Headless Umbraco
Umbraco's free, MIT-licensed CMS ships headless APIs and webhooks. For most bilingual marketing sites that is all the backend you need — so we build the front end, not a licence purchase.
We build on Umbraco and on headless platforms, and we publish the cost comparison with its sources — including where Umbraco wins.
The phrase covers four different products with wildly different price tags. Getting this wrong is the single most expensive mistake in an Umbraco headless project.
For a bilingual marketing site, options one and two are almost always the right answer. We will say so rather than route you to the expensive end — and if your situation genuinely calls for orchestration across multiple business systems, we will say that too.
Decoupling buys you a front end you fully control: performance, framework choice, and the ability to serve the same content to a site, an app or a partner feed. It costs you two specific things.
Neither is a reason to avoid headless. Both are reasons to model the content properly on day one. The full economics are in our three-year cost comparison.
Document types and blocks designed for API consumption rather than a single template — including how English and Arabic vary, which is decided here or regretted later.
Delivery API switched on and scoped, access control set, caching and webhooks configured so publishing propagates without overloading the backend.
A typed Next.js front end with locale-prefixed routing, logical-property RTL, image handling and the editor preview path.
URL inventory, redirect map, structured data and status-code verification before launch — then an upgrade calendar so you land on an LTS release rather than a twelve-month one.
The four things people mean by headless Umbraco, compared on what decides the choice.
| Criterion | CMS self-hosted | Umbraco Cloud | Heartcore | Compose |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Licence cost | Free, MIT | From €45/mo per project | Priced separately | From €12,000/yr |
| Headless API included | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| You run the infrastructure | Yes, you do | Managed | Managed | Managed |
| Editor seats | Unlimited | Unlimited | Tier-dependent | Unlimited users |
| Delivery-API availability target | Yours to run | Standard and above | Tier-dependent | Tier-dependent |
| Data residency / on-premises | Anywhere | 5 regions listed | No | No |
| Metered by usage | No | No | Tier quotas | Per ingestion |
| Sensible for a bilingual marketing site | Yes | Yes | Partial | Different problem |
Umbraco Cloud figures verified against umbraco.com/pricing on 27 September 2026. Compose figures from a capture of Umbraco's own product page dated 21 September 2026, since that page is not reachable to automated requests. Heartcore tiers are published but were not re-verified here, so they are shown qualitatively rather than priced. All prices exclude VAT.
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