If you are a .net developer, chances are that you want a CMS that allows you to use your skills in C# and Razor.

There are a few other .net based CMS but this comparison is only between these two since these are the ones I’ve worked with.

The similarities between Epi and Umbraco allows you to quite easily learn the other once you know one of these, the differences are however many and all of them can make or break the project you are trying to build.

Some differences are either/or, and some are better/worse, so this table contains X for features that either exist or does not exist, and a number 1-10 for what I consider better and worse. The ones with a numerical value has a motivation below, so the table is just for overview.

Since this comparison is to help you make a decision which CMS to choose, I have added some * next to features that comes in Umbraco 8 which is not out at the time of this blog post.

Feature Umbraco 7 Episerver 11.x Works in Azure X X Multiple frontends with cache busting X 1:1 language sites with fallback languages X* X Ease of use for a developer 8 7 Ease of use for an editor 9 6 Cost of licences 10 2 Ease of upgrades between versions 7* 9 Build in support for A/B testing X Forms 8 6 Access control and administration 8 6 Deploy and content migration 7 8

Ease of use for a developer

Umbraco loses a few points, mainly because the API has changed between versions, some API has been unreliable or slow in certain versions which means it can be really hard to trust the code samples/documentation you find. When using the modern version of the API and follow some best practices it is quite easy to work with though.

Episerver is harder for a few reasons, the complexity when working with multiple sites/languages makes it quite easy to make misstakes that can be hard to find during the development. On the plus side their API has been pretty stable for years which means it can be quite easy to find correct information. The documentation is however quite spotty and sometimes looking up a method will give no more information than intellisense.

Ease of use for an editor

Umbraco has a simple page tree, a quite natural way of working with languages and domains which gives it a win in this category. The UI is consistent and easy to navigate.

Episerver is a bit of a mess, blocks and media share UI in a very confusing way, media items can’t be translated and the admin tool is still a web form based part that looks like it was made in the early 2000 (which it was).

Cost of licences

Umbraco by itself is free to use, both personal and for business. There are however some addons such as Umbraco Forms which costs $219 per domain and courier $1,299/site.

Episerver on the other hand is quite expensive and has no free options. The license is about $40,000 per site and there is a yearly cost added to that.

Both Umbraco and Episerver has cloud based options which are subscription based, the prices and examples above are for self hosted sites.

Ease of upgrades between versions

The star for Umbraco is mainly becase major versions such as the upcoming Umbraco 8 does not support a regular upgrade but more or a content migration. The other deduction is becase a nuget upgrade overwrites the configuration files which means any customization for these needs to be handled manually by diffing every time a nuget package is updated.

Episerver has had several breaking changes over the years, but the last few years it has stabilized so that most upgrades are relatively pain free.

Forms

Umbraco Forms is pretty great but comes with a price (literally) but the ease of use is hard to beat.

Episerver Forms is a mess that is built on the already annoying block handling system that makes Episerver so heavy on the mouse button, every item in a form takes many clicks to edit and publish.

Access control and administration

Umbraco has improved greatly the last year and is now very powerful and easy to administer. It looses one point for now for the limitation of which editor can edit which language in a 1:1 language site. This could however change before the end of the year.

This is the part where you can tell that Episerver was originally built on webforms many years ago. The admin part is still very old looking and hard to understand and use for new people. Hopefully the admin section will be remade soon but I doubt it will be changed 2019.

Deploy and content migration

The reason Episerver gets a slightly higher score is that it uses code first models which means a code release also adds the correct settings to the document types. Umbraco can solve this with uSync but since this is an addon I have deducted a point.

Episerver scores slightly higher for content migration because of the built in tool to export/import data. This tool is however less powerful than Courier but since Courier is a somewhat pricey addon, Episerver is out of the box slightly better.

Conclusion

If price is no issue and a stable and supported API is more important, Episerver might be the right choice.

Umbraco however improves rapidly and what might have been reasons to not choose Umbraco in the past is no longer valid reasons. The only downside Umbraco still has is that it is slighly less stable, both when it comes to upgrades and working APIs. Umbraco 8 promises to be a better and more stable CMS so maybe 2019 is the year when Umbraco wins all comparisons,