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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MODX
Score 9.0 out of 10
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The MODX Digital Experience Platform provides everything you need to build, host, and maintain amazing websites your way. The vendor says that with MODX CMS and cloud hosting, users have complete control over their creative vision and the experiences they deliver, without restriction or compromise. They can focus more on building great digital experiences, and less on hosting and maintaining. If you ever need help, MODX Professionals are available worldwide and direct support from…
$0
per installation
Pricing
Concrete CMS
MODX
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
MODX Revolution
$0
per installation
PRO - Perfect for customers with typical marketing sites
$19
per month
STUDIO - Perfect for customers who need more power and resources
$49
per month
BUSINESS - Perfect for digital agencies and marketing departments
$99
per month
ENTERPRISE - Perfect for or organizations with custom requirements
Upon Request
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Concrete CMS
MODX
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
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PAYMENT FORMS
MODX Cloud accepts major credit cards and PayPal for your hosting subscription. We can only accept check (cheque) payments on the Enterprise Plan, annually.
CANCELLATION
You may cancel your MODX Cloud account at any time. Before you cancel you'll be reminded to backup and remove all your live websites and then follow the instructions for cancellation. If you cancel within the first month, we'll provide you with a full refund.
REFUNDS
If you cancel within the first month, we'll provide you with a full refund. All other cancellations will be effective at the end of your current billing period. We do not provide refunds for remaining days or months on monthly or annual billing.
ConcreteCMS is different from all other a used. all others have a specific purpose, like Odoo or Dolibarr for ERP/CRM, Magento Prestashop ... for e-commerce, GLPI and other CMMS for material management, and so on. Concrete CMS is usable for all, flexible, natively for CMS or …
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.
[MODX is well suited for] all websites, from blogs to corporate sites. It is fast scalable and really good. A small site can be build really fast, and a large site can be made extremely scalable. A website redesign is easy to implement with a new template, without having to redo the content. It got great user groups and users and back-office access can be completely customized.
While ecommerce is possible with some really good plugins I would only use MODX with ecommerce for sites where ecommerce is not the primary role. For pure ecommerce sites rather use a dedicated system like e.g. PrestaShop (i would say the same thing with other ecommerce plugins e.g. WP woo commerce don't do it unless its a site add on.)
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).
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.
It is the CMS we use the most, not because we know it well but because we literally tried many of other CMS and this one did it for us.
However having said we really do not like the one shoe fits all approach. E..g for eCommerce we usually use PrestaShop etc. if a specialized CMS can do a task rather use that.
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.
The other company that we looked into was WordPress and all of the features that it offered our organization. What MODX offered to us from development to everyday use just made more sense for our organization as a whole. WordPress is still a great CMS platform, just not exactly what we were looking for.
Very scalable. e.g. in the [MODX] manager you can manage multiple websites at once without having to login else where. it is very convenient and this way resources and be easily managed and shared.
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.
