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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Igloo
Score 6.4 out of 10
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Igloo Software is a social business software company that builds digital workplaces and intranet solutions to support online communities and businesses of any size. It is a suite of content management, collaboration and knowledge sharing tools within one secure social networking platform. Online communities drive groups, teams and organizations to improve employee productivity, foster relationships and increase collaboration with customers, partners and suppliers.
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Pricing
Concrete CMS
Igloo
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Concrete CMS
Igloo
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Igloo is free to use for up to 10 users.
Paid accounts begin $12 per user per month.
We also offer volume discounts for enterprise-wide intranets and external users. Contact us for details.
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.
Igloo is a well-suited option for teams/companies that want to build an employee intranet with some other interesting features, like file storage and sharing, internal communications, and resource and knowledge management. All of these features may help your workers increase productivity significantly by centralizing everything in one robust and reliable platform. However, it can be less appropriate if costs are a problem for you, due to the pricing. So, if you will not be using several features and just want an intranet for you company, you may want to go with another solution.
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).
Their UI is not used-friendly. Their use of Igloo-specific terminology made it difficult to understand how each function of the site worked. They would repeatedly say, for example, "a ___ is really a ___" vs. just calling it what the function actually is.
Implementation was a far cry from their sales support. After basically nickel-and-diming you for everything, they - very poorly - cap your use of their implementation support team.
Overall, Igloo didn't work for our organization because they do multiple things decently vs a few things excellently. The experience with Igloo was unremarkable.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Easy to use, cost-effective, and benefit in organizational culture development and information sharing across various employees and from higher management. Great customer support and continuous development to make the software better for users. It allows better collaboration with a little bit of fun too and requires less resources to handle.
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.
