Umbraco Heartcore is Umbraco’s managed headless product: the familiar backoffice, hosted by Umbraco, with content delivered over an API. As of October 2026 it is still on sale and documented on umbraco.com, and we saw no end-of-life notice. It is also a narrower product than Umbraco CMS, so part of our job is telling you which one you actually need.
Heartcore or Umbraco CMS with the Delivery API?
| Heartcore | Umbraco CMS with Delivery API | |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | Run by Umbraco | You or Umbraco Cloud |
| Custom .NET in the backoffice | No | Yes |
| Frontend | Separate app | Separate app, or Razor in the same project |
| Best for | Marketing sites, apps, multichannel content | Custom workflows, integrations, intranets |
If your needs fit the left column, hire for Heartcore. If you need server-side logic, the right column is safer, and the Umbraco developer page is the better starting point.
What does a Heartcore developer do?
- Model document types and compositions so the API returns shallow, predictable JSON.
- Build a Next.js or Nuxt frontend against the REST or GraphQL endpoints.
- Set up preview so editors see drafts before publishing.
- Wire webhooks to rebuild or revalidate pages when content changes.
- Move content in from an older Umbraco site or another CMS.
What we vet for
Candidates must know how Umbraco content modelling behaves when consumed by an API: nesting depth, block lists and how references resolve. We also look at how they handle environments, because schema must be moved between environments deliberately. Candidates with only Razor experience do not pass.
Where does Heartcore go wrong?
Teams expect headless to be simpler than traditional Umbraco. The complexity moves instead. Document types designed for page templates produce nested JSON that a frontend struggles with, and queries that fetch the whole tree get slow as content grows. We fix this at the modelling stage by keeping page types shallow and putting reusable fields in compositions. Preview is the other common gap: editors want to see a draft on the real frontend, and that has to be built, not assumed.
If a project outgrows Heartcore, content can move into self-hosted Umbraco CMS, since both share the same document type concepts. We plan for that exit up front, so a later change is a migration and not a rewrite.
First weeks
We start with access to the project and an audit of document types, then render one working page from the API with preview enabled. That proves the path before the full frontend starts.
Engagement
Dedicated developer or short project; see dedicated team hiring and IT staff augmentation. Rates sit within $50 to $150 per hour. For the whole build, see Umbraco Heartcore development services, and for other platforms, the headless CMS developer hub.
