Umbraco Update: Product and strategy highlights from the Winter Keynote

At the start of the year Umbraco HQ tends to hold an online event to showcase product updates and make strategic announcements. This year’s Winter Keynote has just dropped and comes off the back of a busy Q4 2025 for Umbraco HQ. The session, presented by CEO Matt Persson, Director of Developer Relations Emma Burstow and CTO Filip Bech-Larsen, featured new announcements, more details on items previously announced, product demos and more. A full recording of the 55-minute webinar can be viewed in full on YouTube but if you haven’t got time to watch it, in this post we summarise the main points of interest. 
2025 was a year of growth

The session started with a 2025 “highlights reel” showcasing a busy year for Umbraco. Matt Persson then added his reflections on the platform’s achievements, mentioning:

• 22% topline growth
• some KPIs improving about 30%
• new offices opening around the world
• the number of Umbraco partners growing to nearly 500
• and a 50% growth in the use of Umbraco Cloud.

Persson also emphasised the power of the Umbraco community – a theme revisited several times during the keynote – describing it as the platform’s “superpower” and the “backbone of our world of Umbraco.”

Improved support from Umbraco HQ

Persson also announced a number of improvements to Umbraco HQ support:  

• With the opening of a number of offices around the world, Umbraco HQ is now able to offer 24/7 support around the world, a “milestone” which ensures they can serve the needs of global companies.
• A new “Partner Portal” has launched allowing Umbraco Partners to better track transactions, forecasts, credits and other aspects of their relationship with Umbraco HQ. It is designed to be a “new foundation” for partner engagement.
• There is a new 100% target in Umbraco’s SLA for website and delivery APIs, which reflects Umbraco’s growing confidence.

ISO 27001 certification now achieved

Umbraco’s ISO 27001 certification had previously been revealed, but it has now been achieved, with Matt Persson remarking that it proves Umbraco really is ready for enterprise customers. We are not surprised by Persson’s observation that gaining ISO 27001 certification has been very well received. We think it is a significant step that will tick a box for many IT buyers and help Umbraco win larger and more complex organisations where ISO 27001 is a must-have.

Umbraco's AI Strategy

Of course, AI is everywhere, and a significant proportion of the session focused on Umbraco’s AI strategy, and a current and upcoming set of capabilities that support AI both inside and beyond Umbraco. This is also reflected in a useful follow-up blog post from Umbraco HQ.

As we have previously noted, Umbraco take a different approach to AI compared to some other platforms, but in this session there was a message that while the approach is different, Umbraco is very much AI-ready. CTO Filip Bech-Larsen outlined how the platform is “built for choice, longevity and real-world use” when it comes to AI, with a three-pillar strategy that still keeps the Umbraco CMS as the base of everything:

• AI is always on your terms, providing a safe launching pad, enabling compliance conversations, and keeping you in control.
• Everything is modular, so the platform doesn’t need to change as AI continues to evolve; everything will continue to work and features you do not want are not forced upon you.  
• AI is “everywhere” that Umbraco is – both inside and outside Umbraco – but always connected.

Umbraco in AI and AI in Umbraco

Bech-Larsen made a clear distinction between “Umbraco in AI” which connects Umbraco to external AI and “AI in Umbraco” – the appearance of AI within the Umbraco backoffice and environment – outlining the plans for both.

Umbraco has already released the Umbraco Developer MCP, and is now adding the following agent resources, although none are yet available in beta at the time of writing:

• A base implementation for MCP which consists of a set of tools and a template to enable MCP implementations based on Umbraco.
• Agent Skills, which will ensure LLMs use the information that you want to them to use, enabling AI responses to be appropriate and correct.
• A new Editor MCP to bring AI capabilities to support content and editorial teams without IT involvement, although this is still in the earlier stages of development.

For AI within the backoffice, Bech-Larsen announced the launch of Umbraco.AI, a foundation for AI in Umbraco. This is an open-source package released and managed by Umbraco HQ which includes several elements that were also shown in the accompanying product demo, including:

• Connections: the ability to link different multiple AI providers and models (more than one can be used) with initial support for OpenAI, Gemini, Amazon Bedrock, Azure and Anthropic models.
• Profiles: a place you can set up different use case profiles, for example for image creation, and then define the preferred LLM to use.
• Prompts: the ability to set up standard prompts such as “Generate Alt Text” and then associate it with a particular field in the CMS.
• Contexts: The ability to set up rules and references that guide how the AI acts such as Tone Of Voice, or how the AI acts for a particular persona. This helps provide essential governance for the AI.

Also planned are a series of additional AI modules (feature packages) that add specific capabilities that could be built by Umbraco HQ, partners or the community.  These include an Umbraco Copilot experience which will bring a ChatGPT-style interface into Umbraco.

Some of these capabilities are already available while others like Umbraco Copilot are still in the pipeline.  
Overall, we think the collection of announcements is a significant and positive step that brings AI directly into the Umbraco environment and is backed by a well-thought-through strategy that adheres to the existing Umbraco strategy and ethos.  

Active product roadmap

There’s also an active product roadmap planned for 2026, with upcoming highlights including:

• Global Elements, meaning that editors can reuse and manage content much more easily, such as footers, particular banners, calls-to-action and so on. With Global Elements these can be reused across different pages, and any changes made will also update across wherever a particular global element appears. This is an obvious long-awaited step that will be welcomed by digital marketers and business users.
• A new Umbraco search abstraction layer, making it easier to integrate different search engines into an Umbraco project.
• And many more developments, many focusing on AI, such as the development of the new Editor MCP.

Umbraco Compose

Umbraco Compose was originally announced at Codegarden and is positioned as a “data orchestration platform” that makes composability “scalable and maintainable”.  The session provided more detail and a product demo of what it can do. Essentially Compose acts as a data layer between an organisation that might have multiple data sources such as a CRM, a Digital Asset Management (DAM) platform, or a Product Information Management (PIM) system, and then multiple data digital channels such as a website, mobile app, shop and so on.  Umbraco Compose also comes with an integration with the search tool Algolia and importantly relays all the data back in the Umbraco CMS, so editors can view what the integrated experience will look like.

The launch of this add-on is welcome for anyone wanting a more stable, resilient and ready-to-go platform to support composable architecture with the Umbraco CMS at the base.

The product demo of a tools supplier’s website and shop showed how it was much easier to integrate data and make changes to data sources, configure the search and make design tweaks, all using Umbraco Compose as the data orchestration point and the GraphQL API for delivery.

Umbraco for Enterprise

We covered the new Umbraco for Enterprise offering in our last Umbraco update, but it was covered in a little more detail in the keynote. It’s essentially a single package covering the entire platform with all the add-ons and support, all wrapped into one agreement. Persson stressed that the new package did not indicate any change in what Umbraco was offering or a shift in focus but was more to change the perceptions of enterprise customers and show them that the platform is “enterprise-ready”.

Umbraco’s growing confidence and capability

We think this year’s Winter Keynote is a reflection of Umbraco HQ’s growing confidence and ability to compete with other large CMS and DXP providers in the market, particularly in attracting enterprise customers. Gaining ISO 27001 certification and being able to offer around-the-sun support are significant. The support for AI is also now ramping up with Umbraco.AI and a busy product roadmap, so the platform will be genuinely AI-ready.

In developing offerings Umbraco HQ is careful to remain true to its open source and community-driven culture, and they continue to achieve this. We look forward to working with Umbraco through 2026.

If you’d like to discuss any of these new announcements or a potential Umbraco project then get in touch!