Kentico cost vs self-hosted Umbraco

Where Kentico cost vs self-hosted Umbraco really differs

If you are planning around a Kentico renewal or the Xperience 13 deadline, start by separating the platform fee from everything else. Umbraco CMS has no license fee because the Umbraco-CMS repository is published under the MIT license, so the comparison turns on add-on licenses, hosting, migration and developer time. Kentico's prices are not published here, so the Kentico side of the comparison must come from a written vendor quote that states the edition, tier, environments and what is included in the subscription or private cloud service. Self-hosting tends to cost less where you would otherwise pay a recurring platform subscription and the hosting that comes with it. Your recurring costs then shift to infrastructure you control, the Umbraco features you choose to license, and the people who run the site. Where you need Umbraco Forms or Umbraco Engage on a public domain, check the license terms: Forms is sold per domain and covers subdomains with two development or testing domains, and Engage requires a valid license for one production domain plus up to two development or testing domains. Confirm with Umbraco how those licenses renew and whether your domain count changes the price.

Self-hosting costs more in the places a subscription normally absorbs. The first is a one-time rebuild: page types become document types, widgets and forms are rebuilt, and marketing features that Kentico provides in its own product must be replaced, as covered in the migration section. The second is staffing. Someone must own hosting, backups, security patching, monitoring and releases, and that work is paid for in salaries, contractors or an implementation partner's retainer. The third is upgrade work. Umbraco 17 is an LTS release with end of life on November 27, 2028, and Umbraco 13 reaches end of life on December 14, 2026, so plan a upgrade path on a fixed calendar rather than as an occasional project. If you choose Umbraco Cloud instead of self-hosting, ask how its hosting and Umbraco Deploy environments are priced against your current Kentico tier, because that choice changes which costs recur.

Cost components on each side of the comparison

This table lists each cost component of running Kentico against running self-hosted Umbraco, who receives payment on each side, and whether the cost is one-time or recurring. Read it as a checklist for building a like-for-like quote, because the largest differences sit in add-on licensing, hosting scope and upgrade labor rather than in the base software.

Cost component	Kentico side (who is paid, one-time or recurring)	Self-hosted Umbraco side (who is paid, one-time or recurring)
Platform license	Kentico, recurring subscription or tiered license for Xperience by Kentico, or a SaaS service plan. Confirm tier terms and renewal basis in writing.	No license fee for Umbraco CMS, which is MIT licensed. Recurring cost is limited to hosting and the people who maintain the code.
Add-on marketing and forms licenses	Kentico, recurring, for marketing and forms features included in the chosen tier. Confirm which features sit in which tier.	Umbraco Forms and Umbraco Engage are paid add-ons, sold per domain, with one license per installation and a production domain plus development or testing domains. Check whether your public domains and subdomains are covered before you budget.
Hosting or Umbraco Cloud	Kentico, recurring for SaaS or private cloud. Confirm what the plan covers for backups, environments and support.	Your cloud provider or data center, recurring, if you self-host, or Umbraco, recurring, for Umbraco Cloud, a managed service on Microsoft Azure with backups, CDN, HTTPS and Development, Staging and Live environments. Ask Umbraco what its managed scope excludes.
Migration project	Implementation partner or Kentico, one-time, for scoping, rebuilding page types and integrations. Ask for a fixed-scope written plan.	Implementation partner or in-house team, one-time, for mapping document types, content, media and forms. Effort depends on site size and the number of custom integrations.
Upgrades between LTS releases	Kentico, recurring through version upgrades and any migration work each major release requires. Confirm support end dates for your version.	In-house team or implementation partner, recurring, to move between Umbraco LTS releases. Umbraco Cloud hosting runs through its published end-of-service dates, so plan each move against those dates.
Support and internal skills	Kentico, recurring support contract, plus internal .NET staff time for administration and content modeling.	Internal .NET developers, recurring salaries or contractor fees, plus optional retainer support from a partner or Umbraco's support options. Ask who covers security patching and on-call response.
Testing, backup and compliance evidence	Mostly included in the vendor's platform terms. Confirm backup scope, restore testing and audit evidence in writing.	Your team or a partner, recurring, for backup verification, security testing and change records that an auditor will ask for. These costs stay with you even when hosting is managed.

How Kentico and Umbraco licensing differs by option

Kentico's SaaS offering is a subscription in which Kentico operates the Xperience by Kentico platform and its hosting, so the license and the service plan are sold together. The contract sets what you receive, not the product name, so compare each tier against the features your team uses before you sign.

Subscription scope: Confirm whether the fee covers the platform license, hosting, backups, patching and managed environments, or only some of them.
Tier limits: Ask which limits apply to each plan, such as sites, environments, contacts, users or traffic, and what happens when you exceed them.
Marketing and personalization: Confirm which marketing, personalization and analytics modules are included in your tier and which are sold as separate add-ons.
Domains and environments: Ask how many production, staging and development environments are included and whether extra domains or subdomains are billed.
Renewal and exit: Ask for the price-change terms at renewal, the export format for your content and the period Kentico keeps data after termination.

Get the tier, the add-on list and the renewal terms in writing before you compare multi-year totals, because these three items usually drive most of the difference.

What moves the cost comparison most

The total cost of moving from Kentico to Umbraco depends less on the list price of any single component than on a handful of drivers that multiply each other. Measure these in your own environment before comparing a Kentico renewal or SaaS plan against a self-hosted Umbraco estate.

Public domains needing paid add-ons

Umbraco Forms and Umbraco Engage run unrestricted locally but need a valid license on a public domain. Licenses are sold per domain, cover subdomains, and include two development or testing domains, with one license per installation. Count every public production domain and subdomain that will collect form submissions or run personalization, then price each one against the license terms. Ask whether a multi-brand estate on one installation changes the count.

Traffic and hosting tier

Hosting cost rises with traffic, storage, and the number of sites served, and it recurs every year. Self-hosting shifts that cost to your cloud accounts or data center, where you pay for compute, database, CDN and backups directly. Umbraco Cloud bundles hosting, backups and a global CDN into a managed service on Microsoft Azure. Measure peak traffic, media volume and cache hit rates, and ask your Kentico account team which SaaS tier those numbers map to.

Environments per site

Each environment you keep running adds recurring compute, database and storage cost. Umbraco Cloud provides Development, Staging and Live environments with Umbraco Deploy to synchronize content and structure between them. A self-hosted setup needs the same separation, so count the environments your release process requires, plus any preview or testing instances your editors depend on, and decide which of them can be shared or scaled down.

In-house .NET skills

Labor is usually the largest recurring cost in a self-hosted Umbraco estate. Someone must patch the .NET runtime, apply Umbraco upgrades, manage the database and maintain custom code, and current Umbraco documentation requires .NET 10.0 or higher. If your Kentico team already writes C# and knows the platform, the internal share of that work may be small. If not, ask partners for a quote that separates one-time build work from the ongoing retainer for upgrades and support.

Kentico version being left

The version you start from sets the size of the migration and how much work you must pay for once. Moving from Xperience 13 means rebuilding against a different platform, while a later starting point may reuse more structure. The Kentico support timeline also affects when the spend has to happen. Confirm your current version, its support end date in your contract, and how many page types, widgets and integrations need mapping.

Marketing features to rebuild

Personalization, campaigns, A/B tests, forms and analytics that run inside Kentico must be rebuilt or replaced, and each one is a one-time cost plus a recurring license if it needs Umbraco Engage or Forms. Inventory every marketing feature your editors and marketers use today, note which depend on data stored in the current platform, and decide which need a paid add-on and which an open-source tool outside the CMS can cover. Ask partners to estimate each item separately.

Umbraco LTS timing and upgrade cost over the life of the site

The recurring cost of a self-hosted Umbraco site is planned upgrade work between LTS releases, and the supported windows set the schedule. Umbraco 17 is an LTS release published on November 27, 2025, with end of life on November 27, 2028, extended long-term support (XLTS) until November 27, 2030, and end of service on Umbraco Cloud on November 27, 2031. By contrast, Umbraco 13, the previous LTS release from December 14, 2023, reaches end of life on December 14, 2026, with XLTS ending December 14, 2028 and Umbraco Cloud service ending December 14, 2029. A site that is still on Umbraco 13 when it is built or migrated will need its upgrade planned within a short window, so check which version the project will land on before estimating anything.

Umbraco's end-of-service policy describes how hosting continues after standard support. Hosting on Umbraco Cloud continues for the duration of XLTS, a phase of up to 24 months, and projects can then run on dedicated resources for 12 months after XLTS ends. For a Umbraco 17 site on the dates above, that means Umbraco Cloud hosting runs to November 27, 2031, and dedicated resources can carry the site beyond that point for a further year if the organization chooses to self-host. Ask your team to map each date against the planned go-live, the next LTS release and the internal change freeze windows, because the moves between versions are where the work lands.

Budget upgrade hours in your own model rather than assuming a figure from this page. Upgrade effort depends on how many NuGet packages, custom Umbraco extensions, property editors, Forms or Engage configurations and Content Delivery API consumers the site carries. Ask your implementation partner or internal team to itemize those components, estimate the regression testing for each, and state which items are one-time (the first migration to Umbraco 17) and which recur at each LTS cycle. Confirm also who pays for the Umbraco Forms and Engage license renewals, because those are separate from upgrade labor. Build the model over the full life of the site, including the years after standard support ends, and reconcile it against your existing Kentico renewal schedule.

How to build the comparison with your own numbers

This sequence turns a Kentico renewal quote into a side-by-side model with Umbraco, so every line traces back to a contract term, a domain count or a staffing decision you can defend. The output is a three-year cost view that shows which inputs drive the difference.

Inventory current Kentico licenses and terms
Pull the signed Kentico agreement, the current quote, the invoice history and any SaaS or private cloud service plan terms. Your finance lead and the account owner for the Kentico contract do this, with the licensed editions, user or seat counts, add-on modules and renewal dates recorded line by line. You know the step is done when every recurring charge on the invoices maps to a clause or quote line, and anything unexplained is queried with Kentico in writing.
List every public domain and environment
Document each public domain, subdomain, staging host, development instance and test environment that the site or sites use, along with the language and market each one serves. The web lead and the platform team compile this list from DNS records, load balancer configuration and deployment pipelines. Domain count matters because Umbraco Forms and Umbraco Engage licensing is priced and described per domain, so the list should show which hostnames would run each add-on on a public domain. The step closes when the list is reconciled against DNS and nothing is left to memory.
Map marketing features to Umbraco add-ons
Go through each Kentico marketing and form capability in use, such as form builder, personalization, analytics, A/B testing, email campaigns and contact scoring, and mark whether it is needed on day one. The marketing operations lead and a solution architect make this map. Forms needs go to Umbraco Forms, personalization and testing needs go to Umbraco Engage, and any capability that neither covers goes to a separate tool with its own cost line. Confirm current licensing terms directly with Umbraco, since the license model may change. The output is a feature-to-license table that shows which add-ons are required and which can be dropped.
Choose the hosting model
Decide between Umbraco Cloud, a managed Azure service with Development, Staging and Live environments, and self-hosting on your own infrastructure. For self-hosting, the platform team confirms the .NET 10.0 or higher runtime, the database choice between SQLite and SQL Server, and the operations work for backups, patching, monitoring and TLS. Record the hosting option as a separate scenario so both paths can be costed against the same inventory. You know this step is done when the chosen scenarios each list their infrastructure, operations and vendor lines.
Estimate migration as one-time work
Break the move from Kentico into a fixed list of work items: content model mapping, content and media transfer, template and front-end rebuild, forms and widget rebuild, marketing feature replacement, URL and redirect planning, testing and cutover. Ask two or three implementation partners and your internal developers to estimate each item in their own units, and request the written scope and assumptions for each quote. Do not carry forward any external estimate you cannot trace to a specific work item. The step closes when each one-time line has a named owner, an assumption list and a quote reference.
Add recurring upgrade, support and staffing lines
Model the costs that repeat each year: Umbraco and add-on license renewals where they apply, hosting or Umbraco Cloud fees, infrastructure, security patching, support retainers, and the developer hours needed for upgrades between LTS releases. Check the Umbraco end-of-service dates for the version you plan to run, so upgrade windows fall inside your planning horizon. Staffing is the largest variable, so record the roles, the share of time for each and whether the work is in-house or contracted. The output is a recurring cost schedule with a named driver for every line.
Run the model over the planned horizon
Project the one-time and recurring lines across the period your board or finance team uses for renewal decisions, and show the Kentico scenario and each Umbraco scenario side by side. The finance lead and solution architect run the model, and sensitivity checks change the domain count, the staffing mix and the hosting choice one at a time. Share the model with the Kentico account owner and ask for a formal renewal quote that matches your inventory. The step is complete when the totals reconcile to the contract, the quotes and the assumptions, and any gap is explained in writing.

Questions buyers ask before comparing Kentico and Umbraco costs

Does Umbraco CMS itself cost anything to license?

No. Umbraco CMS is free and open source, and its GitHub repository is published under the MIT license, so the core CMS carries no license fee. The costs that remain are the ones around it: the infrastructure to run the site, the database, the developers who build and maintain it, and any add-on licenses you choose. Confirm the MIT terms against the repository for the exact version you plan to run, and have your legal team review them alongside any third-party packages your build uses. Kentico's license fees are the line item you would be comparing against, so ask Kentico for the full quote scope, including the tier, environments and support terms, before you put numbers side by side.

When do Umbraco Forms or Umbraco Engage licenses become necessary?

They become necessary when you run the add-on on a public domain. Umbraco Forms runs unrestricted locally but needs a valid license on a public domain. Licenses are sold per domain, cover subdomains, include two development or testing domains, and require one license per installation. Umbraco Engage, the marketing add-on for personalization, analytics, A/B testing and targeted campaigns, needs a valid license covering one production domain and up to two development or testing domains. If you only use the core CMS, or you use the add-ons only locally, you may not need these licenses at all. Confirm the current price list with Umbraco, and map which Kentico marketing features you actually use, because that determines whether Engage or Forms replaces them.

Is Umbraco Cloud or self-hosting cheaper to run?

It depends on your team's operating capacity, not on the license line. Umbraco Cloud is a managed service on Microsoft Azure that includes automatic backups, a global CDN, HTTPS, Development, Staging and Live environments, and Umbraco Deploy to synchronize content and structure. Self-hosting moves those responsibilities to you, and the platform bill is then your own cloud or data center cost. Ask Umbraco for Cloud pricing tied to your environments and traffic, and price a self-hosted build with your own cloud spend, backup tooling, monitoring and on-call time. Cloud is usually easier to budget; self-hosting gives you control over location and networks. Neither figure is supplied here, so model both from written quotes.

How much does migration effort depend on the site?

Most of the effort depends on the shape of the existing Kentico site, not on the CMS name. The main drivers are the number of page types, the amount of custom widgets and form logic, how much personalization and marketing automation is in use, the volume of content and media, the number of integrations, and the URL structure you must preserve. A brochure site with few custom components is a very different project from a multi-brand estate with personalization rules. Before you request a quote, inventory these areas, and ask for the migration scope to be agreed in writing with deliverables and timelines before work starts. DeployOpen plans and delivers this work as fixed-scope engagements, and does not publish prices.

What skills does the work need, and can an internal team do it alone?

An internal team can do it alone if it already has .NET engineering, Umbraco experience and someone who can run SQL Server or SQLite-backed deployments, but the gap is often in operations and content modeling rather than coding. Current Umbraco CMS documentation requires .NET 10.0 or higher, so you need developers comfortable with the current .NET toolchain and the Umbraco content model. Plan for front-end, back-end, DevOps and security roles, plus editors who must be trained on the new interface. Be honest with yourself about capacity during the cutover, because that is when a small team is most stretched. If you lack capacity, you can scope a partner for the parts you cannot cover and keep the rest in-house.

How long does the cutover take?

No duration is supplied here, so treat any single number with caution. The cutover length depends on content volume, the number of templates and integrations, how much URL redirection you must keep, and how much parallel running you want before switching DNS. Plan the timeline against your Kentico support dates, because Kentico 13 end of support is a hard deadline that many teams are working toward. Ask any implementation partner, DeployOpen included, for a timeline that is written into the fixed scope, with the cutover window, rollback plan and content freeze period explicitly defined.

How long will Umbraco releases stay supported?

Umbraco 17 is a long-term support release published on November 27, 2025, with end of life on November 27, 2028, end of Extended Long-Term Support on November 27, 2030 and end of service on Umbraco Cloud on November 27, 2031. Umbraco 13 reaches end of life on December 14, 2026. Build the upgrade cost into your running budget: each LTS cycle brings a planned upgrade, and that upgrade is recurring developer time. Ask the Umbraco team for the current end-of-service policy before committing, and check whether your hosting plan includes upgrade support.

Costs teams forget on each side

The license line is the easiest number to compare, and it is rarely the largest. Commercial renewals carry overages and add-ons, while a self-hosted Umbraco site moves recurring operational work onto your own team or partner. Check both columns before you compare totals.

Kentico renewals and overages

Kentico contracts are priced by edition, environment and usage tier, so a renewal can change more than the base fee. Check which tier your current instance sits in, what happens when you exceed a contracted limit, and whether add-ons such as extra environments or marketing modules renew on the same term. Ask for the renewal terms in writing and compare them with your traffic growth over the last two years. This cost recurs every year for as long as you stay.

Umbraco Forms and Engage licenses

Umbraco CMS itself is MIT licensed, but Umbraco Forms and Umbraco Engage need valid licenses on any public domain. Forms licenses are sold per domain and cover subdomains, and Engage covers one production domain plus development or testing domains. Count your public domains, subdomains and environments before you budget, and confirm the current price with Umbraco. These are recurring costs only if you use these features.

Backups and disaster recovery

On Kentico SaaS, the vendor operates much of the recovery path under its service terms. On self-hosted Umbraco, you own the database backups, media file backups, restore testing and the recovery time you commit to. Define the recovery point and recovery time targets for your content and forms data, then test a full restore into a separate environment. This work recurs with every release and every infrastructure change.

Security patching and LTS upgrades

With self-hosting, you or your partner apply .NET runtime updates, Umbraco releases and package updates on your own schedule. Umbraco publishes LTS versions with defined support windows, so plan a periodic upgrade project rather than treating patches as background work. Check which Umbraco LTS line you will run, its end-of-life and end-of-service dates, and who in your contract is responsible for applying security fixes within your change process.

Staging environments and Umbraco Cloud

Kentico tiers often include non-production environments that you pay for as part of the plan. A self-hosted build needs its own development, staging and production stacks, plus a way to move content and schema between them. Umbraco Cloud bundles Development, Staging and Live environments with Umbraco Deploy, so compare that subscription against the cost of building the same pipeline yourself. Ask what each option charges for extra environments.

Editor retraining and monitoring

Editors trained on Kentico's interface will need time to learn Umbraco's content and media workflows, and that effort is one-time but often underestimated. Monitoring is recurring: uptime checks, error logging, database growth and certificate renewal all fall to your team once the site is yours. Budget for both, and ask your partner to document the editor workflows and the monitoring runbook as part of the handover.

What a self-hosted Umbraco budget must carry

Self-hosting moves cost from a vendor invoice to internal and partner labor. Umbraco CMS itself is free under the MIT license, so the budget is built from the components you pay for: hosting you control, licensed add-ons where a public domain requires them, implementation, and a standing line for upgrades and support. Ask every bidder to price these separately so the comparison with a Kentico quote is like for like. Confirm with your own architects which environments you need (development, staging and production are the usual minimum), because each one carries infrastructure and deployment work that recurs.

Licensed add-ons are the component most often missed. Umbraco Forms runs unrestricted locally but needs a valid license on a public domain, sold per domain with one license per installation, and Umbraco Engage needs a license covering one production domain and up to two development or testing domains. Count your public domains and subdomains now, because the licensing model is domain-based and the figure drives the line item. Also confirm whether you need the Content Delivery API for headless delivery, since it is opt-in and must be enabled in configuration before it costs you anything in build effort.

Umbraco Cloud changes the mix rather than removing it. It is a managed service on Microsoft Azure with automatic backups, a global CDN, HTTPS and Umbraco Deploy for moving content and structure between Development, Staging and Live, so hosting and environment operation shift from your team to a subscription. You still pay for implementation, for the developers who build and maintain the site, and for upgrades. Request a written quote for both models, including what the Cloud subscription covers at your traffic and environment count, and check the lifecycle dates in the Umbraco end-of-service policy against your planned upgrade window before you commit.

What to confirm with Kentico and Umbraco before signing

Start with Kentico, and get the answers in writing before any renewal or migration decision. Ask which edition and service plan you are actually buying, what the license covers in terms of environments, sites and users, and whether the price changes at renewal or when traffic, content volume or contacts grow. For a private cloud arrangement, ask exactly what is hosted for you, who manages patching and backups, which support tiers apply, and what your recovery commitments are. Also ask about data export rights: confirm in the contract whether you can take a full copy of your content, media, forms data and marketing records, in what format, and at what cost, and whether that right survives termination. Verify all current terms directly with Kentico, since editions, plans and renewal rules change.

On the Umbraco side, the core CMS is MIT licensed, so the questions shift to the add-ons and hosting. For Umbraco Forms and Umbraco Engage, ask a licensing partner or Umbraco directly how many production domains and how many development or testing domains your plan covers, and whether subdomains and multiple installations count separately. Confirm how your forms and marketing features are priced if you add sites later. If you plan to use Umbraco Cloud, ask which plan includes the Development, Staging and Live environments you need, what backup retention applies, and whether Umbraco Deploy is included. If you self-host, get a written view of the support options available from your implementation partner, your hosting provider and any Umbraco partner, including response expectations and who handles upgrades. Verify all current licensing and plan terms directly with Umbraco before signing.

How DeployOpen scopes a fixed-price Umbraco implementation

DeployOpen plans, implements, integrates, hardens, backs up, upgrades, documents and supports self-hosted open-source platforms inside the client's own infrastructure. For a Kentico replacement, that means turning the license and hosting comparison into a written scope that covers your Umbraco version, your Forms or Engage needs and your environments before any work starts.

How we scope

Inventory your current Kentico licenses, service plan, modules and marketing features so the comparison uses your actual footprint
Agree the Umbraco version, hosting model and whether Umbraco Forms or Engage licenses are needed for each domain
Put scope, deliverables and timelines in writing before work starts, since most engagements are fixed-scope

How we build

Install Umbraco in your own cloud account, data center or air-gapped network, with the database you choose from the supported options
Rebuild content types, forms and personalization logic, then test them against the scoped requirements
Run security testing on the site and API, including the Content Delivery API settings for preview and protected content

How we hand over

Document the architecture, licensing position per domain, environment setup and total cost drivers for your team
Deliver backup and restore procedures so your staff can recover the site without outside help
Provide compliance-readiness evidence and controls documentation for your assessors, which auditors and certification bodies then review

How we support

Offer ongoing support, upgrades and continuous testing as a retainer after handover
Plan upgrades around Umbraco LTS dates, so you can confirm your target version and its end-of-service date in advance
Review licensing and hosting costs with you each year, so renewals and domain changes do not surprise your budget