Fast, secure, and solid CMS that your clients will love.
Updated July 07, 2015

Fast, secure, and solid CMS that your clients will love.

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

Software Version

4.3.2

Overall Satisfaction with Plone

We are using Plone for more than 6 years to develop websites for the public administration and private held companies. The whole organization is using Plone and not only to develop solutions for our clients but also internally, where we have built a strong set of internal tools and a knowledge management tool to help our developers to adapt to our development environment. We are using Plone as an open source software to build and implement solid e-government solutions for parliaments and administrations. Plone is a robust CMS with a strong security system and it doesn't have any additional license fees. Implementation costs are minimized because it's also easy to learn from the final user perspective.
  • Security management: Plone handles security pretty well out-of-the-box due to its Plone/Zope stack, also Plone doesn't use a SQL database so it's not vulnerable to injection.
  • It's easy to learn: Final users usually need only 1 single session to learn how to use a Plone powered website and manage it's content. There isn't a different back-end, content can be edited from the front-end.
  • Speed: Plone is memory efficient, and plays well with caching systems like Varnish.
  • Learning curve for developers: Plone is not a simple solution, it's complex and it needs some serious learning time to start being really productive and being able to make a good use of the tool.
  • Plone requires a dedicated server and some deep knowledge to build and mantain your projects.
  • It's difficult to find Plone expertise and consulting services in some countries.
  • Using other CMS's we usually needed 3-4 hour sessions to teach our clients how to manage their websites. Using Plone we spend only 1-2 hour in each session.
  • We found that there's an important learning curve in the development process. The investment pays off in long-term, but you should be prepared for that kind of cost.
  • Less time spent applying hotfixes as Plone had a small number of vulnerabilities in the past years.
Plone is best suited for large websites. It's complex and sometimes requires a big effort to correctly setup the development and production environments, that's why it's being used mainly in medium-large sites being managed by more than one author at the same time. Intranets are another good example, Plone can handle a large volume of files and it supports a wide range of authentication methods.

Plone Feature Ratings

WYSIWYG editor
6
Code quality / cleanliness
9
Admin section
8
Page templates
8
Library of website themes
2
Mobile optimization / responsive design
7
Publishing workflow
10
Form generator
10
Content taxonomy
9
SEO support
10
Bulk management
7
Availability / breadth of extensions
6
Community / comment management
7
API
9
Internationalization / multi-language
9
Role-based user permissions
10

Using Plone

Plone has a very strong and professional community behind it. We are comfortable using Plone and we managed how to build successful products for our clients with its application stack. Security is also very important today and Plone gave us a great stability in our systems architecture with small time spent in maintenance and software fixes.