It’s Christmas time. Secrets are about to be placed under the tree. Some are true surprises, others may be more expected or familiar, and some are things you’ve created yourself, making you excited to see how your present will be received.
That’s exactly how I feel this year. Together with the Orchestration Team at Umbraco, I’m thrilled to place Umbraco Compose under the tree. We’ve been working on it for quite some time - identifying your needs and wishes - and now we’re looking forward to handing it over to you - and seeing your reaction.
What Is Umbraco Compose?
Umbraco Compose is our take on how to build maintainable, agile, connected, and scalable best-of-breed digital experiences. It’s a SaaS product that unifies your headless tech stack and frees developers from repetitive, boilerplate, uncreative code - so they can focus on innovative work that adds real value to your business. Think of it as an insurance policy for your ability to innovate: helping you adopt new technologies, manage migrations, and unlock the potential of your content data in a rapidly evolving technological landscape.
For developers, Umbraco Compose acts as an orchestration layer. You ingest data into Compose from your external systems - ERP, CMS, PIM, DAM - via the ingestion API, and retrieve it through the delivery API. Flexible GraphQL queries allow you to unify data across systems: for example, a product landing page that pulls price from ERP, specifications from PIM, marketing content from the CMS, and images from the DAM.
Why Compose?
You might say you already have a solution that handles complexity like this. If so, it’s probably something you or your developers built yourselves—custom code for a single project. This is exactly the type of development we aim to standardise, just like the CMS’s standardised web content management and the Content Delivery.
Today, when building a best-of-breed headless architecture, you may connect everything through a backend-for-frontend (BFF): custom code that stitches APIs together and applies business logic before passing the output to the frontend. These solutions are hard to implement generically, often inflexible, and usually unique for every project - leading to tight coupling, vendor lock-in, and long-term maintenance headaches.
Some call it composable regret; others call it mach-lash. Umbraco Compose is designed to solve exactly this problem - a standardised solution for connecting your headless best-of-breed architecture.
How Umbraco Compose Works
Before you start ingesting data, you define your domain model using Type Schemas, and you create the logical structure through collections.
Data is ingested into collections - either directly (if your system sends data in the correct format) or via an Ingestion Function, where you can transform input data using a JavaScript function. Once the data is ingested and defined by your Type Schemas, it becomes accessible through GraphQL - either directly from your frontend or using persisted queries.
If you want to be notified about data changes, such as new ingestions or deletions, you can use the built-in webhook functionality.
What About AI?
The foundation of effective AI is good, structured, accessible data—precisely what Umbraco Compose provides. With your content gathered in one place and exposed through a unified GraphQL layer, Compose becomes a perfect starting point for your AI journey.
But it doesn’t stop there.
We’re working on an MCP server for Umbraco Compose, which we hope to release not long after the commercial launch in Q1 2026. It will have full access to your data model and the delivery API, making it a potent query engine. You’ll be able to use your preferred AI client to help query across all your data seamlessly. Whether you - as a developer - are looking for insights into your data or needing help crafting queries, the Umbraco Compose MCP server will be there to assist you.
If You Can’t Wait…
If you’re as excited as I am and can’t wait to unwrap Umbraco Compose - or you’re simply looking for something fun to experiment with over Christmas - there’s a chance you can join the private beta programme. Sign up for the Umbraco Compose launch list, and we’ll reach out when the next round opens.
Until then, I wish you all a very Merry Christmas.
