and how to market Umbraco products. There was even a “business keynote” featuring Umbraco’s CEO. Previously Codegarden has been focused much more on the developer community.

The fact that this was the largest Codegarden certainly fits with the upbeat narrative around the progression of Umbraco and some of the recent achievements that were mentioned across the different keynote sessions, including achieving ISO 27001, the spread of the Umbraco community across the world, Umbraco’s effective AI strategy and the odd growth figure thrown in for good measure.

2. AI was everywhere

There was absolutely no surprise that AI was the dominant theme at this year’s Codegarden. Umbraco’s AI strategy, the way the platform is developing to support AI, some new product reveals, and the future role of digital agencies in the AI era, were all

touched upon. And while I’ll touch upon some of these points here, we’re going to fully cover everything AI in Bryan’s follow-up post.

3. Umbraco is enterprise-ready

Another key theme emphasised across keynote sessions and running through the conference was that Umbraco is now “enterprise-ready”, in that it can fully support the needs of large enterprise customers.

Recent moves by Umbraco are certainly supporting this – achieving ISO 27001, 100% uptime SLAs for Umbraco Cloud on professional and enterprise tiers, the move to global round-the-clock support, a more stable and predictable release schedule and the Umbraco for Enterprise package. Collectively, this will shift market perceptions that Umbraco as an open-source platform is a better fit for smaller and medium-sized businesses rather than the enterprise.

At 3chillies we already have enterprise-level clients on Umbraco, so we’ve welcomed everything that makes Umbraco more attractive for larger clients.

4. The big product ‘reveal’ was Umbraco Automate

You can expect there to be at least one major product reveal at Codegarden, and this year it was the turn of Umbraco Automate, an open-source product which Umbraco HQ is positioning as a “drag-and-drop automation engine native in the Umbraco backoffice.”

This basically provides a visual interface to set up automated processes to support digital marketing automation and content optimisation across the whole of the Umbraco suite of product as well as third-party solutions. There’s a set of triggers and actions available out of the box to help define custom automations, and its extension to products like Umbraco Commerce and Umbraco Forms has great potential.

This will include the ability to involve AI agents in the automation, which feels like a necessary step to keep pace with AI innovation across other platforms. The fact this is open source also feels like a robust decision. Umbraco Automate is in Beta now with the full release set for July.

5. Umbraco Cloud gets a lot of love

Umbraco HQ also explicitly signalled its strong commitment to Umbraco Cloud (and its commercial value), and this is backed by a number of announcements, some of which support more of a self-service approach:

• A new traffic and performance dashboard that brings a stack of performance and monitoring analytics and KPIs for admins, notably bringing Cloudflare edge analytics and Azure Monitor application metrics into one convenient view.
• The ability to deploy Umbraco Cloud to any environment using CI / CD
• A number of improvements to the sustainability dashboard which has been rebuilt using a more reliable methodology, and provides more versatile ways to compare, query and track the data.
• Scheduled upgrades are also on the roadmap, so that teams can control when they want the upgrade to happen and can arrange this through the portal.
• Hosting recommendations are also coming which compare hosting arrangements with Umbraco HQ’s recommended best practices.

However perhaps the most important change is bringing load balancing to Umbraco Cloud and the introduction of a dedicated Redis cache that supports multi-instance scaling, again more likely to support larger, more complex digital footprints. There’s also some additional useful changes including some security enhancements and the introduction of Hostname Monitoring, which will make it easier for agencies to monitor a portfolio of sites.

6. Umbraco 18 is imminent with Umbraco 19 also on the way

The imminent release of the Umbraco 18 release candidate featured in Filip Bech-Larsen’s product keynote session. One major new feature in 18 is the introduction of “Elements” which are basically pieces of reusable content that live outside the content tree and aren’t pages. Think of promotional blocks, footers, legal disclaimers, site settings or even taxonomy data – all examples of elements that can be reused more easily across sites and pages, and now with advanced content management features applied.

Digital marketers will welcome the introduction of this new content type, but the full value will be realised with the introduction of Umbraco 19 that will see Elements Integrated with the Block Editor.

Other aspects of Umbraco 18 are more backend updates for developers:

• The ability to generate typed OpenAPI schemas for each Document Type, Element Type and Media Type for Umbraco’s Delivery API
• The replacement of Swashbuckle with Microsoft.AspNetCore.OpenApi. which helps with a more sustainable approach for extensions, and a smoother path for extensions when upgrading to Umbraco 18, though it does mean some extensions will still need updating.
• Although targeted for Umbraco 19, Umbraco will be migrating from NPoco to Entity Framework Core, a change which impacts how Umbraco talks to the database. This is designed to support .NET developers who already work with

Entity Framework Core, support easier and quicker tests for data access logic, and allows for a more flexible approach for where data actually lives.

7. Umbraco Compose and other add-ons get some attention too

Umbraco Compose, announced at the 2025 Codegarden, is designed to support orchestration and composable architecture, and has had some welcome improvements:

• a substantial increase ingestion limits (more than triple) for both the professional and enterprise tiers.
• a new interface to help manage API applications.
• some advanced controls to manage ingestions.
• support for Interfaces and Unions in the GraphQL API, enabling smarter and stronger API responses.

One interesting aside, which Byran will cover in his AI-round-up, is that because Umbraco Compose works through the GraphQL API, it works particularly well with AI and LLMs, so it can act as convenient middleware to run AI across multiple systems across your digital marketing stack.

Additionally, there are some additional improvements made to some of the other add-ons including a redesign for Umbraco Deploy, and several additions to Umbraco Commerce to support customer management.

Umbraco continues to mature

Codegarden was a great event. The platform continues to evolve to make it a viable alternative to larger and more commercial CMSs, while also getting into shape for the AI era. And that’s what Bryan will focus on in the next post.