DotNetNuke vs Umbraco - Which One You Love?

With the passage of time, ASP.NET is evolving with an increasing number of high grade options for extensive content management systems. On the basis of user requirements, there are a variety of quality options available both with open source code and with commercial licenses. Although PHP is still considered as a prominent ruler of the web, there is enough room for some striking ASP.NET CMSs that have the potential to empower you to create exclusive, gorgeous and efficiently performing websites. It will also render you the opportunity to work over the immensely popular .NET platform that is commonly used in businesses. Whether you are game for a commercial solution or are looking for some open source stuff, top ASP.NET CMSs like DotNetNuke or Umbraco can conveniently give you the desired functionality and support. Let us discuss the exclusive features of these two impressive CMS.

DotNetNuke

DNN is one of the best .NET CMS available today.It is very flexible and customizable. Installation of DotNetNuke is extremely simple. DotNetNuke was designed to be very user friendly. As an administrator, you can easily compose and distribute bulk HTML emails/newsletters to your user groups. 

This CMS enables businesses to quickly build menu-driven interface that allows non-technical users to easily create new sites or extend the functionality and features of their existing web site. It is avialable for free. DNN has a very active community and is supported by a vast community of talented programmers. It is one of the easiest, most cost effective solutions for managing any company’s website. In usability point it is the best framework people reach out for, non-technical users can change their content easily, by adding pages, changing layout and adding new features etc in a smooth way without much info. There are 8000 modules in DNN which can customize the website look and feel as well as its functionality. It is extremely scalable as any website can grow to much larger websites with DotNetNuke. There is no limit to the growth. It even can change the way it behaves, one can easily extend it. It is most recognized CMS which powers over 400,000 portals, extranets, intranets and public web sites. More than 700,000 registered members support this platform. There are over 7 millions of downloads done and download rate is 1 in every 5 seconds for DotNetNuke.

Best DotNetNuke Hosting Recommendation

Umbraco

Umbraco is designed with developers in mind, which means that it will take a little extra effort to get it up and running. If you need any additional support and training, you can not use free option.

Umbraco is built upon Microsoft’s .NET Framework and more than 155,000 sites trust Umbraco. This CMS runs on cloud system and it supports multiple sites in a single instance of installation. There are more than 85000 installations of Umbraco which are active around the web. It gives out of box solutions, which means it gives you access to your google analytics statistics , has the ability to create your own reports from the metrics and dimensions, can implement the Umbraco ecommerce solution using only XSLT / Razor, HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Net solutions perform better when it comes to high volume of traffic/extensive use. It supports bigger sites on web. Commercial community support is on the rise with this CMS. No doubt, Umbraco CMS development is the buzzword in the CMS world.

Top Umbraco Hosting Recommendation

Experience in Umbraco and DotNetNuke

DotNetNuke was a great .NET based open source CMS. I started using it for my clients with version 2. Quickly I started building powerful websites in no time. Clients loved WYSWYG approach to editing content. This love lasted for years, and still is. I have built huge portals in DNN, running on shared windows shared hosting provider that offer DotNetNuke.

Umbraco? Umbraco was love at first sight. I installed version 2 and after initial confusion (which required certain mind shift to completely different concept), I was blown away by flexibility of this CMS.  First thing that I loved are document types and datatypes, where you could easily “describe” content types like you add columns to a table. Text here, image upload there, rich text editor here… and you have a document type used to describe content of your site. It reminded me of Xmod module for DotNetNuke. Back office to edit that document type is ready auto-magically. Fields can be referenced in templates easily and everything is editable in back office (templates, macros, content).

Since .NET development is not my thing for some years now, ability to do macros and some dynamic parts in XSLT was also amazing. Tweak navigation, display last 10 news on homepage, display cheapest product,… all easily done with few lines of XSLT (later Razor script).

Last but not least: HTML output. Umbraco enables you to take control of every single letter returned by webserver. Nothing, I mean nothing extra is output to browser. You can just as easy output TXT, pure XML or JSON instead of HTML if you want. Actually, you could use Umbraco to create a webservice or manage a site built completely in Flash… just output content in XML instead of HTML and Make a Flash app to pull it. This is great for SEO but also for speed optimization. This is one thing webmasters disliked about DNN, output is nasty and takes a lot of effort to clean it up and optimize.

On the other hand, Umbraco is not DNN killer. WYSWYG way of editing is still not great and clients really like DNN way of editing content. Also, we might be wrong, but for bigger portals we’re safe with DNN. It is proven and it works. We’re not comfortable to use Umbraco for larger content sites and larger volumes of visitors. Also, some typical sites are built in DNN very fast, with huge amount of ready made modules available on Snowcovered.

Conclusion

I like both of them and I can recommend this both CMS. Both CMS is easy to use and it is very fast.