What is Umbraco Heartcore, and is it still current?
Umbraco Heartcore is the managed headless edition of Umbraco. It runs on Umbraco Cloud, exposes content through REST and GraphQL APIs, and gives editors the familiar Umbraco backoffice. Unlike self-hosted Umbraco CMS, it is a single type of project that Umbraco hosts and upgrades for you.
As of October 2026 Umbraco still lists Heartcore on its product pages and sells it, and we found no official end-of-life or sunset notice. Umbraco’s support policy says Heartcore projects are upgraded automatically, so it has no LTS cycle like the CMS versions do. There are signs of low momentum, though. A July 2026 thread on the Umbraco community forum notes that the last Heartcore entry in the release notes dates from April 2025 and that Heartcore does not appear on the public roadmap. That is a community observation, not an announcement. If you are starting a new build, ask Umbraco directly about its plans before you commit.
When do we recommend Umbraco CMS with the Delivery API instead?
For most new projects we would use Umbraco CMS itself. Recent versions ship a Content Delivery API and a Management API, so a self-hosted or Umbraco Cloud site can serve a headless frontend while keeping the same backoffice. You get control over hosting, custom code in .NET, and a long-term support path. The trade-off is that you or your partner run the infrastructure and apply security updates. Our Umbraco CMS page covers how we build and upgrade those projects.
Heartcore still makes sense for a team that wants someone else to host and patch the CMS, has no .NET developers, and is happy with a vendor-managed setup. It makes less sense if you need deep backoffice customisation, which is the strength of the full CMS.
| Need | Better fit |
|---|---|
| Managed hosting, small team, API only | Heartcore, with the status caveat above |
| .NET extensions, custom workflows | Umbraco CMS with the Delivery API |
| Structured content, no .NET | Contentful or Sanity |
| Open source, Node.js stack | Strapi |
What we build with Umbraco in headless mode
We design document types and compositions, set up multi-language trees, and build a Next.js or Astro frontend that reads from the API. Preview is wired through tokens so editors see drafts on the real site. Webhooks trigger rebuilds, and we handle media through the backoffice or an external store. For existing Umbraco sites, we run migrations that keep content and URLs intact.
Questions before you start
Ask which hosting model the contract covers, who handles upgrades, what happens to content if you leave, and how the API limits apply to your traffic. Exporting content to your own storage should be part of the plan from the start.
If you already run Heartcore, we can audit the project and either keep it healthy or plan a move. Our team of Umbraco Heartcore developers covers both paths. For platform options at large, start at the headless CMS hub, or see our free headless CMS list.
