Umbraco Compose FAQ

Compose is the platform that makes your Composable Experience setup possible - and delightful.

Compose eases the management of data flows in your headless tech stack, ensuring you get full flexibility and adaptability without getting tangled up in a bunch of custom code.

With Compose, you get clean, reliable, and streamlined data handling from your tech stack to your frontend(s), freeing your developers from repetitive, boilerplate integration so they can focus on delivering real value for your business.

Some call it data orchestration. Others, a fully managed backend-for-frontend. We call it Umbraco Compose.

Umbraco Compose is fit for any industry and any size project.

It’s especially built for enterprise projects with complex setups that are in need of reliability, predictability, and fast adaptability.

Umbraco Compose is a cloud-native SaaS offering built around modern integration and API design principles. At its core, Umbraco Compose uses GraphQL to expose structured data through a single endpoint, and it uses JavaScript for the Ingestion Function.

Under the hood, Umbraco Compose is designed as a managed service operated by Umbraco. It uses a secure, scalable cloud infrastructure so teams do not have to build or maintain their own orchestration layers. The focus is on standard, well-understood technologies rather than proprietary formats, which helps ensure long-term flexibility and trust.

No, you do not need to know .NET to use Umbraco Compose. Compose is not something you install, extend, or customize through .NET code. Instead, it is a fully managed cloud service that you configure and consume, primarily through the APIs and tooling provided by Umbraco.

The main query language of Compose is GraphQL, so knowledge about this is needed.

The good news is that GraphQL doesn’t have a steep learning curve and is a versatile and highly useful skill for your developers to have. If GraphQL is new to you, tools like Altair, Nitro, Postman, and a future MCP server will help you get started writing GraphQL queries.

In the long run, this will save you a ton of development hours as there are fewer custom endpoints to maintain. A bonus is that this unified way of serving and connecting data makes it a lot easier to introduce new developers to your project.

Umbraco Cloud and Umbraco Compose solve different problems and are designed to work alongside each other.

Umbraco Cloud focuses on hosting, deploying, and operating Umbraco CMS projects. It provides managed infrastructure, CI/CD, and tooling to run websites and content applications reliably.

Umbraco Compose, on the other hand, is an orchestration layer that connects multiple systems and exposes their combined data through a unified API. It does not host websites or manage deployments. Instead, it sits between your data sources and your digital experiences, making it easier to build composable, multi-channel solutions.

Yes, Compose is specifically designed to integrate with a wide range of third-party tools and services. It supports a composable approach where systems like PIMs, DAMs, CRMs, ERPs, and custom APIs can all contribute data to a shared model. This allows organizations to use best-of-breed solutions rather than relying on a single monolithic platform.

Compose does not assume that Umbraco CMS is the only source of content or data, even though it integrates naturally with it. By acting as a neutral orchestration layer, Compose helps teams connect existing systems without forcing major architectural changes or technology lock-in.

Yes, one of the key benefits of Compose is that it makes switching tools and services easier over time. Because you have a data model in Umbraco Compose that sits between data sources and consumers, frontends are decoupled from individual backend systems. This means a system can be replaced without requiring changes everywhere else.

In practice, this allows organizations to evolve their technology stack gradually. A PIM, DAM, or other service can be swapped out while keeping the same APIs and data contracts in place. This reduces migration risk and supports long-term flexibility as business needs change.

Yes, Compose is well-suited for incremental migration rather than all-or-nothing transitions. Existing systems can continue to run while their data is gradually ingested into Compose. Frontends can then be updated to consume data from Compose at their own pace.

This approach is especially valuable for organizations with legacy platforms or complex ecosystems. Compose can act as a unifying layer that simplifies modernization, allowing teams to reduce technical debt over time without disrupting existing users or workflows.

The short, and perhaps surprising, answer: no.

However, Umbraco CMS is the perfect companion with Umbraco Compose - but it’s not limited to it.

We’ve built an out-of-the-box integration that makes it easy to connect the two. With this, you get your domain model and content automatically sent to Compose, as well as a content picker feature that seamlessly links your CMS content with any data from other sources that you have connected to Compose. Easy setup for developers - and a great user experience for your content editors.

Plan your integration and architecture.

All projects start with an architectural review session, where your questions will be answered, and an Umbraco Compose expert will help you identify potential bottlenecks.
​Visit Umbraco Compose webpage

You can think of Umbraco Compose as the perfect companion to Umbraco CMS - but it’s not limited to it. We’ve built a great integration that makes it easy to connect the two. Out of the box, you’ll get your domain model and content automatically sent to Compose, plus a content picker that seamlessly links your CMS content with data in Compose.

All integrations are open source, and we hope to see even more connections to other CMSs in the future. And even without a built-in integration, you can easily connect through webhooks and the Ingestion Function in Umbraco Compose.

Umbraco Compose makes it easy to bring your legacy data into a modern setup. Using the flexible ingestion API, you can pull in data from older systems, unify it, and deliver it in a clean, consistent way. While it’s more than just a migration tool, Umbraco Compose is a great companion during any migration - helping you connect the old with the new and move forward with a modern, streamlined architecture.

We’re working on it! In the meantime, we offer a detailed online onboarding program with tutorials and guides covering everything from the Management and Ingestion APIs to simple and advanced GraphQL use cases. It’s a great way to get up to speed and start getting value from Umbraco Compose right away.

Umbraco Compose brings all your digital systems together, becoming the heart of your technical architecture. It connects your Digital Experience Stack in a faster, more cost-efficient way than traditional custom code. Built for scale and flexibility, it makes it easier - and safer - to connect or replace tools like PIMs, DAMs, ERPs, and CRMs. In short, it’s your insurance for staying agile as your business evolves.

Umbraco Compose saves developers countless hours by simplifying integrations and API work while ensuring future scalability. Instead of building and maintaining complex custom connectors, developers can focus on what really matters - crafting great digital experiences.

Compose acts as a “Backend for Frontend,” providing a unified data layer across your content and systems, making projects faster, cleaner, and more enjoyable to build.

Support for Umbraco Engage is on our roadmap. We’re excited to make these two products work seamlessly together.

From an editor’s perspective, everything in Umbraco Commerce stays the same.

For developers, Umbraco Compose offers a storefront API to manage orders, products, and carts in a headless, high-performance way. This approach also works with external commerce platforms, giving you full flexibility without locking you into one setup.

Everything works just as you’re used to. Since Workflow and Deploy manage your Umbraco content, they’ll continue to do so seamlessly. Once CMS forwarding is set up, your document types and content automatically stay in sync with Compose whenever updates happen — no extra work required.

You can easily ingest your forms into Compose, just like any other content. To make it work headlessly, you’ll render the forms in your custom frontend and handle elements like reCAPTCHA yourself, and you’ll post the forms directly to the Umbraco instance, like in any other headless Forms setup. This gives you full control over design and user experience.

Probably. Umbraco Compose uses the same content format as the CMS Content Delivery API, so most editor-enhancing packages will likely work, while packages altering the output/rendering of the content probably won’t.

Yes! Umbraco Compose is available exclusively as a fully managed SaaS product. That means you get new features and improvements automatically, built-in scalability, and all the benefits of a cloud-native platform - without the hassle of managing infrastructure yourself.

Umbraco Compose is a commercial product, but it’s built on the same open and transparent principles that define Umbraco and our other add-ons. Some key components - like CMS Forwarding, the picker property editor, and our example integrations - are open source and ready for the community to explore, extend, and contribute to.