Umbraco Automate: What It Is, How It Works, and What It Means for Our Clients

Umbraco has just launched Automate, a new add-on that brings automation directly into the CMS backoffice. For anyone running marketing campaigns, managing customer journeys, or juggling the endless list of "can you just set this up to happen automatically" requests, this is a genuinely useful addition to the platform, and one we think a lot of our clients will benefit from.

Here's what it is, how it works, and where we see it making a real difference.

What is Umbraco Automate?

Automate is an open-source, visual automation engine built natively into Umbraco from version 17 and upwards. Think of it as a drag-and-drop canvas, sitting right inside the backoffice, where you can build workflows out of triggers and actions without writing a line of code. Think of it as make.com or Zapier but all done inside your friendly CMS, Umbraco - and at no additional cost!

A trigger is an event: a form gets submitted, a member signs up, a piece of content gets published, an order comes through. An action is what happens next: send an email, notify a Slack channel, generate a discount code, call an AI agent, hit a webhook. Chain enough of these together and you've got a proper automated journey, built and maintained entirely by the marketing team, no developer ticket required.

It comes with standard triggers and actions out of the box, and if you're already using Umbraco Forms, Commerce, or Engage, Automate plugs straight into those too. A submitted quote request can trigger a Slack notification. A finalised order can trigger a stock update. A Persona Score change in Engage can trigger a personalised follow-up.

How does it work?

The short version: you build automations visually, on a canvas, using triggers and actions you drag into place.

A typical flow looks something like this. A new customer signs up on the site (trigger). That kicks off a welcome email (action), notifies the sales team (action), and generates a unique discount code (action). Previously, a setup like that would usually mean stitching together an external automation platform, or asking a developer to build something bespoke. With Automate, it's built in the backoffice, by whoever owns the workflow.

A few things worth knowing about how it's built:

It's not limited to what's inside Umbraco. Automate supports webhooks, so it can trigger from, or send data to, pretty much any external system. Combined with its open-source nature, developers can extend it with custom triggers and actions where the out-of-the-box options aren't enough.

AI is built in, with a human check. You can set Automate to call an AI agent, for example, to draft alt-text, summarise new content the moment it's uploaded generate meta title's or meta descriptions for your pages. But every AI-generated output can be routed through a human-in-the-loop approval step, so nothing goes live without someone reviewing it first. Useful productivity gain, without losing control over what actually gets published.

Your data stays where it is. Because Automate runs inside your own Umbraco instance rather than routing everything through a third-party SaaS platform, sensitive data (customer data, for example) never has to leave your environment. That's a meaningful simplification for GDPR compliance, and one of the more compelling arguments for using Automate over a bolted-on external tool.

There are no artificial limits. No caps on the number of runs, triggers, actions, or users. Cost doesn't creep up as usage scales, which is a common frustration with SaaS automation tools that price by volume.

Where this could benefit our clients

We work with a wide range of Umbraco clients, and a lot of the automation requests we get tend to fall into a handful of familiar categories. Here's where we think Automate could genuinely move the needle.

Faster campaign turnaround for marketing teams. Right now, if a client wants a new onboarding sequence, a cart recovery flow, or a lead nurture journey, it usually means a conversation with us, development costs, and a wait. With Automate, a lot of that can move straight onto the marketing team's plate. They design the journey on the canvas, and it's live in minutes rather than weeks. For clients running frequent campaigns, that's a real shift in how quickly they can react to what's working.

Joined-up processes across Forms, Commerce, and Engage. For clients already using these add-ons, Automate gives them a way to connect the dots without custom development. A "Request a Quote" form submission that automatically emails the customer, notifies the right sales rep in Slack, and logs the enquiry, built entirely through triggers and actions rather than a one-off integration we'd have to maintain.

Reducing the "can you just automate this" backlog. Every agency has a list of small, repetitive automation requests that never quite justify a full development sprint: notifying a team when stock runs low, tagging content for review after a set period, sending an internal alert when a high-value order comes through. Automate is well suited to exactly this kind of task, handled by the client directly, freeing up our development time for the bigger, more valuable work.

A safer way to bring AI into content workflows. A number of our clients have asked about using AI to speed up content production, but are understandably cautious about losing quality control. Automate's human-in-the-loop approval step is a sensible middle ground: AI drafts the content or alt-text for an image, a real person signs it off before it's published. It's the kind of AI adoption we can confidently recommend.

A stronger data-handling story for regulated or GDPR-sensitive clients. For clients in sectors where data handling gets scrutinised, being able to say that automated workflows never leave their own hosted environment is a genuinely useful selling point, not just a technical nicety.

Our take

Automate is a strong addition to the Umbraco ecosystem. It's not trying to replace dedicated automation platforms for every use case, but for the kind of day-to-day, content and CMS-adjacent automation that so many of our clients need, having it live inside Umbraco, under one roof, with no extra licensing complexity, is a compelling proposition.

If you're an existing client and want to talk through where Automate could fit into your setup, or you're considering Umbraco and want to know what's possible, get in touch and we'll walk you through it.