Concrete CMS Reviews & Insights

Score9.2 out of 10

84 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Concrete CMS are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Smooth User Interface: Many users have praised the smooth user interface of the product, stating that it is intuitive and easy to navigate. Several reviewers have mentioned that they appreciate the clean design and well-organized layout, which enhances their overall experience.

Reliable Performance: Numerous customers have commended the reliable performance of the product. Several reviewers have stated that it consistently meets their expectations and performs tasks efficiently without any glitches or slowdowns. Users have expressed satisfaction with its stability and responsiveness.

Versatile Features: A significant number of users have highlighted the versatility of features offered by the product. Some reviewers have mentioned that it provides a wide range of functionalities, allowing them to accomplish various tasks effectively. The availability of customizable options has also been appreciated by several customers, as it caters to individual preferences and requirements.

Reviews

59 Reviews

Want a super easy and solid swiss army knife of a website, use Concrete CMS

Rating: 9 out of 10

July 4, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it for our public-facing website, and we use it to deliver a range of website solutions for our clients. I offer it to my clients because I know I can create easily maintainable and extensible sites for them and be confident that they can become quite self-sufficient in a short amount of time.

Pros

create and publish user-defined database content
easy and intuitive for site editors *and* developers
standards compliant and highly secure
was built from the ground up to be a versatile and robust development environment

Cons

reinvigorate and grow the (addon) developer community
expand and refine the documentation/education program
grow brand awareness

Likelihood to Recommend

Concrete CMS shines any time the end-user wants to be able to edit their own content. Even in situations where the information is formatted in a complicated and/or technical way, Express objects give the developer a magic wand to allow novice editors the ability to update and maintain site content. I offer Concrete CMS as a far more secure alternative to WordPress, due to Concrete's design and the fact that the brand is currently under the radar of most bad actors.

Jalen Séguin

Founder, CEO at Questio (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

12 years of experience

View profile

Feature packed, intuitive to use

Rating: 10 out of 10

July 2, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Concrete CMS for our website and for our clients. We host 120+ websites that we have developed over the past 7 years. Projects range from simple brochure sites to eCommerce, through to highly bespoke sites, where we have created lots of new functionality.

Pros

Easy and intuitive for site editors
Standards compliant code
Up to date and secure
Limitless, easy to extend
Lots of functionality out of the box

Cons

Documentation could be more extensive
Need to grow community to encourage developers to sell more in the marketplace
Build brand awareness

Likelihood to Recommend

It's very well suited to projects where the client will want to edit their own site and make lots of changes. Because it is so intuitive, clients tend to love working with it. Projects that use feeds and process large amounts of data, are probably better off having a Concrete5 front-end and a separate element elsewhere doing the heavy lifting, perhaps another Laravel application.

David Reeder

Founder & Managing Director in Information Technology at Made Simple Media (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

13 years of experience

View profile

Concrete CMS has nicelly choosen it's name, Concrete is really concrete

Rating: 10 out of 10

March 15, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I'm using Concrete CMS for almost all kinds of web-based software I build. It's a real swiss knife. I've made a website, e-commerce, ERP, and many management tools with it. it's a very nice project base. I always have the facility to teach how to use it to the project's users, it's very intuitive.

Pros

in context editing
plugin programming
web security
modification with mouse

Cons

i don't see

Likelihood to Recommend

more appropriate for a community-based web application, website. less for enterprise but I use it for that too with specific dev of plug-ins. a good choice for little e-commerce too. very good in terms of web security. also, sometimes used for document management in some enterprise and collaborative platforms.

Olivier Soille

Architecte logiciels in Engineering at AdQuate (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

14 years of experience

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Concrete CMS is your ultimate choice of CMS!

Rating: 10 out of 10

October 26, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I've been using Concrete CMS [for] over 12 years. I've switched it from Joomla. I've cheated on WordPress a bit. But I always came back to Concrete CMS. I loved it so much that I even helped Japanese translation [and] helped implement it for other companies in Japan 12 years ago. It's very secure compared to other CMS. In the last 12 years, they barely had any severe, critical vulnerability. They made a very wise decision to switch it to Symfony-based, so it was built much more secure than WordPress. When you use WordPress, you must be careful not to create vulnerabilities. In the case of Concrete CMS, as long as you use its APIs, you worry much less about security. In addition, Concrete CMS has many default features and you won't need many "basic" add-ons that you would usually have to install when you are using WordPress. I highly recommended it. I'm very happy to help many Japanese small to big companies to expand their digital presence.

Pros

Permission and workflow
Ease of adding features by Symfony and composer
Large enterprise intranet
Big enough global community
University websites

Cons

Community
Hosting service

Likelihood to Recommend

Suitable if you are part of small to large scale companies or web-houses which have PHP developers and frontend engineers with some budgets. [Also suitable if] you or your client want to build a website that requires some features or uniqueness [and needs] some customization and freedom. Additionally suitable if you want this project to be DevOps based project or if the project requires very tight security and is inside of a closed network.

Katz Ueno

Editor-in-Chief in Corporate at deerstudio, llc (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

12 years of experience

View profile

ConcreteCMS: the Best!

Rating: 10 out of 10

October 25, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use ConcreteCMS as the choice for our customers. We built and maintain websites, and have been happily doing this with ConcreteCMS (fka Concrete5) since 2009. Our customers soon realize that WordPress is not the way to go once they have seen the possibilities we create for them with ConcreteCMS.

Pros

Content Management for customers
Programming possibilities for us
Smooth & fast, no hassle with daily plug-in updates WordPress has
Never experienced conflicts with different add-ons (daily nightmare in WordPress)

Cons

Better documentation

Likelihood to Recommend

It is simply one of the best true Website Content Management Systems around. It's powerful and stable, both for the end-user as well as us, as developers.

Peter Quintus

Founder & CEO in Information Technology at InDis (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

12 years of experience

View profile

My go to CMS for years

Rating: 9 out of 10

March 12, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use this on a variety of website projects, both internally originated and for clients. It's easy to launch a new site through our hosting platform and keep it up to date, and the compact marketplace for add-ons and themes weeds out so much of the noise you would find on bigger marketplaces.

Pros

Great UI for users to create content
No need to deal with the maintenance structure, but when you do it is well designed
Doesn't most everything you need from the base install

Cons

The user forum needs a shake up. Can be hard to get activity on a thread
Some more complex features aren't being developed by the community and need to be
Needs more support to overcome the preference for the 800 pound gorilla in the sector

Likelihood to Recommend

The right choice for more projects than it wins. Get a site up and running quickly and focus on the content, not the inner workings. Good for early-stage companies to use and grow with, when you don't need to mess with your website at the expense of your business. An economical choice without the fear of your information becoming part of the business success of the developer. (no ties into the Internet economy of big data).

Garrett Ewald

Owner in Marketing at Pranzare (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

Best CMS

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

March 6, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Concrete5 gets used from standard websites to big portals with a lot of individual funcionallities. It also gets used as a framework.

Pros

Many built-in functionalities that makes it a complete CMS
It constantly keeps on developing and the community is very active
It can be extended very quick and easy and is a solid framework

Cons

Should be known better
Traning and certification
Partner program

Likelihood to Recommend

Concrete5 suits well for any CMS project - from a standard website to big portals. It is very easy to be administrated by editors and also can be extended quickly by developers.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

A awesome tool for a better and inclusive web

Rating: 10 out of 10

March 3, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

An awesome tool for a better and inclusive web. I build a lot of websites for different industries like medicine, construction, food, automation, real estate, etc. The principal benefit is the time I save building with concrete5. I discovered it in late 2013 and started building in 2014, making more than 100 websites with this tool.

Pros

Easy: Installation, configuration, customization and to do improvements.
A great community that helps everyone in trouble (if it happens).
Tons of add-ons and great numbers of theme options (could be more, but is ok).

Cons

A few options to customize a theme on core system.
A few themes selling on market place.
Small community around the world.

Likelihood to Recommend

Give a chance and you will never look back. Only will see the bright future. Concrete5 is a system to build a more inclusive Internet, with tools easier to manage. You can use an institutional website or build an awesome community to manage the company's workflow. Concrete5 is almost like a low code SDK.

Raphael Peniche

Project Manager in Marketing at Estudio Grafenno (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

Amazing CMS, easy to use for both developers and admins

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

February 27, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Concrete5 is used to allow the company's developers to easily create a flexible website that allows its clients to update their content with minimal fuss, and allows the developers to quickly implement new features or changes as when requested by the client. The level of control a client has over their site can be fully tailored to suit the their needs and technical skills.

Pros

As a dev, the Page object (coupled with page attributes, nav menus and page lists) makes structuring a website or web app a dream. The separation of page templates from page types also helps, the former being about layout while the latter is more conceptual.
As an admin, you pretty much have as much control as the developers of the site decide to give you.
The versioning system allows admins to roll changes back and work on changes before publishing them.
The permissions system is exceptionally powerful, allowing roles and/or individual users to be included or excluded from each permission.
The attributes system allows pages, files and users to be given custom properties of various types (e.g. text, image, colour).

Cons

Lack of a REST API for using as a headless CMS (although I believe this will change with the next major version).
No built-in way that I'm aware of to integrate React and/or Vue components.
No equivalent to Wordpress + Advanced Custom Fields' "repeater" fields for adding an indefinitely long list of page/file/user attributes (though it's worth noting that the way Concrete5 is structured makes the need for this much rarer than it is in Wordpress).

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Verified User

Employee in Professional Services (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

Great value for a quick, easy website

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

February 24, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Concrete5 internally to track and control internal processes. It was very quick to set up and use. We are able to host it on our own Apache server, and setup was similar to other CMS software like Drupal or WordPress--set up database, install code, provision users and permissions. Then we set up some pages for writing out procedures and then we ran it through Concrete5's publish workflow.

Pros

Has a great community
It's open source
It's free
Has an add-on market for features not built in
Huge time saver

Cons

Add-on market could be bigger
Documentation can sometimes be lacking

Likelihood to Recommend

Fast and easy to set up; looks very professional. Concrete5 runs great on most servers. This is great software for a small business or individual wanting more control over how their website works. I would not recommend this for a larger business or one that is migrating over a large, complex, older website with or without a previous CMS.

Chris Kerry

Network Support Technician in Information Technology at Vision Bank Topeka (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

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Amazing CMS, easy to use for both developers and admins

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

February 27, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

As a dev, the Page object (coupled with page attributes, nav menus and page lists) makes structuring a website or web app a dream. The separation of page templates from page types also helps, the former being about layout while the latter is more conceptual.
As an admin, you pretty much have as much control as the developers of the site decide to give you.
The versioning system allows admins to roll changes back and work on changes before publishing them.
The permissions system is exceptionally powerful, allowing roles and/or individual users to be included or excluded from each permission.
The attributes system allows pages, files and users to be given custom properties of various types (e.g. text, image, colour).

Cons

Lack of a REST API for using as a headless CMS (although I believe this will change with the next major version).
No built-in way that I'm aware of to integrate React and/or Vue components.
No equivalent to Wordpress + Advanced Custom Fields' "repeater" fields for adding an indefinitely long list of page/file/user attributes (though it's worth noting that the way Concrete5 is structured makes the need for this much rarer than it is in Wordpress).

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Verified User

Employee in Professional Services (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience