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.
Read full review This is a CMS solution that uses ASP and now XSLT and ASP.NET MVC environment, so make sure your servers are Windows based. Also, be sure to speak about audits to your CMS environment, this can save you time, money and energy if you intend on developing anything custom in the future. The more prepared your environment, the smoother it is to use this powerful cms.
Read full review 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). Read full review Its dashboard is quite clear and visible. Its reports are very flexible and helpful for us since they contain all the information that is necessary. The content scheduling feature is good in facilitating us by publishing the content at the time we set. A content repository is amazing as it allows editing, tagging and managing, and storage of the published as well as scheduled publish content. Read full review Cons Allow end users to clear cache when updating pages. Needs a few more built in forms. The CMS is not multilingual by default. Even though I managed to 'hack' it so, it would be nice to have it included. It'd be nice to make use of custom PHP modules through shortcodes more straight forward. It seems the hooks are a bit contrived. Read full review SEO Management - though our courses are not available free publicly but still within our systems a better search engine for the courses and its content could work very well. Ingeniux could be more interactive when it comes to exporting/importing documents. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review IGX CMS is a stable product and IGX is a stable company with several other offerings that pair with the CMS including an LMS and CRM (among others).
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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.
Read full review Performance 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!
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Kevin Call ★ Assistant Director of Electronic Communications
Read full review Friendly, knowledgeable, willing to teach. Their satisfaction is reached when I get my problem solved.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review I have only used the free versions of the other softwares. My Ingeniux CMS experience was much better but I had the paid version
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Company employees can easily locate product documentation now. Our team doesn't have to field nearly as many pings and calls from people looking for content. The writers can manage the content much more easily now. For example, multiple writers can work on individual topics as opposed to passing around Word files. We can single-source content that is duplicated across the site. This is a huge time saver. Read full review ScreenShots