With Umbraco Heartcore you won’t need to worry about upgrading your project.
But starting a new project it looks like it is still based on Umbraco 13.
Besides GraphQL support are there specific benefits in simple sites? I mean CMS offer Content Delivery API and Umbraco Cloud has now CDN caching via Cloudflare.
The dashboard mention demo.heartcore.dev, but it doesn’t seem to exist:
I personally haven’t worked with Heartcore, but I think it’s main future is indeed the GraphQL.
I personally think Heartcore will be phased out in favor of Compose at some point. Compose is effectively Heartcore on steroids, so it would make sense. But I haven’t seen anything official.
Given the price difference between Compose and Heartcore - I think there’s still a need for the lower end of the market though. I’ve not really looked into Compose pricing too much, but at a glance it starts at £11,600 a year?
I don’t think Heartcore gets much love these days. You’re right that the Content Delivery API in the CMS now covers a lot of what Heartcore used to be the reason for, and with Cloud giving you Cloudflare CDN caching too, the gap has narrowed.
The main things you still get with Heartcore that the CMS doesn’t have out of the box are the GraphQL API and, since April 2025, the free version of Umbraco Workflow included on all projects. For a simple site though, if you’re happy with REST and don’t specifically need GraphQL, I’m not sure Heartcore buys you much over CMS plus Cloud.
Worth noting the last Heartcore release note in the docs is that April 2025 Workflow update, and there’s nothing Heartcore-related on the Umbraco roadmap in Now, Next or Later…
