Concrete CMS vs. Joomla! vs. Optimizely Content Management System

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.

If your developers want to have some fun, Joomla offers the stability and friendliness to do custom coding. Certain marketing initiatives require us to get "cute" with the interface, and Joomla allows for that a bit easier than WordPress (and definitely easier than sites like Squarespace). The security of Joomla is also always a plus.

Incentivized

If you want to build a website quickly there are plenty of ways to do so with some great examples and plenty of support both from the company and in the forums. if you want to build a more complex structure you can but be ready to spend the time to build exactly what you need as a solid foundation goes a massive way before building out content and making those choices early and sticking with them helps

Incentivized

• 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).

Incentivized

• Security. Its got many new features in the new Joomla! 4 which make the already good security even better. I like the ability to use my Yubi keys to log in with the new webauth standard, I don't think any other CMS has that built in
• W3C Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 (with AA compliance)
• Really good SEO that gets our sites to the top of the search engines again without the need for any extra things
• Speed, it gets a really good score (100%) in the google lighthouse on our server, can't beat that

• I think the user interface for content admins is very good and very competitive. And compared to other providers, the technology that CMS in particular has. So the way it integrated the net ecosystem is very well because it follows the MBC pattern. So basically it just allows really simple implementations for what would normally be complex components on any other sort of vendor that's out there.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Because Joomla's user community is smaller than WP, it lacks as many choices from 3rd party developers, meaning it can be a little more difficult to find the right extension for what you need to accomplish
• Along the same vein, most of the best 3rd-party software for Joomla! is paid
• Simple features such as Add to Menu and Cache cleaners should be adopted as part of the Joomla! core, though they are available as extensions
• Joomla! could use a simpler and easier URL rewriting process

Incentivized

• Magento did have some nice tools for creating product groups or carousels for promotion. Opti seems to be lacking in that.
• A blog - maybe this is available and we don't have it installed, but a searchable blog would be very appreciated.
• Structured Data/MicroData - maybe it's our install, but this seems to be missing
• Meta data: we have access to limited types and need to make a request from IT, it would be nice to be able to access more to adjust for SEO needs.
• When in a folder on the BLOCKS tab, it would be wonderful to hit the MEDIA tab and stay in that same folder.
• I have some less technical people that will make folders with spaces - which Opti handles, but it would be great if it wouldn't accept a space or gave an error message not to use them.
• I think I know why the extra code is added to urls and image links, but it causes issues when taking things from our testing site to the live site. For example, I need to copy the Navigation from Inspect Element on testing to put it in production. I have learned to work around it, but it's not my favorite.

Incentivized

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 gave it a rating of 10 because I just love how Joomla! works, how it is set up and how it handles many users. Also it is very fast, and there is no overload on the MySQL database or servers ever.

Incentivized

Since I work on the implementation side of things, and do not directly own licensing for Ektron CMS, I have to base this rating off of how I think it will be received or presented to customers looking to start a new site deployment. I try to remain CMS agnostic, though my specialty is with the .NET and Microsoft stack. Because of the experience I have working with Ektron, I tend to be more forgiving with the shortcomings as I am familiar with how to work around them or past them from experience. Being familiar with the community available also helps, as you become familiar with the best approaches to find solutions to your issues. Each product has it's ups and downs and all of them are only going to be as good as the company or development team implementing them can make them. This is EXTREMELY important to remember when choosing a CMS, as it can make or break your expensive investment.

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.

Incentivized

Joomla! 3.x is easily installed either manually or via a script provided by your host. It contains most of the tools needed to begin creating websites right from the start. Those features that it doesn't have are easily installed via links and buttons from the thousands of extensions available in the community

From our editors perspective they find the CMS system easy and to clear to use. Our developers find it very easy to design on and appreciate the level of service support available. It's also always evolving and getting better every year. We find this investment reassuring and encourages us to try keep pace and see how we can continue to push the envelope and continue to improve all aspect of our websites and online touch points.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Unplanned outages or errors are fairly rare in our instance. And when there are issues, they're usually fixed fairly quickly

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!

Today's Modern Joomla performs very well and is robust and durable. The pages load faster than they ever did in the past and Modern Joomla's integration into other software or systems has become seamless. Modern Joomla sites will last long and will stay running forever.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Between the core Joomla developers who are excellent at answering questions and providing support, you have a whole community of developers who work with Joomla and are happy to help fellow developers out answering questions and supporting the Joomla project. Out of the many communities I am involved in for open-source software, Joomla's community is by far the best.

Incentivized

I attended multiple trainings/tutorials early in the process. The vendor-supplied content about Optimizely was engaging for users/attendees (I often analyze training content, compliance programs, governance plans), which helps our OCM people by having good "word of mouth" about the product long before a rollout ever happens. I actually when the user-focused portion of the Optimizely Academy twice in 2022 to ensure I had a grasp on operability and to be able to support the training and OCM efforts

Incentivized

It is good if you know Joomla! if not it can get a bit confusing

Ektron is one of the best solution for .Net platform. Over the years have improved the performance issues that the previous versions had. My only complain is right now you can't do Page builder pages if you choose to have a MVC architecture

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.

Joomla has gone through tremendous growing pains. It is now better than ever. But before, when it was going from 1.5-2.5, the templates and plugins would break over and over again. If you don't understand what Joomla was trying to do back then, you might have a bad attitude toward it. Today, those pains are over and things don't break like they used to during that time period.

Incentivized

I was not fully involved.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We tested other platforms like WordPress, Magento and some local CMS. 
But Joomla offered us better resources for generating content.
Joomla is a CMS suitable for many types of projects, especially if you have several people editing content at the same time. 
It allows you to maintain visual standardization and offers many options for working with images. 
With its ability to control access to different articles, categories or even different components, it is a great tool, even if they are managed by different people.

Incentivized

Optimizely Content Management System is much more feature rich, and less complex that the other CMS platforms we have used. Optimizely Content Management System is more intuitive in how the content is structured and how easy it is to pull blocks of content to create the layout of a page.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Joomla has reduced our costs of rolling out a new website because it uses less developer time and can be rolled out by individual users as needed.
• Joomla has a lot of extensions and add-ons that make it easy to create and implement advanced solutions quickly.

Incentivized

• Flexibility with design that allows us to work towards our mission of 'Tennis Opened Up'
• Speed of deploying content, meaning users can really on us for the most up-to-date content on tennis in Britain
• Ability to have different logged-in areas for different user groups, allowing us to create more bespoke and personalised experiences

Incentivized