New here?
Welcome! If you are new to Umbraco or the Umbraco Community, you have arrived at the right place! This page will help you understand the basics of Umbraco, learn your first skills, and discover the community that supports it all.
On this page you can read about what Umbraco is, how to take your first steps with Umbraco, who the Umbraco Community is, who the Umbraco Developer Relations team are, and how to get in contact with the friendly Umbraco Community.
You're about to go on a very exciting journey - and we're so happy you're here!
Umbraco the CMS
What is Umbraco?
Umbraco is a free, open‑source content management system (CMS) that helps you build and manage websites of any size. It’s built on the .NET framework and uses C#, which makes it powerful, flexible, and a great fit for modern web development.
Umbraco is friendly to work with and supported by a global community of people who share knowledge, tools, and ideas.
You can read more about Umbraco the CMS on our main website:
Your first steps with Umbraco: Creating your first project
There's two ways to get started with Umbraco.
Umbraco Cloud
Umbraco Cloud is the easiest and fastest way to get started with Umbraco. Umbraco Cloud handles hosting, updates, maintenance, and infrastructure for you - so you can focus on building great websites instead of managing servers.You can start a 14-day free Umbraco Cloud trial and see if Cloud is something you'd like by visiting this link:
Install Umbraco locally
If you prefer to install Umbraco on your own machine, you can install it locally and explore the CMS at your own pace. All you need is a simple development setup - and once it’s running, you can get started.
This is a completely free way to use Umbraco - but if you want your website to be live and accessible to others, you’ll need to host your project somewhere.
Visit our documentation to get help setting Umbraco up locally on your machine:
The Umbraco Community
This is the Umbraco Community
The Umbraco Community is a big, diverse group of friendly people who all care deeply about building, sharing, and growing together. Whether you're a developer, designer, content editor, or something completely different - there's a space for you here.
The community is built on Umbraco's core values: Trust, Respect, Openness, Hunger and Friendliness. You don’t need permission to belong in the community. You’re already part of it just by being here!
Codegarden is Umbraco's iconic annual conference
Codegarden is the place to be for developers, content editors, designers, marketeers and anyone who is or wants to be part of the Umbraco community.
Codegarden is a multi‑day tech conference filled with talks, workshops, hacking, social gatherings, and plenty of conversations. It’s also where we celebrate the new Umbraco MVPs (Most Valuable People) - a highlight of the event and a moment the whole community looks forward to.
Read more about Codegarden at the official Codegarden website:
How to get involved
Umbraco is an open‑source project, which means anyone can help shape it. If you’re a developer, you can contribute directly to the codebase by fixing bugs, improving features, or building packages that others can use.
But contributing goes far beyond code. You can help write documentation, translate content, share knowledge, report issues, organize meetups, or support others in the community.
If you need inspiration for how your unique skillset can make a difference, visit our Find Your Path page:
