Codegarden is Umbraco's annual celebration of everything the CMS and its community build together, and this year our CEO Valeriy Ilchenko made the trip for his second time attending. It was, once again, a genuinely special experience — the kind that leaves you visibly refreshed and energized, in a way that's hard to get from staying heads down in the day-to-day.
Despite plenty of uncertainty across the wider tech industry, what stood out most this year was how the Umbraco ecosystem isn't just surviving, it's actively thriving. Sessions ranged from core roadmap updates to real production case studies, and the hallway conversations were, as always, where a lot of the best ideas came from. Great community, great conversations, and a few especially good ones over dinner.
One of the biggest talking points this year was Umbraco's direction on AI. Umbraco AI gives editors and developers a foundation for AI inside the backoffice that stays opt-in and under your control: you choose the model and provider, decide where your data goes, and Umbraco doesn't train on your content. Features like Umbraco Copilot build on top of that foundation to help editors draft and adjust content directly on the page they're working on. Seeing Umbraco lay down such a solid AI foundation, and move so quickly with it, gives our team a lot of confidence in where the platform is headed.
That confidence was reinforced just weeks later with the launch of Umbraco Automate, a native, visual workflow editor built right into the Umbraco backoffice. Automate is free and open source, with no limits on runs, triggers, actions or users, and it brings Zapier- or n8n-style automation directly into the CMS rather than bolting it on from outside. Because it runs wherever your Umbraco installation runs, automations never leave your own environment, which makes GDPR and data-residency conversations a lot simpler too. For teams that want to automate content pipelines and integrations without adding developer overhead for every routine task, this is one of the strongest reasons yet to be on Umbraco 17.
Umbraco AI and Umbraco Automate are both built for the current generation of the CMS, which means an Umbraco upgrade is the price of admission. If your site is still on Umbraco 13, that matters sooner than it might seem: 13 is an LTS (long-term support) release, but its bugfix support ended in December 2025 and it reaches full end of life (EOL) on 14 December 2026. Umbraco 17 is the current LTS, supported until 2028, and it's the version both of these tools are built around. A 13 to 17 upgrade also happens to be exactly the kind of Umbraco development work we do most: the sooner it's off the books, the sooner AI and Automate are actually usable.
We go to Codegarden because we're part of this community, not just building on top of it. Whether you need a developer for a single feature, an agency to run a full 13 to 17 upgrade, or a partner who can own your whole roadmap, we'd like to talk. See how we approach Umbraco CMS development and upgrades, or get in touch directly with Valeriy for a second opinion — book time on his calendar.
