Umbraco or WordPress for a B2B company

WordPress started life as a blogging platform, and it still shows. Posts, pages and the block editor work out of the box, and editors pick them up quickly. More structured content, such as a service catalogue with attributes or a page for each office, needs extra code or plugins.

In Umbraco you design the content model from the start. Each kind of page gets its own document type: fields, allowed blocks and a place in the site tree. Editors see only what that page needs. It takes more work up front, but on a B2B site with services, sectors, case studies and a knowledge base, that structure soon pays for itself.

WordPress core does not support multilingual sites out of the box. Its documentation describes two routes: plugins, or a Multisite network with one site per language. Both work, but the plugin you choose decides how your content is stored for years to come.

In Umbraco, language variants are built in:

A B2B website rarely stands alone. Enquiries go to the CRM, product data comes from the ERP, and partners sign in to a client area.

Umbraco connects to external systems through their APIs, whatever technology they are built on, and built-in webhooks notify other systems when content is published or deleted. Integrations are written in ASP.NET Core and C#. If your business already runs systems on .NET or Azure, some code can be shared with other applications. Sign-in through external providers, including Microsoft Entra ID, uses standard ASP.NET Core packages. The built-in Content Delivery API serves content as JSON when you need an app or a separate front end.

WordPress has a REST API for reading and writing content as JSON, and a huge choice of plugins for popular services. If your tools have a well-maintained plugin, integration can be quick and cheap. A connection to a system that has no plugin, however, has to be built against its API, on the PHP side.

On most sites, WordPress installs minor core releases, including security fixes, automatically by default. Plugins and themes update themselves only in special cases. In practice, a WordPress site’s security depends on how many plugins it uses, how well they are maintained and who keeps on top of updates. Hosting is easy to find: any server with PHP and MySQL or MariaDB will do.

Umbraco has a predictable release cycle. LTS versions get about three years of support, and the dates for security-only support and end of life are published well in advance. The flip side is that every few years you need to plan a move to the next LTS. Umbraco 13, for example, reaches end of life on 14 December 2026.

You can host Umbraco yourself, on Windows or Linux, or use Umbraco Cloud. Cloud runs on Microsoft Azure and includes:

Both are open source. Neither charges for the CMS itself. Total cost comes from the build, hosting, paid add-ons and several years of maintenance.

Skills matter too. If your team or supplier works in PHP, WordPress is the natural choice. If you have .NET developers or systems in Azure, Umbraco lets you reuse that knowledge and tooling. Compare costs over three to five years, not just the launch budget.