Overview
What is Concrete CMS?
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.
Want a super easy and solid swiss army knife of a website, use Concrete CMS
Feature packed, intuitive to use
Concrete CMS has nicelly choosen it's name, Concrete is really concrete
Concrete CMS is your ultimate choice of CMS!
ConcreteCMS: the Best!
My go to CMS for years
Great CMS system for medium to large websites.
Best CMS
A awesome tool for a better and inclusive web
Amazing CMS, easy to use for both developers and admins
Great value for a quick, easy website
Powerful, easy-to-use website content management
Concrete5 Is The Way to Go for Non-Programmers
As a …
Powerful for developers, easy for site editors
Works as expected, a bit resource intensive
Awards
Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards
Popular Features
- Admin section (40)10.0100%
- Page templates (40)10.0100%
- Mobile optimization / responsive design (39)9.797%
- WYSIWYG editor (42)9.292%
Pricing
What is Concrete CMS?
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.
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Would you like us to let the vendor know that you want pricing?
18 people also want pricing
Alternatives Pricing
What is ExpressionEngine?
ExpressionEngine is a content management system from EllisLab in 2002, a successor to pMachine Pro, a blogging system, which is written in object-oriented PHP and uses MySQL for data storage. ExpressionEngine is their flagship Content Delivery Platform.
What is Adobe Business Catalyst (Discontinued)?
Adobe Business Catalyst was a cloud-hosted system for building and managing web content and online stores with a built-in CRM framework in addition to sales, service, and marketing features including eCommerce and Email Marketing tools. It has been end of life (EOL) since 2020.
Product Demos
Concrete CMS DevOps Hosting
Features
Security
This component helps a company minimize the security risks by controlling access to the software and its data, and encouraging best practices among users.
- 9.5Role-based user permissions(38) Ratings
Permissions to perform actions or access or modify data are assigned to roles, which are then assigned to users, reducing complexity of administration.
Platform & Infrastructure
Features related to platform-wide settings and structure, such as permissions, languages, integrations, customizations, etc.
- 9.7API(31) Ratings
An API (application programming interface) provides a standard programming interface for connecting third-party systems to the software for data creation, access, updating and/or deletion.
- 9.7Internationalization / multi-language(30) Ratings
The software supports multiple languages, countries, currencies, etc.
Web Content Creation
Features that support the creation of website content.
- 9.2WYSIWYG editor(42) Ratings
What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editing tool allows users to build pages without writing code.
- 10Code quality / cleanliness(37) Ratings
Code generated by WYSIWYG editor is clean and validates according to W3C standards.
- 10Admin section(40) Ratings
The admin page is easy to navigate and use.
- 10Page templates(40) Ratings
The CMS has standard webpage templates or types of web pages (e.g. homepage, article page, interior page, blog page, etc.); users can also build custom templates.
- 4.4Library of website themes(38) Ratings
A library of website frameworks or themes is available as a starting point for building a website.
- 9.7Mobile optimization / responsive design(39) Ratings
The CMS helps users build webpages that work well on mobile devices – whether m-dot pages or responsively designed pages.
- 7.8Publishing workflow(37) Ratings
The software allows users to set up a custom workflow for updating the website, including approval processes.
- 6.5Form generator(39) Ratings
Users can build website forms for visitors to fill out.
Web Content Management
Features for managing website content
- 8.8Content taxonomy(39) Ratings
Users can create multiple levels and types of content categories including tags.
- 9SEO support(39) Ratings
The CMS helps users create the right website infrastructure (pagination, page headers, titles, meta tags, url structure, etc.) to increase the site’s visibility in search engine results.
- 6.1Bulk management(39) Ratings
Users can change an attribute on a group of documents or sites all at once through features such as global search and replace, making bulk changes easier.
- 5.6Availability / breadth of extensions(39) Ratings
There is a broad library of extensions, plug-ins, modules or add-ons that allow users to easily customize their websites without building custom code.
- 5.6Community / comment management(39) Ratings
Users can put post/page comments through an approval process, auto-approve commenters based on their email addresses, block commenters by IP address, delete comments, etc.
Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Concrete CMS?
Concrete CMS (formerly concrete5) is an Open Source Content Management System for teams. The vendor states users can run a secure website that content contributors will love using with Concrete CMS. Concrete is a platform that grows with the user's needs.
The user experience is built around in-context editing and is designed to be as easy to use as a word processor so that users spend less time training people, and less time having to fix things.
As an open source framework the user can build complex applications as features like permissions, workflow, file management, calendar, forms, SEO and so much more are built right in. A marketplace of add-ons & themes and an active community can help quickly deliver solutions using Concrete CMS.
The vendor boasts fortune 500 companies, nonprofits, individuals and the U.S. Army as users of Concrete CMS to power critical parts of their web presence.
Concrete CMS Features
Web Content Creation Features
- Supported: WYSIWYG editor
- Supported: Code quality / cleanliness
- Supported: Content versioning
- Supported: Admin section
- Supported: Page templates
- Supported: Library of website themes
- Supported: Mobile optimization / responsive design
- Supported: Publishing workflow
- Supported: Form generator
- Supported: Content scheduling
Web Content Management Features
- Supported: Internal content search
- Supported: Content taxonomy
- Supported: SEO support
- Supported: Browser compatibility
- Supported: Bulk management
- Supported: Page caching
- Supported: Availability / breadth of extensions
- Supported: E-commerce / shopping cart extension
- Supported: Community / comment management
- Supported: Import / export
Platform & Infrastructure Features
- Supported: API
- Supported: Internationalization / multi-language
Security Features
- Supported: Role-based user permissions
- Supported: Multi-factor authentication
- Supported: User-level audit trail
- Supported: Version history
- Supported: Simple roll-back capabilities
CMS programming language or framework Features
- Supported: PHP
Concrete CMS Screenshots
Concrete CMS Videos
Concrete CMS Technical Details
Deployment Types | On-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Windows, Linux, Mac |
Mobile Application | No |
Supported Countries | anywhere |
Supported Languages | arabic, bangla, bosnian, chinese, czech, danish, dutch, english, estonian, finnish, french, german, greek, hebrew, hungarian, icelandic, indonesian, italian, japanese, korean, lithuanian, malay, persian, polish, portuguese, romanian, russian, slovak, spanish, swedish, thai, turkish, vietnamese, welsh |
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(85)Community Insights
- Pros
- Cons
Smooth User Interface: Many users have praised the smooth user interface of the product, stating that it is intuitive and easy to navigate. Several reviewers have mentioned that they appreciate the clean design and well-organized layout, which enhances their overall experience.
Reliable Performance: Numerous customers have commended the reliable performance of the product. Several reviewers have stated that it consistently meets their expectations and performs tasks efficiently without any glitches or slowdowns. Users have expressed satisfaction with its stability and responsiveness.
Versatile Features: A significant number of users have highlighted the versatility of features offered by the product. Some reviewers have mentioned that it provides a wide range of functionalities, allowing them to accomplish various tasks effectively. The availability of customizable options has also been appreciated by several customers, as it caters to individual preferences and requirements.
Confusing User Interface: Many users have expressed frustration with the confusing and difficult-to-navigate user interface of Concrete5. They find it challenging to complete tasks efficiently due to the lack of intuitive design and organization.
Slow Rendering of Admin Pages: Some users have reported experiencing slow rendering of admin pages, particularly when using older computers. This sluggish performance hampers their productivity and can be frustrating during day-to-day usage.
Limited Customization Options: Users have voiced their concerns about the limited customization options in Concrete5. They feel that these options are buried within the software, making it harder for them to personalize their websites according to their specific preferences and requirements.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-14 of 14)Amazing CMS, easy to use for both developers and admins
- 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).
- Lack of a REST API for using as a headless CMS (although I believe this will change with the next major version).
- No built-in way that I'm aware of to integrate React and/or Vue components.
Works as expected, a bit resource intensive
- It is quite extensible.
- There are many add-ons and themes.
- It makes it easy for even non-technical people to be able to update the content on the website.
- The extensions for older versions could be better marked to show if they are compatible with the current version.
- It could stand to have a bit of code optimizing to make it less resource intensive.
- It would be nice if there was a way to import content from my development server to my production server.
- Effective and easy to publish and edit content. You enter the page where you want to edit content, choose edit mode and all editable content is there for you to change. Great overview with sitemap feature, you get full view of your website structure.
- Extremly flexible, you can define page-types and assign custom attributes to each.
- Gives developer full controll over display, and lets the editor plot in correct values.
- Easy to maintain, good security. No need for external plugins in order to preform advanced features.
- Best plugin is no plugin.
- Not suitable for webshops. Sure there are plugins for that such as WooCommerce on WP, but that's a poor choice. Best to go for PrestaShop or full-blood E-Commerce solution.
- No list view edit of the pages such as Joomla, would make it more effective.
Whatever you imagine, you can build anything on it. All you need is a descent developer that has a few brain cells.
- Concrete5 provides a very easy interface for website owners/administrators. Adding pages and content is simple and straightforward.
- Concrete5.7+ works well on mobile devices such as phones and tablets - including admin editing tools.
- Concrete5 has a good user community and support forums, as well as paid add-ons which provide advanced functionality which other open-source CMSs can lack.
- Concrete5.6 websites have no good path to migrate to 5.7, short of manual content migration. This is a big problem and affected the user community negatively.
- Some features that were available as paid add-ons in 5.6, such as discussion forums and e-commerce shopping cart, are missing from newer versions 5.7/5.8.
- Starting to develop add-ons and customizations for Concrete5 can be challenging as 5.7/5.8 documentation is not yet complete.
Inherited C5 Website
- Flexibility
- Clean admin layout
- Language translation
- High learning curve
- Not as intuitive as the competition
Concrete5 - a CMS with a good past, and a better future
It was all I wanted mine to be, and then some!
More recently, 5.7.came out, which has a new interface, and couldn't be easier for the end user.
The intuitive interface allows easy creation and management of pages, with help for SEO, and a wealth of plugins.
With different user roles, its easy to allow different departments to manage their own site areas.
We are a web host, and have an easy install solution for this program, but if you don't use that, the install is remarkably easy to do, with a friendly interface.
Like any online solution, it is not the best answer for every need. But it is the best answer for most needs. With an ever growing supply of themes and plugins, you should definitely look at this for your CMS solutions. Except for sites that we build needing a lot of custom coding, all of our web sites are now run on Concrete5.
- In-line Editing: 7 + has in-line editing, so you see your changes appear in the place they will be on the live site, in the font they will be and the size that they will be.
- File Management: Excellent file manager, allowing images to be grouped, tags added, lists of what pages use that image, so you can put the images in sets for being used together (in sliders, for instance).
- Very Human! Every contact you make with the site, the mail that comes to you is from the owner of the group. (Yes, Concrete5 is Open Source.) Very friendly, very nicely done.
- If you upgrade from pre 5.7 to 5.7, adding pages is rather tricky. Once you are familiar with it, it makes perfect sense!
- If you are using an older computer, the admin pages are very slow to render.
- In some cases, using the column tool will stop a responsive theme from being responsive. This is not the theme's issue, as we have used it many times in the same theme. Some pages stop being responsive, others do not. ("Stop being responsive" is technically incorrect, they behave improperly as they resize. This is with text-only content, and does not have images distorting them.)
- The only way to add h tags is to click on the html editor of a block, and add the the tag to the heading.
If a site is not heavily coded, then Concrete5 is an excellent choice. The only time we still use WordPress is if a client is very familiar with that platform, or it has plugins that the client needs that are not available on Concrete5. (This has only happened once!)
An Excellent Open Source CMS
- Easy Front End Editing - Look at what you're editing instead of trying to do things in a dashboard in a WYSIWYG editor.
- Easily extendable with an MVC structure.
- Easy to design themes for.
- Concrete5 uses Bootstrap in their UI so when developing themes that may also use Bootstrap there can be conflicts using the same classes. This has been solved somewhat in 5.7, however, by use of namespacing.
- Concrete5's MVC structure is great in how easy you can override blocks. However, if you go nuts you can quickly rack up an obscene amount of stylesheet and "is" calls in the head of the document which can hurt performance.
- It's been criticized for having a rather large amount of files, which can be a problem on cheaper shared hosting, but I can't speak to that personally. We've never had a problem.
Join the Concrete5 Bandwagon
- Highly flexible theme development process with minimal work.
- Great core tools for content management with content specific blocks, front-end drag and drop editing, and on the fly layout editing.
- Easily add additional blocks allowing users to intuitively add elements to any given page.
- MVC - customize existing functionality with ease
- Passionate Community
- Because Concrete5 can be so extensible, the upgrade process is not without troubleshooting. Upgrade only if you have a development server. Upgrading can also force you to complete in stages, having to upgrade to each major release before upgrading to the latest version.
- The community has not necessarily worked out coding standards, so some add-ons are not as well developed.
A great CMS, easy to program, design with, and to use!
- Usability
- Great documentation and support
- Great community
- Efficient paid modules
- File manager
- Smooth updating process
- "on site" editing
- Flexible. A user has a lot of control to change things
- The cache system has improved, but i think there is still room for improvement. The admin bar disappears from time to time if a page has been placed in cache by the browser.
- I know a new version is on its way and it has addressed some layout problems (i hope!) The column feature is great, but while it is advertised as a flexible tool, it is not. Moving things in columns can be frustrating.
- The use of jQuery is great but, sometimes, abusive. Moving blocks is a great feature, but collapsing them before moving them is not.
- Another great feature is CSS overrides. The UI has to be improved and one can easily destroy a site since these "styled overrides" sometimes disappear or are too easily deletable. So Concrete 5 is like having dynamite in our hands. And for those who smoke...
Concrete5 has not yet earned its due respect. It is a pity. I have done small websites with it, so I can not say how it performs on big sites. It is very hard to sell it. Wordpress and Drupal occupy a lot of space because they are seen as 1) popular 2) stable 3) there to stay. Concrete5 still appears as a new kid. Its future is still uncertain. I recommend it for small to medium sized organisations that want a flexible and easy CMS.
Concrete5: a powerful and user-friendly CMS
- A very friendly user interface based on Twitter's Bootstrap. The importance and value of having a polished, well-designed interface cannot be underestimated as it directly affects the "usability" of the system.
- A marketplace of free and paid add-ons and themes that are vetted by a Peer Review Board. Add-ons (a.k.a. plugins) are checked for compatibility before being made available in the marketplace and authors who sell add-ons have an incentive to keep their code up to date. Compared with some other systems there seems to be less chance that an add-on is going to conflict with others, or that the add-on will be abandoned.
- Security seems to be quite good. I have not even heard of a Concrete5 site getting hacked. As such, system updates are not mandatory just for security patches. This means there is potentially less upkeep to the system.
- The system was designed from the ground up to run a page-based site (as opposed to a system that was originally designed for blogging but can also now handle pages).
- Depending on the needs of the site and how the system is set up there can be multiple ways to edit content, which can be confusing if not handled well by the developer and training.
- No built-in way to migrate content from WordPress.
A CMS worth your while, Concrete5
- Easy to use interface. Unlike many other CMS Concrete5 has a relatively simple and intuitive interface. This makes it easier to learn to use the platform.
- Consistent way of entering content into the CMS. Everything is a block and content is placed into that block and entered into the CMS through the front end.
- Built in meta data, xml sitemap capabilities included in the core distribution, unlike other CMS where you need extensions or plugins to get these features
- Easy to use WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor window for non-coders
- Ability to revert pages to older versions
- Built in permissions
- Availability of add-ons is limited, especially when compared to Wordpress plugins.
- The number of free vs. paid (quality) add-ons is inferior to Wordpress, many paid add-ons are priced arbitrarily, if there were more competitors prices would normalize
- Drag and drop functions are not present throughout, this can be confusing for first time users. Some users may find drag and drop to be annoying.
- Validation errors in the core seem to be common, maybe not as common as Drupal, but the core should not be pushed to production with validation errors.
- It is very intuitive right out of the box so-to-speak, so getting a basic site up can be done relatively easily.
- End users and clients also find the Admin very intuitive and easy to use, in large part due to the in context editing. Therefore, training and hand-off to clients is relatively painless. Not only that, a high percent actually will do "Content Management" . And isn't that the promise of a CMS after all?. This last point, however, is where other CMS's often fail (including the "Big 3" -Wordpress, Drupal, and Joomla)!
- The over-ride system allows an easy way to make modifications to core functionality as well as add-ons without actually hacking the core code.
- While using jquery in a custom theme isn't necessary a problem, there is potential for conflicts with the system's use of it. However, this is being addressed in the 5.7 release (coming soon), which is a major upgrade with significant improvements.
- The lack of market penetration when compared to the "Big 3" (Wordpress, Drupal, and Joomla) means there is currently far fewer themes available. However, it's a situation that is continually improving.
Concrete5 - A strong foundation for your website.
- Super simple interface that even non-web developers can use and get the most out of. This made the training curve extremely fast and very easy to on-board new contributors.
- Built-in version control system so if someone screws up it can be rolled back without hassle.
- Very active marketplace with very cheap plugins that meet particular business needs. We have purchased and used several modules with successful results however we do try out our new purchases on a test bed platform before deploying live to ensure compatibility and verify functionality.
- Built-in permissions for every page that is easy to manage. This ensures that prospects only see what they have access to and clients can see what they have access to, even if they are passed a direct URL.
- It can be difficult to set up on a Windows server. Not impossible mind you, just a little more difficult than your typical Unix server where most even will do automatic installs for you.
- The plugins could be vetted by the company a little better to ensure that plugins that are on the marketplace are always compatible and fulfill the promises they make.
Concrete5 - A Solid Foundation for Any Website
Recently, a client switched from Wordpress to Concrete5, because they felt that Wordpress was too confusing to use, and found Concrete to be much more user-friendly and easy to understand.
- User-friendly interface: both front-end and back-end
- Easy search engine optimization tools
- Lots of built-in features
- Innovative workflow and page archiving system
- Active and reliable community / support
- Highly flexible in way of presentation of content
- MIT-licensed - can be white labelled to match your own company
- Lacks complex features for more complex websites (eg. social networking and ecommerce)
- Customization options are a bit "buried" in the current version
- Some of the paid add-ons or themes are a bit pricey
If you are looking to build a large ecommerce website with thousands of products, you are likely better off with a platform that is dedicated to ecommerce. The same goes for social networking sites that require complex functionality.
However, Concrete can be used for medium-sized ecommerce projects (hundreds of products), or even as a private intranet portal or similar small- to medium-scale social platform.
If you browse Concrete's addon marketplace, you may find what you're looking for. If not, there are plenty of developers that can be hired for custom development.
In short, Concrete is most ideal for small- to medium-sized businesses. In some cases, even large-scale ones, depending on the site's complexity.