Seven takeaways from the 2025 Umbraco Codegarden keynote

The annual Umbraco Codegarden conference remains the flagship event for the global Umbraco community, providing a mix of new product announcements, learning sessions, partner-led examples and case studies. The conference, always expertly organised by Umbraco HQ and held each June in Denmark, also has many sessions available to view online. It’s always an upbeat and celebratory event.
Most of the major announcements and product updates are referenced in the opening keynote session. This year’s keynote involved several different speakers including CEO Mats Persson and CTO Filip Bech-Larsen. As in previous years, in this post we explore seven of the key announcements and takeaways from the keynote.

1. Umbraco continues to grow

The Umbraco Codegarden conference is always a high energy, positive event that celebrates Umbraco’s achievements and the highlights the contribution of its community. This year is no exception; as expected, the keynote featured a lot of shout outs, high fives and upbeat announcements. 
One clear message was that Umbraco continues to grow. CEO Mats Persson said that the platform continues to grow by 25% and is profitable, albeit quite modestly. Meanwhile there is also growth in the global Umbraco community and partner network. Meet-ups are growing by 70%, there is a growing number of packages available which incorporate the new Umbraco backoffice and so on. 
The message was similar to previous years in emphasising that while Umbraco continues to positively expand and evolve, the platform’s core strengths – such as its vibrant developer community and exceptional editing experience – remain very much in place.

2. There were some major CMS improvements shipped in the last year

A typical Umbraco keynote will focus on the product features that have been introduced in the last year, as well as what we can expect to see in the upcoming roadmap. Filip Bech-Larsen, Umbraco’s CTO, reminded the audience of some of the improvements that have been shipped over the past year, including:

• Block Level Variation: Supporting the easy publishing of pages in a different language that might follow the same design and use the same assets but have different translated text.
• Lazy loaded content cache. Provides more choice for teams to control what is in their content cache, leading to load times which can be up to 70% times faster.
• New rich text editor: A new rich text editor uses Tiptap which is far more extendable and configurable, allowing teams to add their own integrations into the editing experience, and to customise their toolbar.
• Launch of the new backoffice: A major milestone in implementing the new improved Umbraco admin experience that had been in the works for a long time.

3. A new long-term supported version of Umbraco is due in November

Umbraco 16 containing some of the major CMS improvements has recently been launched. However, arguably Umbraco 17 arriving in November 2025 will be a more significant release as it will be a long-term supported (LTS) release, with guaranteed support for three years. 
Bech-Larsen mentioned in his speech that more Umbraco customers are adhering to the LTS releases, with at last two thirds sticking with the LTS version. He also reminded us that the current LTS (13.9) has also been updated with lots of improvements and bug fixes.
As an aside, Bech-Larsen also said that they had had feedback that there were some limitations around the current backoffice documentation. He confirmed that Umbraco HQ is committing to updating all the pages and documentation before Umbraco 17 is launched.

4. There are a range of improvements to please developers and digital marketers

Bech-Larsen then went on to explore some of the specific items we can expect to be on the upcoming roadmap. Here there are items that will appeal to both coders and content marketing teams. Some of these have been mentioned before:

Official Docker support: Umbraco HQ will at last support the use of Docker for development and deployment.

• Accessibility improvements: The team are working on some improvements to accessibility, in particular carrying out a full audit of the backoffice, with a view to getting some fixes in to ensure accessibility-related compliance.
• Full load balancing: Load balancing for Umbraco has been available for a while, but only for websites. This will be now expanded to the backoffice too, expected around the time of the Umbraco 17 release.
• Reusable content: This is one of the most significant roadmap items for marketing teams. The ability to reference some content from any page and then make changes which are then reflected everywhere will be a significant improvement.
• Collaboration in the backoffice: There will be better support for teams to coordinate their activities and collaborate through the backoffice; Umbraco HQ is currently investigating how they want to improve this area.
• Default search provider: The team want to bring in a default search provider to enable a more sophisticated search within Umbraco, and they are currently trying out different providers. They also aim to make search more extendable with the ability to plug in other providers and add features such as semantic search. Initially this is likely to be a package which will then be merged into the core CMS. 

5. AI is being supported through the Umbraco MCP Server

To date Umbraco has perhaps been slower to integrate AI into the platform compared to a DXP like Sitecore which has put AI at the heart of its strategy and roadmap. Umbraco’s approach appears to support integration with AI and then drive and enable innovation across the partner and community ecosystem. Bech-Larsen explained this concept and pointed out moves such as adding an AI category in the marketplace.
However Umbraco support for AI is now ramping up with the announcement of the new Umbraco Model Content Protocol (MCP) Server which will allow AI tools like Claude and GitHub Copilot “to read, understand and perform actions on your Umbraco project.”   This is based on the new MCP standard which “standardises how applications provide context to LLMs” and is helping enable the era of agentic AI. Over time the Umbraco MCP Server will support other LLMs such as OpenAI.  
The new Umbraco MCP Server enables team to effectively plug a growing number of AI platforms or an LLM of choice into their Umbraco CMS and do things such as use prompts to create content, use AI to support dynamic pricing in Umbraco Commerce, drive insights and optimisation for marketers, and even support debugging for developers. In this way, the AI works as an extension of the Umbraco platform, continuing to use Umbraco’s management API and preserving important elements such as permissions.

6. Umbraco Cloud continues to get some love

The 2025 keynote also spent some time covering recent and future developments with Umbraco Cloud, which is “thriving” with “real momentum”, reflected in an increasing number of new projects starting in the cloud, as well as migrations to the cloud. Recent or upcoming updates mentioned include:

• A new data region for Canada to support compliance, with five data regions now available.
• Support for “Flexible Environments” which enables more flexible workflows within a cloud environment beyond normal linear workflows, supporting more complex projects and allowing teams to execute deployments more on their own terms.
• More generosity around bandwidth which means customers don’t have to support so much bandwidth themselves, with some experiencing reductions as much as 50%.
• Enhanced cloud security with the Cloudflare-powered Web Application Firewall (WAF) which is now enabled for all new projects.
• A new built-in hostname monitoring dashboard that helps teams to spot issues such as DNS certificates that have expired and prevent availability issues; the team are also looking at sending notifications if there appears to be an issue.
• Integrating Microsoft Entra ID into the cloud server, helping to meet enterprise security commitments; later in the year Entra ID will be integrated into the cloud portal itself.
• A new dedicated database server that will help provide more control over performance and capacity.
• Load balancing will be integrated into Umbraco Cloud, including for the backoffice. 

7. Umbraco Compose is on its way

Umbraco has continued to expand its capabilities through a growing number of “add-ons” which usually provide additional digital marketing capabilities. The speech dwelled on some of these – including the acquisition of UMarketingSuite which has now been rebranded as Umbraco Engage – and some improvements to Umbraco Commerce. However, the speech also mentioned a new add-on which is in the pipeline and was probably the biggest “reveal” of the speech.
Umbraco Compose will be a new add on which supports orchestration – the ability to coordinate content and experiences across composable architecture involving Umbraco. Bech-Larsen reflected on some of the challenges of the composable (best-of-breed) DXP which to date has often not delivered the value it promises.  The new add-on will be designed to:

• Ingest anything from any source
• Relate all data with schema
• Support webhooks for third-party systems
• Support flexible delivery through a GraphQL API
• Enable marketers to view all the data from multiple sources within the CMS, preserving a great experience for digital marketers.
• Be fully flexible and scalable.

The team are aiming to move Umbraco Compose into private beta over the summer.  

And that’s a wrap!

We have often said that there is always something going on at Umbraco. The 2025 keynote speech makes it clear that the Umbraco roadmap will continue to be highly active, with new products, approaches and enhancements

 If you’d like to discuss the contents of the keynote, then get in touch!