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Concrete5 Reviews

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Score 8.9 out of 100

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Reviews (1-25 of 51)

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February 20, 2021

Concrete5 Is The Way to Go for Non-Programmers

Ngo Thien | TrustRadius Reviewer
Ngo Thien
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Page rollback and backup functions are great features for clients.
  • Easy extendability with package system.
  • Fast setup on both local and remote web hosting servers, either via "one button" installs or manually.
  • From a designers point of view, Concrete5 is very easy to re-theme with your own custom web design. Any web designer with a basic understanding of HTML and CSS can re-theme a website.
  • End users can update their pages using built in forms. It's as easy as using MS Word.
  • 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 Ngo Thien's full review
February 18, 2021

A CMS with clean, well-implemented code and good modular approach, but limited marketplace.

Janne Wolterbeek | TrustRadius Reviewer
Janne Wolterbeek
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Clean code
  • Modular
  • Internationalization
  • Themes
  • Marketplace needs to grow
  • Larger marketshare would drive popularity
  • Themes by experienced designers would be a plus
Read Janne Wolterbeek's full review
February 18, 2021

Powerful, Flexible Open-Source CMS

Marc Stress | TrustRadius Reviewer
Marc Stress
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Flexible, easy to manage websites.
  • In-context editor that users and site managers love.
  • Secure codebase.
  • Development transparency from core team.
  • Open-source license model.
  • Extensible architecture.
  • Ready-to-use out of the box.
  • Better documentation from core developers.
  • Better display of dashboard details.
  • More name recognition.
Read Marc Stress's full review
February 20, 2021

Powerful, easy-to-use website content management

Glyn Jenkins | TrustRadius Reviewer
Glyn Jenkins
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Complete CMS out of the box - extensions not required for basic functionality.
  • Modern PHP development framework - build whatever you need to.
  • User friendly editing environment - clients love using Concrete5.
  • Knowledgeable, supportive and friendly community.
  • Documentation is gradually improving, this needs to continue.
  • Design and styling controls could be updated.
Read Glyn Jenkins's full review
February 19, 2021

Powerful for developers, easy for site editors

Josh Bender | TrustRadius Reviewer
Josh Bender
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Comprehensive editing tools for site owners.
  • User-friendly and intuitive interface.
  • Extendable architecture for developers.
  • Solid community forum for asking questions and getting free and paid help.
  • Good number of third-party add-ons and themes to extend the core features.
  • Regular news updates from the core team about platform improvements and strategic direction.
  • Average quality and depth of developer documentation.
Read Josh Bender's full review
February 19, 2021

Works as expected, a bit resource intensive

Michael Johnson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Michael Johnson
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • 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.
Read Michael Johnson's full review
February 27, 2021

Amazing CMS, easy to use for both developers and admins

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Verified User
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • 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.
  • No equivalent to WordPress + Advanced Custom Fields' "repeater" fields for adding an indefinitely long list of page/file/user attributes (though it's worth noting that the way Concrete5 is structured makes the need for this much rarer than it is in WordPress).
Read this authenticated review
February 16, 2021

Concrete5 - the Wordpress beater

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Verified User
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Ease of use
  • Ease of installation
  • Highly configurable
  • Highly extensible
  • Poor developer documentation
  • Could do with editor profiles already added so permissions dont have to be set
  • Doesn't have a very large marketplace so addons need to be created from scratch
Read this authenticated review
February 12, 2021

Great for end users. Good for developers.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Verified User
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Easy for non technical users to edit content
  • Curated marketplace of free and paid extensions at a fair price
  • Good platform for custom development and further integration
  • Reliable and secure
  • Easy to manage
  • Too much wisdom is lost in the depths of Slack
  • With each new release, the infrastructure increases in complexity and leaves the documentation further behind.
Read this authenticated review
February 19, 2021

Extensive features, once individually simplified, creates happy customers

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Verified User
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Out-of-the-box functionalities like user management, search, SEO
  • Edibility by users.
  • Simplicity for non digital natives.
  • Backend is for inexperienced users overwhelming.
  • Management of custom models can be intensive.
  • Frontend in edit-mode is sometimes unresponsive and irritates inexperienced users.
Read this authenticated review
March 02, 2019

Best CMS out there for most website projects except e-commerce.

Anel Pasic | TrustRadius Reviewer
Anel Pasic
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • 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.
Read Anel Pasic's full review
January 15, 2019

Our Experience with Concrete5

Dave Becker | TrustRadius Reviewer
Dave Becker
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Concrete5 has a modular editing system, so you can edit the pages without having knowledge of coding. You just pick the module you want to insert or edit and click where you want it to go.
  • You are able to edit modules in an HTML format if you would like to, so if you have the knowledge you can have even more control over your modules.
  • You can also edit entire page themes by selecting them from the page layout menu. This allows you a greater versatility of the pages on your site.
  • The file sorting system can be clunky at times. It can be difficult to find the correct file when you are searching for files you have previously uploaded.
  • Sometimes the page will crash in the middle of editing, and there isn't an autosave feature to backup your work.
  • Without proper training on how to use Concrete5, you can easily get lost or overwhelmed. It's not exactly intuitive right away.
Read Dave Becker's full review
June 07, 2018

Great Alternative to Wordpress for small projects

Collin Berg | TrustRadius Reviewer
Collin Berg
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • The live editing (and its ease of use) for every page is THE best thing Concrete5 ships with.
  • It is easy to use for (tech-unsavvy) users and still extendable for developers.
  • The ecosystem for add-ons is small compared to WordPress, so finding solutions is harder or they get updated less frequently.
  • The time between updates is slow and lengthy, which can lead to security risks.
Read Collin Berg's full review
September 26, 2016

Concrete5: great for small, simple sites; no good for large data-driven apps

Tom Reitz | TrustRadius Reviewer
Tom Reitz
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • 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.
Read Tom Reitz's full review
September 16, 2016

Concrete5 is THE WYSIWYG CMS

Jack Wong | TrustRadius Reviewer
Jack Wong
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Concrete5 is really good at providing a functional WYSIWYG for managing website content. It's the only CMS we tried that truly acts as such without any major issues.
  • Similar to the above, in-context editing is a great feature. It allows non-developer savvy people to see exactly what they're doing.
  • One click update is really handy. Don't have to download a bunch of files locally, then upload it, and then run a separate update process in order to update Concrete5.
Read Jack Wong's full review
November 11, 2015

Concrete5 - a CMS with a good past, and a better future

John Smart | TrustRadius Reviewer
John Smart
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • 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.
Read John Smart's full review
February 29, 2016

Admin section is great for the non technical people who want to manage their website.

Frank Smith V | TrustRadius Reviewer
Frank Smith V
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Built on PHP so it can be hosted easily and usually pretty cheap.
  • Has plenty of quick start videos to pick it up fairly quick.
  • Well focused content managment system.
  • Tends to render a page slowly on some host providers.
  • Not an extremely flexible platform if you are looking to do a lot of customizing.
  • Have had some issues migrating a fully built website a couple times with Concrete5 so it is hard move from one server to the next.
Read Frank Smith V's full review
February 26, 2016

Concrete5: A Good Alternative for Non-Technical Companies

Kelly Lee | TrustRadius Reviewer
Kelly Lee
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Concrete5 has a small learning curve. Easy to set up, quick to learn and easy to use.
  • Concrete5 is perfect for the non-web tech (i.e. marketing or sales person) to update or make changes on their site. Drop and drag building makes it easy for anyone with no programming skills to update their site or make changes and edits.
  • Concrete5 is fast. Lightweight and quick with minimal scripting slowing everything down.
  • Not as robust or well known as WordPress or Drupal.
  • JQuery conflicts seem to always be a potential problem.
Read Kelly Lee's full review
September 30, 2015

Concrete5: The basic building block of any CMS

David Zizza | TrustRadius Reviewer
David Zizza
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Fast setup on both local and remote web hosting servers, either via "one button" installs or manually
  • Does not require Windows hosting or software, so it's less restrictive and allows for a larger selection of hosting environments
  • A very active and supportive community both developers and users
  • Uses common, open source software like PHP and MySQL
  • Custom theme development much easier compared to other platforms like Joomla!, Drupal and WordPress, or can easily integrate into existing design
  • Many addons are free or reasonably priced, or you can write your own custom ones
  • Migration from host to host relatively painless
  • Page rollback and backup functions are great features for clients
  • You have to really find a web host that runs well or maybe even a dedicated/virtual server to see the best response.
  • Though you can often see live demos and documentation for addons and themes, it would be great to be able to try the product to see if it's a fit for your project.
  • Though its UI is one of the easiest to use for clients, there is always room for improvement. Two things come to mind, the first being the Layout block needs improvement, updating or replacing. It doesn't always behave as expected and sometimes to make changes requires you to rebuild the whole thing (especially if you use layouts within layouts). The other item is that you don't always see the correct display while you are logged in. I fought the code for days trying to figure out a formatting issue, until my client said they were seeing it differently from me, and I realized it was because they weren't logged in. I had fixed the code and never knew it! I have to say here that this might not have been an issue with C5 directly, but maybe with the theme I was using. In either case, you have to make sure that you check it both ways.
Read David Zizza's full review
December 23, 2015

Concrete5 Review

Kobby Appiah | TrustRadius Reviewer
Kobby Appiah
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Modular reusable web UI components
  • MVC Approach
  • Easy extendability with package system
  • Certain blocks could use some more expansion, I'm mainly thinking of the form block. I wish it gave choices for how to fulfill emails other than just using what seems like the regular mail method
  • Having everything bound to naming makes things hard sometimes as multiple files with the same name can be open in a project and cause confusion
Read Kobby Appiah's full review
July 22, 2015

Best CMS is Concrete5

Joey Nizuk | TrustRadius Reviewer
Joey Nizuk
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • From a designers point of view, Concrete5 is very easy to re-theme with your own custom web design. Any web designer with a basic understanding of HTML and CSS can re-theme a website.
  • From a developers point of view, there are hundreds if not thousands of add-ons that will extend the the core functionally of your site to handle things such as full scale eCommerce inventory management, sales, transactions, customer management, fulfillment and so on. More importantly, there is a ton of documentation on the Concrete5 community site and it is very easy to develop your own custom add on if there is not one available.
  • From a site editor's/owner's point of view, Concrete5 is very easy to use. If you can edit your LinkedIn profile and create a Word document then you can edit your Concrete5 website. All page edits are done on the page itself once you are logged in and in edit mode. Any custom add on or redundant task can be saved to the dashboard page for even easier access and use.
  • Once area where I would like to improvement is the handling of bulk uploads to the database from the dashboard.
  • I would like to see more free add-ons.
Read Joey Nizuk's full review
November 11, 2015

Keep it simple with Concrete5

Harold Blevins | TrustRadius Reviewer
Harold Blevins
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Easy to setup and maintain.
  • End users can update their pages using built in forms. It's as easy as using MS Word.
  • Needs a few more built in forms
  • Allow end users to clear cache when updating pages
Read Harold Blevins's full review

Concrete5 Scorecard Summary

Likelihood to Recommend (76)
8.9
Likelihood to Renew (22)
9.9
Usability (12)
9.0
Availability (2)
10.0
Performance (2)
9.0
Support Rating (6)
10.0
Implementation Rating (12)
9.8

Feature Scorecard Summary

Security
9.3
Role-based user permissions (29)
9.3
Platform & Infrastructure
8.9
API (23)
9.0
Internationalization / multi-language (21)
8.8
Web Content Creation
9.1
WYSIWYG editor (33)
9.2
Code quality / cleanliness (28)
9.0
Admin section (31)
9.0
Page templates (31)
9.0
Library of website themes (29)
8.1
Mobile optimization / responsive design (30)
9.0
Publishing workflow (28)
9.7
Form generator (30)
9.5
Web Content Management
8.8
Content taxonomy (31)
9.0
SEO support (30)
9.0
Bulk management (30)
8.0
Availability / breadth of extensions (30)
9.1
Community / comment management (30)
8.7

What is Concrete5?

concrete5 is a free and open source PHP built content management system for content on the web and also for intranets. Its emphasis is on management and editing with minimal technical skills and with an embedded editor allows most editing to be done directly from a page, rather than through an entirely separate interface or editor. It features integrated server caching, supports OpenID, version control, and SEO. As with most open source content management systems, its content management functionality can be augmented with many possible addons or via the developer API.

Online magazines and newspapers are the ideal target of concrete5's capabilities though many other sites can be made and managed as well. concrete5 is touted as being both developer and DIY friendly. Marketplace content to extend features are both free and not free, so cost of implementation will vary.

Categories:  Content Management

Concrete5 Integrations

Concrete5 Technical Details

Operating Systems: Unspecified
Mobile Application:No