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.
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Drupal
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Drupal is a free, open-source content management system written in PHP that competes primarily with Joomla and Plone. The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains basic features such as account and menu management, RSS feeds, page layout customization, and system administration.
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Pricing
Concrete CMS
Drupal
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Concrete CMS
Drupal
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Concrete CMS
Drupal
Considered Both Products
Concrete CMS
Verified User
Professional
Chose Concrete CMS
We did not select Concrete5 as we inherited it. If selecting again, we would use WordPress, Drupal or another CMS to meet our needs.
I believe WordPress and Drupal to be superior products. But Concrete5 holds its own against them. I selected Concrete5 for real estate and marketing firms for the ease of use and updating. The drop and drag editor is hard to beat.
Concrete5 is easier to use than Drupal or Joomla, and beats them in terms of features. WordPress gives Concrete5 a run for its money as far as extension and theme availability, as well as user base and support availability. But Concrete5 beats WordPress hands down with features …
Concrete5 is much easier to use than Drupal and has more functionality set up out of the box with just enough add-ons to get the job done. I have used both WordPress and Drupal, and this sits between them. Concrete5 is not quite as easy as WordPress but much easier than Drupal …
My initial test was to time how long it took to create a very basic site from scratch with no prior knowledge. Concrete CMS won decisively. Over time, I've worked on projects that use other systems, and the challenges I encounter always affirm my choice to stay with Concrete …
Concrete5 compares very well to other content management systems such as Wordpress, Drupal, Expression Engine and Joomla. Concrete5 seems to have the easiest learning curve from development standpoint and much easier to use for the end user.
Concrete5 was far easier to use than alternatives--which is very important when handling support issues for clients. As a developer, the architecture makes it easier to extend the core functions elegantly without overwriting core code. Although a few other CMS platforms have …
If your web team is tired of dealing with CMS training issues, you need to consider Concrete5. If your technical team and host are tired of dealing with website security issues, you need to consider Concrete5. If you're pulling your hair out over frequent update patches …
Concrete5 is by far the easiest for the end user. The user who edits the website can do so with very little training and not just with regards to the content. New pages and functions are easy to create and install. SEOand contact form functions are built in as standard.
I adopted Concrete5 after an end-user trial. With a variety of well known and lesser known CMS (including the above) in their fresh install state, I asked a group of users to register an account and then add a page with some text and an image on it. Concrete5 came out top by a …
Concrete5 is superior in most usecases to all other commonly used CMS platforms. The only thing where Joomla is outpreforming it is bulk editing. WordPress needs at least 20 plugins to do what Concrete5 does out of the box.
Programming C5 templates and custom views is a dream, …
Concrete5's UI is a bit more dated compared to WordPress, and the ecosystem for plugins is smaller. But out of the box, Concrete5 does more with its clean code than WordPress does. WordPress's UI and large plugin/community around it is its biggest strength as a product, not the …
Concrete5 is probably the most user friendly for clients. I selected Concrete5 mostly because I found out about it and didn't really believe its capabilities and had to try it out. It pretty much is what a non-tech savvy person would want in a CMS for content management.
WordPress has a very confusing unintuitive admin section for the user to use while Concrete5 was much more intuitive and effective for people not use to working with a CMS solution. Components are selectable by areas you create in the page template and allows a user to quickly …
I find significant advantages over these other products. As a designer, I appreciate not having to design within a rigid structure, or shoehorn a design into particular format. As a developer, the security, useability and developer support from the core Concrete5 developers and …
Personally I feel that WordPress is overly complicated and not as efficient as Concrete5. For example, Wordpress is a blogging platform hacked into a CMS, where Concrete5 is almost like a foundation with a CMS component. Concrete5 is very similar to Drupal just without the …
Concrete5 absolutely shines in comparison. While there are areas where one system may perform a specific task better than Concrete5, when it comes to the whole package Concrete5 can't be beat.
Concrete5 is the least contrived CMS I've ever run across. It's easily the quickest to theme and get up and running whereas Wordpress or Drupal could take months to get a Theme made Concrete5 can get one in a week. There's no reason to re-invent the wheel with loops and the …
Concrete5 is my first choice if you compare it with smaller solutions like Wordpress,Joomla or Drupal because of its ease to use and flexibility. However, solutions for bigger projects like Sitecore or Umbraco are in their own league. They perform where Concrete5 is not very …
I was overall pleased with the UI and the clarity of the development process. The upgrade process is a breeze, the CMS is light, powerful, and the community forum is great. Job is simply done with great results.
I tried WordPress back when it was @ 2.5 or so. It was very blog oriented. Have used CMS Made Simple. I liked it but it got to be outdated. Drupal has a higher learning curve and would take a lo more training and time to implement.
I often use Perch for smaller site builds because it is simpler, lighter, and faster than Concrete5. Perch has become more and more capable and along the way is taking over some of the medium-size sites I build. WordPress was designed for blogs, and its ubiquity has made it a …
Comparing Concrete5 to Drupal and Joomla are easy. Joomla has a steep learning curve, and Concrete5 does not, this means if I have to teach a client to use a CMS, Concrete5 will be a much smoother process. Drupal also tends to have a bit of a learning curve, but beyond that …
Years ago when I personally was early on in my web development learning path, I tried to learn and use Drupal. Its complexity and difficulty proved to be too much, at least for me personally at that point in time. Finding and using Concrete5 was a real nice experience after …
Before discovering Concrete5 I installed and looked at Drupal and Joomla. I never completely built a site using either one. I found there to be too steep of a learning curve for the end user. I've used WordPress to edit content on other sites although I've never built a site …
Drupal has the best community and support system of any other CMS that I have used. Drupal is more flexible from A-Z including installation, building and customizing the CMS. The only other (free) CMS that is close, in my opinion, is Dot Net Nuke.
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.
Well, I'm definitely biased, I've been working with Drupal for 12+ years, and I can say it's appropriate for any size/scale of a project, whether it's a small catalog website or a huge corporation. If I want to dial it down to a specific use case, Drupal is best what most customers/clients that have high-security standards, and need to have extensive editorial experience and control over their website's architecture. Due to its core design, Drupal can connect with each part of its own and any external third-party resources quite easily. For a less-suited scenario, I might say that if you don't have enough budget to get proper work done, sometimes just using WordPress with a pre-designed theme might sound better to you, but if you have the budget and the time, always go with Drupal
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).
Content Types... these are amazing. Whereas a more simplistic CMS like Wordpress will basically allow you to make posts and build pages, Drupal 8 gives you the ability to define different types of content that behave differently, and are served up differently in different areas of the website.
Extensibility... it scales, ohhhh does it scale. They've really figured out server-side caching, and it makes all the difference. Once a page has been cached, it's available instantly to all users worldwide; and when coupled with AWS, global redundancy and localization mean that no matter where you're accessing the site, it always loads fast and crisp.
Workflows... you have the ability to define very specific roles and/or user-based editorial workflows, allowing for as many touchpoints and reviews between content creation and publication as you'll require.
Security and new release notifications are a hassle as they happen too often
Allowing them to write PHP modules is a big advantage, but sometimes integrating them is a small challenge due to the version the developer is working on.
Its a very solid, very consistent package that never lets you down or leaves you frustrated. It gets a 10/10 because its so much better than anything else currently available. It also gets a 10/10 because, even if not compared to others, it does not leave you wanting for features or functionality. It is an excellent piece of software that will answer almost every CMS need.
The time and money invested into this platform were too great to discontinue it at this point. I'm sure it will be in use for a while. We have also spent time training many employees how to use it. All of these things add up to quite an investment in the product. Lastly, it basically fulfills what we need our intranet site to do.
I have used it on over 30 projects in the past 3 years and it's still a pleasure to work in. Doesn't always have all the answers, no CMS does, but I still find it very easy to use from prototyping to working to final project. Also there is no problem working on a localhost then moving to a live site, like there is with WordPress. It's my go to app in my CMS quiver.
It's a great CMS platform and there are a ton of plugins to add some serious functionality, but the security updates are too complex to implement and considering the complexity of the platform, security updates are a must. I don't want my site breached because they make it too difficult to keep it up to date.
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.
Drupal itself does not tend to have bugs that cause sporadic outages. When deployed on a well-configured LAMP stack, deployment and maintenance problems are minimal, and in general no exotic tuning or configuration is required. For highest uptime, putting a caching proxy like Varnish in front of Drupal (or a CDN that supports dynamic applications).
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!
Drupal page loads can be slow, as a great many database calls may be required to generate a page. It is highly recommended to use caching systems, both built-in and external to lessen such database loads and improve performance. I haven't had any problems with behind-the-scenes integrations with external systems.
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.
As noted earlier, the support of the community can be rather variable, with some modules attracting more attraction and action in their issue queues, but overall, the development community for Drupal is second to none. It probably the single greatest aspect of being involved in this open-source project.
I was part of the team that conducted the training. Our training was fine, but we could have been better informed on Drupal before we started providing it. If we did not have answers to tough questions, we had more technical staff we could consult with. We did provide hands-on practice time for the learners, which I would always recommend. That is where the best learning occurred.
The on-line training was not as ideal as the face-to-face training. It was done remotely and only allowed for the trainers to present information to the learners and demonstrate the platform online. There was not a good way to allow for the learners to practice, ask questions and have them answered all in the same session.
Build off of an existing theme to speed up the creation of custom designed themed. Bootstrap is a good one but there are many others that are probably much simpler to build from than the Bootstrap one was. Make sure you host on a Unix/Linux server so you don't have to install PHP or MySQL separately. It's just smoother on those platforms.
Plan ahead as much you can. You really need to know how to build what you want with the modules available to you, or that you might need to code yourself, in order to make the best use of Drupal. I recommend you analyze the most technically difficult workflows and other aspects of your implementation, and try building some test versions of those first. Get feedback from stakeholders early and often, because you can easily find yourself in a situation where your implementation does 90% of what you want, but, due to something you didn't plan for, foresee, or know about, there's no feasible way to get past the last 10%
WordPress at the time was riddled with security breaches in the news and while Concrete5 was smaller (and therefore a smaller attack vector), after eleven years of use, Concrete5 has only had one published incident with an add-on that resolved within hours and with excellent communication. You can talk to the CEO and the CTO (or the rest of the team). They are very engaged and you're working with a small company of people who care, not a call-center with people just waiting to go home.
Drupal is community-backed making it more accessible and growing at a faster rate than Sitefinity which is a proprietary product built on .NET. Drupal is PHP-based using some but not all Symphony codebase. Updates for Drupal are frequent and so are feature adds.
Drupal is well known to be scalable, although it requires solid knowledge of MySQL best practices, caching mechanisms, and other server-level best practices. I have never personally dealt with an especially large site, so I can speak well to the issues associated with Drupal scaling.
Concrete5 is the customer-facing side of our business. It's where we host the site that potential customers see before they choose to purchase and create an account with us. We are able to keep that site clean, user-friendly, and with a lot of available options for customers to interact with thanks to Concrete5
The ability to have multiple users and admins for the site means that we all members of our team can go in and create new content, fix or troubleshoot issues, and edit the site easily.
Our CRM isn't directly integrated with Concrete5, so when customers go to make a purchase with us, they have to leave our Concrete5 site.
Drupal has allowed us to build up a library of code and base sites we can reuse to save time which has increased our efficiency and thus had a positive financial impact.
Drupal has allowed us to take on projects we otherwise would not have been able to, having a further impact.
Drupal has allowed us to build great solutions for our clients which give them an excellent ROI.