Skip to main content
TrustRadius
Plone

Plone

Overview

What is Plone?

Plone is a free and open source content management system built on top of the Zope application server. Plone can be used for any kind of website, including blogs, internet sites, webshops, and internal websites.

Read more
Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Plone has gained popularity across various organizations for its versatility and customizable features. Users have leveraged this platform …
Continue reading

Plone - A Superb CMS

10 out of 10
March 01, 2014
Plone is the software used to manage the content on the entire University of Wisconsin Oshkosh's website. My place of work (the department …
Continue reading
Read all reviews

Popular Features

View all 16 features
  • API (5)
    9.0
    90%
  • WYSIWYG editor (6)
    8.0
    80%
  • Role-based user permissions (5)
    8.0
    80%
  • Code quality / cleanliness (5)
    8.0
    80%
Return to navigation

Pricing

View all pricing
N/A
Unavailable

What is Plone?

Plone is a free and open source content management system built on top of the Zope application server. Plone can be used for any kind of website, including blogs, internet sites, webshops, and internal websites.

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?

2 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 Square Online?

Square Online (formerly Weebly) is a basic content management system with blogging and eCommerce features. It can be utilized for building standard websites or specialized webpages for online stores.

Return to navigation

Product Demos

Publisher's Plone theme

YouTube

Ploneconf 2020: Getting Started with your Plone site

YouTube

Plone Workflow

YouTube

PloneEdu hangout: plone.app.toolbar, and how to build a workflow application

YouTube

collective.takeaportrait: face detection and webcam Plone demo

YouTube

Plone 4 Demo - How to manage content

YouTube
Return to navigation

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.

8
Avg 8.0

Platform & Infrastructure

Features related to platform-wide settings and structure, such as permissions, languages, integrations, customizations, etc.

8.5
Avg 7.7

Web Content Creation

Features that support the creation of website content.

8
Avg 7.6

Web Content Management

Features for managing website content

7.8
Avg 7.3
Return to navigation

Product Details

What is Plone?

Plone is a free and open source mobile and multichannel capable content management system built on top of the Zope application server. In principle, Plone can be used for any kind of website, including blogs, internet sites, webshops and internal websites. It is also well positioned to be used as a document publishing system and groupware collaboration tool. The strengths of Plone are its flexible and adaptable workflow, very good security, extensibility, high usability and flexibility. Its users are varied from large enterprises to small businesses, non-profits, universities, and governments. It is available on any platform (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, BSD).

Plone Video

What's Plone for you?

Plone Competitors

Plone Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Plone is a free and open source content management system built on top of the Zope application server. Plone can be used for any kind of website, including blogs, internet sites, webshops, and internal websites.

Drupal, Joomla!, and Kentico Xperience are common alternatives for Plone.

Reviewers rate Page templates and SEO support highest, with a score of 10.

The most common users of Plone are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
Return to navigation

Comparisons

View all alternatives
Return to navigation

Reviews and Ratings

(23)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Plone has gained popularity across various organizations for its versatility and customizable features. Users have leveraged this platform to create a wide range of solutions, including video publishing platforms, payment systems, customized forms, workflows, and integrations with other internal and external systems. Plone's solid and secure platform has made it a preferred choice for universities and organizations that prioritize security. The easy-to-use content management system in Plone allows for limitless customization options, making it suitable for both public websites and intranets. With robust and flexible permission management, users have precise control over access permissions on every page. Plone is widely used by universities like the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and the University of Jyväskylä to manage the content on their entire websites. It enables multiple users to collaborate on editorial work effortlessly. For over a decade, Plone has been extensively utilized to deploy websites, intranets, document management systems, and collaboration portals for clients. Its scalability, complex workflow configuration, permission management capabilities, external authentication system integration, and content revision tracking are highly valued by users. Plone serves as a powerful tool for effectively communicating a variety of content types such as strategies, goals, best practices, whitepapers, and instructions. Moreover, it has proven to be an efficient solution for developing help pages related to ICT products, reducing the need for additional help desk support. The reliability and versatility of Plone have made it a popular choice among both public administrations and private companies in building solid e-government solutions without incurring additional license fees. Users appreciate how easy it is to learn and use Plone from the perspective of the final user.

Usability for Content Editors: Plone's usability for content editors has received high praise from users. They appreciate how it eliminates the need for a separate admin interface, making it less confusing. Users find it intuitive and efficient to edit or create content directly in the relevant location. Modeling Specific Workflows: The ability to model specific workflows is considered one of Plone's greatest strengths by many users. They commend its flexibility in assigning different roles and permissions to staff members for different sections of the site, resulting in better content management and control. Theming Capabilities with Diazo: With the introduction of Diazo, Plone's theming capabilities have significantly improved as highlighted by users. They value the virtually unlimited flexibility offered by mapping page elements into existing HTML themes, which allows them to easily select and adapt designs from other platforms.

Higher System Requirements: Some users have expressed that Plone has higher system requirements compared to other CMSs, resulting in increased hosting costs. This can be a deterrent for individuals or organizations with limited resources.

Difficult Development and Lack of Documentation: Several reviewers have found Plone development to be challenging to learn, and they have mentioned the lack of comprehensive documentation as an obstacle. This makes it harder for new users to grasp the intricacies of Plone and effectively utilize its features.

Limited Provider Options: According to user feedback, there are only a few providers capable of running Plone websites. This limited availability may restrict users' choices when it comes to selecting suitable hosting providers that align with their specific requirements and preferences.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-1 of 1)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We develop Plone solutions for our clients and use the product ourselves. We have been using Plone since version 2 and currently use it on new projects.

Plone provides a very powerful base CMS and application platform upon which we build customised solutions for our clients. Plone provides a very scalable architecture, the ability to configure complex workflows and permissions, the ability to plug in external authentication systems, full revision history and tracking of content revisions and many other enterprise features not seen in most opensource CMSs
  • Very powerful and configurable security and permissions. This makes it easy to develop private intranets, secure areas of a site or simply be confident that the site won't be hacked easily.
  • Configurable workflows allow us to develop custom workflow solutions for our clients without the need for complex programming.
  • Base CMS functionality meets the needs of the vast majority of our sites without the need for significant programming, a large number of mature add-on products help in this area too.
  • Excellent SEO capabilities such as clean URLs, automated sitemaps, built in metadata management ensure Plone sites rank very highly in search engines
  • Version control of all changes with a detailed history and the ability to roll back changes. This has saved me many times in the past.
  • Plone is one of the most secure CMS solutions available. Vulnerabilities are extremely rare and the development community is highly skilled and alert to issues that do arise.
  • As a CMS its hard to find a flaw in Plone. But it is a difficult platform to learn and develop in. The Zope framework is unusual in its structure and can take a long time to become familiar with. So the one significant downside of Plone is the effort required to gain solid technical expertise.
Plone is first and foremost a CMS, it is ideal for a large content heavy website, and it is also perfect for private intranets. It can also serve as an excellent document management system in many cases.

Plone is also very good for scaling both in terms of large volumes of data and heavy site traffic. If used properly it can easily be deployed on clusters of servers with a shared backend data store.

Plone is not strong in the e-commerce area and it is not ideally suited to systems that require complex relational databases, though these can be connected if necessary.
  • For out business Plone allows us to deliver enterprise level solutions at very reasonable budgets. We tender and compete against some of the much larger commercial CMS solutions and regularly win comfortably on price and deliver on functionality.
  • Plone also allows us to provide much more functionality than many clients expect. We are often able to over deliver on small budget projects because Plone comes with so much built in.
Plone is really almost the only truly enterprise opensource CMS. Most of its opensource competitors cant compete in this area, while they may have some nice editing tools, and some cool features, Plone stands our for its security, scalability, version control, highly configurable workflows and permissions.

Plone is a highly functional CMS out of the box, but it is also a platform that can be extended in many ways. We often develop custom content types to meet our clients needs. We regularly plug in external authentication systems (some of which are odd proprietary systems). And we often develop complex permissions and workflows. We simply could not achieve these solutions with many of Plone's competitors.
At this stage the outlook for Plone in the future is very positive. The development community is still very active, updates are still coming out on a regular basis and the roadmap goes well into the future. We are confident that Plone will continue to improve and keep up with the demands of web CMS needs. We also dont see any other product in the opensource space that can replace Plone at the moment.
Plone is very intensive in its operations, and if not configured well it can be slow. However it is designed and built with speed in mind and with proper use of coding, templates and caching can perform extremely well under high loads. It is capable of scaling to very high load availability environments with no specific coding requirements.
Return to navigation