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…
Yeah, the GraphQL support out of the box is great. However I think it’s strengths is probably in larger/content heavy sites.
In most smaller projects GraphQL can of course be used as well, but with the new hybrid cached and eventually output caching, using Delivery API or custom REST API would be sufficient in many projects.
The main concerns about Heartcore is that it seems to be based on Umbraco 13, which is soon EOL. Not sure what the plans for Umbraco Heartcore are regarding this. Will existing projects stay on Umbraco 13 or be upgraded/migrated to e.g. Umbraco 17?
The docs also mention Heartcore is a SaaS, so one don’t need to be worries about upgrades, where I would probably expect it to be updated on at least latest LTS version of Umbraco (Umbraco 17) for new projects.
Another downside of Heartcore, since it is SaaS, is that we don’t benefits from the customization in back office (especially in the new back office).
For this specific project, we will just use a traditional Umbraco Cloud project, although we originally considered Heartcore, but I think the customization weight higher that then GraphQL support.
Perhaps GraphQL should be an abstraction sometime in future as an (pro) add-on similar to Umbraco Search, Forms and Deploy.
I don’t mind if this add-on would require a license, but it may combine the best of both worlds.
A bit similar to Forms and Deploy.
