Concrete CMS vs. LumApps

Concrete5 is perfect for a website that needs to be regularly updated without accessing the code, whether that be because a developer created your site for you, or because you yourself are a developer who wants to keep the time spent on updates down.

In my experience, it's less useful for modern web apps such as PWAs that would benefit more from technologies such as React and Vue.

Incentivized

LumApps is THE employee experience platform! With its customizable meta-data, I was able to create over 700 pieces of content to deploy a regionalized user experience for our global sales and customer success teams. No longer were employees inundated with content that did not apply to their region or market. With LumApps’ best in class functionality, the integrations that our organization uses, such as Google and Slack were easily integrated within LumApps to create a seamless user experience for a global audience.

• Concrete5 has a modular editing system, so you can edit the pages without having knowledge of coding. You just pick the module you want to insert or edit and click where you want it to go.
• You are able to edit modules in an HTML format if you would like to, so if you have the knowledge you can have even more control over your modules.
• You can also edit entire page themes by selecting them from the page layout menu. This allows you a greater versatility of the pages on your site.

Incentivized

• Offers simple addition of custom content types that give the ability to apply different access and distribution levels.
• The HTML widget allows for the simple removal of WYSIWG tools to simplify the view for content contributors.
• The ability to rearrange layouts is very simple.

Incentivized

• Concrete5.6 websites have no good path to migrate to 5.7, short of manual content migration. This is a big problem and affected the user community negatively.
• Some features that were available as paid add-ons in 5.6, such as discussion forums and e-commerce shopping cart, are missing from newer versions 5.7/5.8.
• Starting to develop add-ons and customizations for Concrete5 can be challenging as 5.7/5.8 documentation is not yet complete.

Incentivized

• The editing user interface is a bit wonky and occasionally glitchy.
• The back-end options are not organized super well, which can make it confusing to find the right settings.
• The customization options are somewhat limited without advanced CSS/dev skills, and the basic functions can be a bit challenging for some non-technical users.

Incentivized

I have had nothing but good experiences with Concrete5. I have used it on several client websites and even several of my own sites. It is the leading CMS I will go to if I have a need to dynamically update content on a website by people who are typically untrained. They have solved every angst I had with the other solutions I have evaluated in the past and continue to be the simplest to implement and customize.

The tool is easy to use. Even without a dedicated product owner we feel confident using the system for our needs.

Incentivized

Although there is a slight learning curve (as with any software), it is very easy to use once you get a hold of it. It is easy to upload and manage files (and other digital assets), and the drag-n-drop interface on the front-end is easy for end-users to understand

Incentivized

As I said before, LumApps platform is not intuitive at all, people have a lot of trouble using the tool, the curve to learn is too high, mainly the style part, is so confusing what I am adjusting there, is the outside of the widget? What does the padding do, what does the margin does.

Incentivized

Since it's not tied to a central server (other than for authorizing updates and assigning licenses to specific sites), it's available pretty much 100% of the time.

Incentivized

The site works extremely well, the front end flies, searches and form submissions are very fast indeed. The reason its a 9 not a ten? the back end can be a little slow at times, and this is unfair, because for the backend to be so amazing, it has to do a huge amount of work!

Concrete5 is open-source and has an incredibly strong, polite, and supportive community. You can get an answer to nearly anything you want to do with Concrete5 by googling for it, searching the Concrete5 discussion forums or stack overflow, or posting your question to the forum. Members are very courteous and do not look down on those with less knowledge. And answers are always quick, informative, and supportive.

Incentivized

Question and bug support are very helpful and quick. About the feature requests, we don’t have much visibility of the features that we suggested, or If they are going to implement some solutions or not.

Incentivized

It's important that any CMS is implemented by a skilled developer. Content management is not a commodity. One of the keys I've found with Concrete5 is to create a homogenous content-entry method (e.g. focus on in-context editing OR focus on using the Composer feature). This seems to make it more likely that site editors will be able to easily come back to editing after a layoff without having to "remember" too much.

Incentivized

I didn't have to spend too much time learning Concrete CMS, whereas I had to spend a long time learning other CMSs. After struggling to develop a plugin for WordPress, developing an add-on for Concrete CMS was piece of cake thanks to many available APIs. Making custom themes and blocks was much easier than WordPress.

It overall stacked up incredibly against all its competitors. Its customer service, simple to use format, and ease of implementation were hard to beat. We got up and running in about 6-8 months and it was right on schedule for implementation. It's feature set was smaller then it's competitors but even at first glance it was much easier to use for the amount customization it contained. We considered factors when purchasing like ease of use, adaptability, and look/feel overall as a product. No product came close to LumApps on these features.

• Even though the Concrete5 community is growing, it's still not up to the level as some of the other WCMS communities.
• More detailed statistics with historical data could be provided by the system.
• Concrete5 hihgly depends on Jquery. It makes it hard to upgrade the javascript library since the control panel depends on it.

• It is starting to reduce our reliance on email, and the overall volume of email.
• It has created a smoother induction process for new starters because it is a central place where all employees can go for the core information and resources they need to stay informed and do their job.

Incentivized