Umbraco Automate: marketing automation built into your CMS

Umbraco Automate is a marketing automation tool built directly into the Umbraco CMS. It lets you set up automatic actions on your website, so that when something happens on your site, a task is carried out in response, without a developer needed each time.

When Automate was announced at Codegarden 2026, we immediately started thinking about how we'd put it to work for our clients. It's now days away from general release, and our enthusiasm hasn't cooled.

What does Umbraco Automate do?

Umbraco Automate works on a simple principle: you tell it to watch for a particular event happening, and you tell it what to do when that event occurs. It then handles the rest, running quietly in the background and carrying out the task every time the event happens, without anyone needing to lift a finger.

The event that kicks things off is called a trigger, and it can be almost anything that happens on your site: a form being submitted, a new member registering, a page being published, an order being placed. The task it carries out in response is called an action: sending an email, notifying your team, publishing a piece of content, posting to Slack, and plenty more besides. You pair a trigger with an action, or with a whole sequence of actions, and that pairing becomes an automation that runs on its own from then on.

Umbraco Automate is a general-purpose tool for removing manual, repetitive steps from how your site runs. Because you can combine almost any trigger with almost any action, and chain actions together with conditions along the way, there isn't one single thing it's for. The shape it takes depends entirely on what your team needs it to do.

What can you build with it?

The examples below are a starting point, not the boundaries.

• A visitor submits an enquiry form. They get an instant confirmation email, and your sales team is notified the moment it lands.
• A new member registers. A welcome email and a unique discount code go out automatically.
• A page is published. Your team is pinged in Slack, no manual heads-up needed.

You build these by dragging blocks onto a canvas and joining them together. There's no code involved, which means the people who own the content can build the automation, not just the developers.

What does Umbraco Automate mean for marketing teams?

Umbraco Automate lets marketing teams do more themselves: building out a customer journey, wiring up a sequence of notifications, setting content to publish in response to an event. And where a developer has connected an external system like your CRM or mailing platform, the team can put that connection to work in their automations too, extending what they can do without a specialist involved each time.

It also changes what is realistic and achievable for organisations that could never justify the licence fees of a large marketing automation suite. Capability that once sat behind an expensive subscription is now part of the CMS itself, which opens the door to ways of working that previously weren't on the table.

How much does Umbraco Automate cost?

Umbraco Automate is part of the core Umbraco product. There's no separate licence fee for it, and no metered cost that grows as your automations do.

Is Umbraco Automate suitable for regulated organisations?

Yes. The data your automations handle stays inside your own Umbraco environment. It isn't routed out through a third-party platform, which is exactly the assurance you want when GDPR obligations or a procurement review are in play.

The platform behind it holds up to scrutiny too. Umbraco is ISO 27001 certified, meaning the processes used to develop, operate and maintain its products have been independently audited against the international standard for information security management. Umbraco also complies with the EU's NIS2 Directive and Cyber Resilience Act, and provides a formal Data Processing Agreement for GDPR purposes.

For the sectors we work in, this matters at procurement time. When a security questionnaire asks what certifications the platform holds, there's a documented answer. Automate inherits that footing because it's part of the core product, built and maintained by the same certified product organisation, rather than a bolted-on third-party tool that needs its own vendor assessment.

How does Umbraco Automate handle AI?

Umbraco Automate can bring AI into an automation, drafting a content summary or writing alt text when something new is uploaded, for instance. What it can't do is publish that work on its own. Someone on your team reviews and approves every output before it goes live.

You're also not tied to a single AI provider. The model doing the work can be swapped out later without rebuilding the automation around it. AI pricing and model quality are still moving targets, and keeping that choice in your hands means you can adapt as the field changes.

Why does it matter that Umbraco Automate is open source?

Umbraco Automate is included in Umbraco's open source core at no extra cost. On many platforms this capability comes as a paid add-on, sometimes with caps on how much you can run. Umbraco has brought it in as part of the core product, which makes [Umbraco → link to /technology/umbraco] a more powerful tool for developers and marketing teams alike, without a premium attached.

Automation like this is well-established territory, and mature marketing teams will have used something in this space before. What's changed is where it now sits.

Want to get Automate working on your site?

The real value of Automate comes from thinking through your processes before you build them. We work with clients to map out what should be automated, how it should behave, and what good looks like before a single trigger is set. Get in touch and we'll start there.