How to choose an Umbraco partner: partner tiers, certification and a practical checklist

An Umbraco partner is an agency with a formal partnership with Umbraco HQ, the company behind the open-source Umbraco CMS. In the current program there are three tiers, Silver, Gold and Platinum, and the main requirement for each is how many certified Umbraco developers the agency employs. Gold and Platinum partners can also earn a yearly Contributing badge for giving time back to the project.

That makes the tier a useful first filter, but not a decision. It tells you about certified staff and the agency’s relationship with Umbraco, not about whether it has upgraded a site like yours, how it supports you after launch or who owns the code. Below we explain what the tiers and certifications mean, how to find Umbraco partners, and a checklist we would use ourselves when choosing an Umbraco agency. We are an Umbraco agency, so we also say plainly where we sit in the program.

How the Umbraco partner program works

Umbraco’s partner page lists three tiers. All partnerships run as a yearly, auto-renewed subscription, and each tier includes annual training seat requirements, credits, discounts and co-marketing.

Umbraco does not publish partnership fees on that page, and it does not publish minimum project counts or revenue thresholds for any tier. The certification requirement is the only hard criterion it states publicly.

The Contributing badge

Gold and Platinum partners that allocate agency time to the Umbraco project can receive a Contributing badge, shown as for example “Contributing Gold Partner” with a year. It is announced on Umbraco’s blog, valid for one year and must be renewed. Qualifying work includes documentation, core pull requests and packages relevant to the current major version, tutorials and videos, supporting MVPs, and organizing meetups, festivals and hackathons. If you care about an agency’s depth in the platform, this badge is a stronger signal than the tier alone, because it reflects public work you can look up.

Other badges you will see

The partner index also shows badges such as Cloud Powerhouse and yearly Umbraco awards on some agency cards. Umbraco’s directory pages do not explain the criteria for these in detail, so ask the agency what a badge was awarded for if it matters to your project.

“Certified partner,” “Registered partner” and other names

People search for “Umbraco certified partner,” “Umbraco gold partner” and “Umbraco registered partner,” and the names can be confusing:

• Certified applies to people. There is no tier called Certified in the current program; every tier requires certified developers.
• Gold is the middle tier, requiring at least one Certified Expert.
• Registered was the entry-level partnership. When Umbraco added Platinum in 2023, it described the program as supplementing “the current Registered, Silver and Gold partnerships.” The current partner page describes only Silver, Gold and Platinum and does not state requirements for a Registered level.

Partner tiers change over time, so check the current page on umbraco.com rather than relying on an agency’s description, including ours.

Umbraco certification and training for developers

Umbraco certification is earned by individual developers, not companies, and it is what the partner tiers are built on.

The certification courses are Fundamentals, Umbraco and MVC, Extending the Backoffice, Application Integrations, Security, Searching and Indexing, and Load Balancing. Additional skill courses cover topics such as content management, Umbraco Cloud, Commerce, Forms and Engage. As listed in October 2026, a certification course costs €1,300, the Expert bundle €4,000 and the Master bundle €5,500.

Two details matter when you evaluate an agency:

1. Certifications are valid for two years. Renewal requires a recertification exam focused on the latest Umbraco version. Ask whether certifications are current, not just whether someone was certified once.
2. You can verify names. Umbraco’s certified developer search lets you look people up by country, organization, name or level. If an agency cites certified developers, check that the people who will work on your project are listed.

Certification shows a developer has learned Umbraco’s way of doing things. It does not replace evidence of shipped work on the version you will run, which for most projects in 2026 means Umbraco 17.

How to find Umbraco partners

• The official partner index on umbraco.com lists partner agencies with their tier, badges and a short description. It is the authoritative place to confirm a tier.
• Umbraco’s matching service. The “let us help you find a partner” form asks Umbraco to recommend partners for your project.
• The certified developer search helps you check the people, not just the company.
• The Umbraco Marketplace shows which agencies publish packages, and for which versions. Recent releases tell you an agency works with the current back office.
• GitHub and the Umbraco forum show who contributes to the core and answers questions in public.
• Independent review platforms add verified client reviews, project sizes and dates, which partner directories do not provide.

Use more than one of these. A partner index tells you an agency is in the program; reviews and public code tell you how it works.

A practical checklist for choosing an Umbraco agency

1. Version experience

Ask which Umbraco versions the team has shipped in the last 12 months. Umbraco 17 is the current LTS on .NET 10, supported until November 2028, and its back office has been built on Web Components since Umbraco 14. A team whose recent work is all on Umbraco 13 or older has AngularJS back-office habits that do not carry over. Ask to see a custom back-office extension they wrote in Lit or TypeScript.

2. Upgrade track record

Most Umbraco projects in 2026 involve an upgrade: Umbraco 13 reaches end of life on December 14, 2026, and Umbraco 8 has been out of support since February 2025. Ask for a concrete upgrade they did, what broke and how they handled it. Good answers mention specific packages, removed editors such as Nested Content, and test strategy. Our Umbraco 8 to 17 migration guide lists what such a project involves, if you want a reference for the questions to ask.

3. Packages and community contributions

Public packages and pull requests are evidence you can inspect. Look at what an agency has published, which Umbraco versions it supports and when it was last updated. A package with recent releases for 17 says more about current skills than a badge.

4. References and reviews

Ask for two or three references from projects similar to yours in size and type, and talk to them. Read verified reviews on independent review platforms, paying attention to what clients say went wrong, not only to the star rating.

5. Support terms

Umbraco ships minor releases about every six weeks and security patches as needed. Ask how the agency handles that after launch:

• Who applies security updates, and how fast after a release?
• What response times apply to production incidents, and in which time zone?
• Is support a retainer, a block of hours or ad hoc?
• What happens at the end of the contract: handover documentation, access transfer, notice period?

6. Hosting

Clarify whether the site will run on Umbraco Cloud or on your own Azure or AWS infrastructure, and who operates it. Each has trade-offs: Umbraco Cloud includes some add-on licenses and managed environments, while self-hosting gives more control over infrastructure and cost. Make sure the agency has run the option you choose in production.

7. Code ownership and licensing

Your contract should state that you own the code and the repository, and that commercial licenses (for example Umbraco Forms subscriptions or paid packages) are registered in your organization’s name. Ask which third-party packages the agency plans to use and under which licenses, including its own.

8. Team and engagement model

Find out who will actually do the work, how many people, their seniority and whether they are employees or subcontractors. Ask how the agency works with your in-house team: pull requests you can review, shared repositories, documented acceptance criteria.

Red flags

• No recent work on 14 or later. In 2026 that means the team has not worked with the current back office.
• Vague upgrade estimates without an inventory of packages, extensions and integrations.
• Code held in the agency’s own repository with no clear transfer of ownership.
• Licenses registered to the agency rather than to you.
• Tier claims that do not match the partner index, or certified names that are not in the certified developer search.
• No references you can speak to, or reviews that are all unverified testimonials on the agency’s own site.
• A proposal to build on a short-term release (for example 18 or 19) without explaining the upgrade it commits you to within a year.

What OSKI’s partner status does and does not mean

We are a Registered Umbraco Partner. In plain terms:

What it means. We have a formal relationship with Umbraco and have worked with Umbraco and .NET for more than ten years.

What it does not mean. We are not a Silver, Gold or Platinum partner, and we do not hold a Contributing badge. Being Registered does not certify our developers and does not come with the tier benefits Umbraco offers its higher partners. You should judge us on the same checklist as anyone else.

The evidence we would point to, all of which you can check:

• Public packages. We publish 11 Umbraco NuGet packages with about 51,800 downloads in total, including recent ones built for Umbraco 17 and 18.
• Verified reviews. Our rating on Clutch is 5.0 from 7 verified reviews.
• Upgrades. On the Jongeneel platform we moved an internal operations system from Umbraco 8 and .NET Framework to Umbraco 17 on .NET 10, replacing the deprecated NuPicker with Contentment and keeping background jobs and back-office plugins working.
• Scale. We run Ben-Gurion University’s Umbraco site, with about 80,000 pages and around 1,000 editors, including a zero-downtime move from Azure to AWS.
• Multi-site and integrations. For Alliant we rebuilt a family of insurance websites on current Umbraco with one modular multi-site architecture, Okta sign-in for editors and Eloqua forms.
• Working under another brand. From 2021 to 2025 we delivered white-label Umbraco work for a US consultancy, building custom sites and Okta integrations for its clients.

If you are comparing agencies, we are happy to walk through this checklist with you on a call, whether or not you end up working with us. You can see how we work on our Umbraco development page, or read about our dedicated teams and white-label model if you need developers inside your own team.