Payload CMS vs Umbraco

Both are self-hosted content management systems (cms) projects. This page compares how well each one is actually maintained — the part you cannot see from a feature list.

Payload CMS scores 91 against Umbraco's 84, putting it slightly ahead on the strength of a stronger recent trend and a larger community. That measures project health, not feature fit — Umbraco may still be the right choice if it does what you need.
Payload CMSUmbraco
Health score 91/100 84/100
Commits (11 mo) 1640 2786
Commits (last 3 mo) 431 691
Stars 45k 5.3k
Latest release 24 Sept 2026 17 Sept 2026
Licence MIT MIT
Built with Nodejs .NET
Typical RAM 2 GB 2 GB

Payload CMS

Developer-first headless CMS and application framework.

91/100
Thriving

High commit volume, frequent releases and growing activity.

Maintenance 35/40
Releases 25/25
Community 19/20
Momentum 12/15

Commit activity more than 87% of tracked projects; popularity more than 96%. How this is calculated.

Commits, last 11 months

2025-10: 190 commits 2025-11: 124 commits 2025-12: 105 commits 2026-01: 201 commits 2026-02: 139 commits 2026-03: 115 commits 2026-04: 188 commits 2026-05: 147 commits 2026-06: 172 commits 2026-07: 163 commits 2026-08: 96 commits

Umbraco

The friendly CMS. Free and open source with an amazing community.

84/100
Thriving

High commit volume, frequent releases and growing activity.

Maintenance 37/40
Releases 25/25
Community 13/20
Momentum 8/15

Commit activity more than 93% of tracked projects; popularity more than 67%. How this is calculated.

Commits, last 11 months

2025-10: 326 commits 2025-11: 173 commits 2025-12: 173 commits 2026-01: 181 commits 2026-02: 147 commits 2026-03: 276 commits 2026-04: 404 commits 2026-05: 415 commits 2026-06: 208 commits 2026-07: 296 commits 2026-08: 187 commits

How to read this

Everything above is measured, not opinion: commit counts and release dates come from the public repositories, and the health score ranks each project against all 1352 projects we track. Read the full method.

What this comparison deliberately does not do is tell you which has the better feature set. Maintenance health tells you which project will still be receiving security fixes in two years. Decide that first, then compare features on the projects that survive the filter.

See every option in this category: self-hosted content management systems (cms).