Item: Concrete CMS
Rating: 10
Author: Joey Nizuk

Overall Satisfaction with Concrete5

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Concrete5 for ninety percent of our client projects. Concrete5 is a perfect solution whether our clients need a simple CMS, a blogging platform or a complex dynamic site. Concrete5 is ideal for user registration, mass content input and display. The platform can also handle transactions via the eCommernce add-on and the best benefit for us is that it is easy to develop custom add-ons. Also, the sheer simplicity of the CMS allows all levels of users to manage their site which saves the site owner money by not having to hire a developer to adjust/edit content.

Pros and Cons

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Return on Investment

Our development workflow is a lot more efficient. Also, our development time and cost is nearly cut in half when we work with Concrete5.

Alternatives Considered

Personally I feel that WordPress is overly complicated and not as efficient as Concrete5. For example, Wordpress is a blogging platform hacked into a CMS, where Concrete5 is almost like a foundation with a CMS component. Concrete5 is very similar to Drupal just without the steep learning curve.

Likelihood to Recommend

Concrete5 is well suited for any website that is going to be a static company website with maybe a careers section, contact form, portfolio, customer management, and dynamic features like that. Although when it comes to eCommerce it's a bit tricky because there are scenarios where Concrete5 works and doesn't work. For example if there is a client who needs a large eCommerce site with a 100,000 plus product catalog that is continually revolving and constantly syncing with third party commerce vendors such as Amazon, eBay etc., then I would probably not recommend Concrete5 because there are other platforms that are solely for this type of eCommerce site (e.g. Magento). Although if there is a client who needs a smaller scaled eCommerce site to showcase maybe their own product line or a niched group of products which requires more engagement with the users then Concrete5 is perfect for this.

Concrete CMS Feature Ratings

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