Announced at Codegarden 2026, Umbraco Automate is a brand new addition to the Umbraco family – and it could change the way your team manages your website day to day.
If you've never heard of Codegarden, it's the annual conference organised by Umbraco – the biggest gathering in the Umbraco world, held each June in Copenhagen – where the team unveils what they've been building and shares a look at what's coming next. This year's event was packed with announcements, but the one that really caught our attention was the launch of a new, standalone product: Umbraco Automate.
So, what is it? And, more importantly, what does it mean for your business?
The problem it solves
If you've ever asked your web team to set up a simple automated email when someone fills in a contact form, or to send an internal alert when a new product is published, you'll know how quickly those requests end up in a backlog. Small automations – the kind that would save your marketing or operations team a surprising amount of time – have traditionally required developer involvement to build and maintain.
Umbraco Automate changes that.
What Umbraco Automate actually does
Think of it as an automation engine that lives directly inside your Umbraco backoffice – the same place where your editors manage content, publish pages and update your site.
Using a simple drag-and-drop interface, you can build "if this, then that" flows without needing to write a single line of code. For example: if a form is submitted, send an email to the sales team. Or: if a product is published, post an alert to a Slack channel. Or: if a piece of content is approved in Umbraco Workflow, trigger a discount code in your commerce system.
These are the kinds of tasks that marketing and operations teams do manually every day – or have been waiting for IT to automate for months.
It also connects to AI
One of the more forward-looking features is the ability to bring AI into your automation flows. You can call AI agents as steps within a flow, or have an automation trigger in response to the result of an AI task. So, for example, an AI step could review a piece of submitted content before it's published, or summarise a form response before routing it to the right team.
For businesses that are curious about AI but want to keep a human in the loop – and quite rightly so – Automate includes a built-in human approval step. Nothing external or AI-generated goes live without a person signing it off. It's a reassuringly sensible approach to what can sometimes feel like a runaway train.
When can you use it?
Umbraco Automate is open source, which means there are no limits on the number of runs, triggers, actions or users. It launched in beta for Umbraco 17 at Codegarden on 10 June 2026, with a final release planned for 9 July 2026.
For teams already on Umbraco 17 – or those planning to upgrade – this is something worth putting on your radar now.
A good fit for growing teams
We work with a wide range of organisations, from smaller businesses to larger enterprises, and a common thread is this: the teams managing websites are busy. They don't always have a developer on hand to wire up every integration, and the manual steps involved in keeping things running can quietly eat up a lot of time.
Umbraco Automate feels like a practical answer to that problem. It's not about replacing your team's thinking – it's about removing the repetitive manual steps that slow them down, and doing so within the platform they already use.
If you'd like to talk about whether Umbraco Automate could benefit your organisation, or if you're thinking about upgrading to Umbraco 17 ahead of the final release, give us a call at Lake Solutions on: 020 3397 3222.