Concrete CMS (formerly Concrete5) is a free and open source, PHP built content management system for content on the web and also for intranets. It is optimized to support the creation of online magazines and newspapers.
N/A
Umbraco CMS
Score 6.7 out of 10
N/A
Umbraco is an open-source .NET Core CMS with over 700,000 active installs worldwide and with more than 200,000 active community members. It was first released on February 16th, 2005, and is still to this day an open-source project backed by a commercial company. To ensure Umbraco is always running the latest technology, the company has aligned with Microsoft's .NET release schedule to always have the Umbraco CMS…
$0
Pricing
Concrete CMS
Umbraco CMS
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Umbraco Free
$0
Umbraco Starter
$53
per month
Umbraco Standard
$320
per month
Umbraco Professional
$860
per month
Umbraco Cloud Enterprise
Custom Pricing
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Concrete CMS
Umbraco CMS
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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The Umbraco CMS and all of its core features are the same across all plans.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Concrete CMS
Umbraco CMS
Features
Concrete CMS
Umbraco CMS
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Concrete CMS
9.5
Ratings
16% above category average
Umbraco CMS
9.0
Ratings
11% above category average
Role-based user permissions
9.50 Ratings
9.00 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
Concrete CMS
9.7
Ratings
24% above category average
Umbraco CMS
8.5
Ratings
11% above category average
API
9.70 Ratings
8.00 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language
9.70 Ratings
9.00 Ratings
Web Content Creation
Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Product A and Product B
Concrete CMS
8.4
Ratings
8% above category average
Umbraco CMS
8.0
Ratings
4% above category average
WYSIWYG editor
9.30 Ratings
10.00 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness
10.00 Ratings
10.00 Ratings
Admin section
10.00 Ratings
7.00 Ratings
Page templates
10.00 Ratings
8.00 Ratings
Library of website themes
4.20 Ratings
6.00 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design
9.70 Ratings
6.00 Ratings
Publishing workflow
7.70 Ratings
10.00 Ratings
Form generator
6.60 Ratings
7.00 Ratings
Web Content Management
Comparison of Web Content Management features of Product A and Product B
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.
Umbraco is well suited for websites that are looking to do a wide range of activities that require complex technoligies. An example of this is a company with several different products or services. Umbraco would be overkill for simple sites that are mostly static. It is also difficult to find developers who have Umbraco experience, as it's market share is not all that high
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.
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.
Migration of data between servers. There are tools that you can pay for that help facilitate this, but like any CMS system, there are still some tricks to getting it to work correctly.
Running as a Web Project instead of a Web Site. Umbraco does not run compiled code, but instead compiles it on the fly. I find this to cause some performance issues that would otherwise be resolved with a compiled code base.
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.
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
Umbraco CMS effectively addresses enterprise content management needs. It's quite mature .NET based CMS, standing out as a leader among its competitors. Websites built with Umbraco are blazing fast. Extensive customization capabilities, and user-friendly content publishing interface makes it an ideal choice for businesses looking for a mature CMS solution.
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.
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!
Working in the admin panel (adding / reviewing / editing content) is very slow. The public facing site speed is dependent on what the pages are doing and how well the code was written (whether it is optimized for speed).
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.
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.
Spend the time to wireframe the content structure prior to diving in. This helps speed the process of implementation and it serves as documentation for end users.
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.
We previously used WordPress, however this was not easy to use, it was a complicated system and was limited in what we could achieve, there was a big outlay in buying bolts on and ensuring the system was safe. We found we where spammed loads, we tried to make it work however after a year we decided to leave WordPress behind. The company did evaluated Adobe but the dev team decided that Umbraco was the best tool to meet our own needs.
