Concrete CMS

Concrete CMS is a content management system that its own site describes as "Free and Open Source" and built for teams. It lets content creators, designers and developers build, author and publish web content, and it suits marketing and communications teams, IT groups running intranets and portals, and agencies that want editors productive without a long training period. The site's copyright line names PortlandLabs, 2008-2026.

What you build and how

The headline feature is the editor. The site's wording is "Edit content with WYSIWYG right on your webpage," so you change text and blocks on the page itself instead of in a separate admin form. The company adds that editors "become proficient within moments" and that its comprehensive built-in features "solve most needs with no extensions." For a team that publishes often and does not want to file a ticket for every copy change, that is the central pitch.

For site structure, the homepage invites you to "Use our website builder to customize pages, menus, and navigation." The navigation names the applications the platform is used for: Web Content Management, Human Resources Portals, Intranets and Portals, Digital Asset Management, eCommerce, Multi-Site and Product Portal. So the same system covers a public marketing site, an employee intranet, a dealer or product portal and a media library, with Multi-Site listed as an application in its own right. The site menus also point to Themes, Integrations and Add-Ons, plus an Extensions marketplace. An August 2026 blog post mentions five new marketplace add-ons, among them Top Navigation Bar PLUS and Hero Image PLUS, plus a site in the wild from Siebnen, Switzerland.

The collaboration model is the part the company spells out most. The page lists four things. First, you can "Assign roles and groups for controlled access for everything, down to the individual block of text." Second, you can fine-tune advanced permissions for security and access to any feature. Third, content approvals can run through a workflow for quality assurance. Fourth, edits are tracked with comprehensive change logs, and version control lets you review, compare and revert. A customer quote from a creative director calls it "Great for editors and very good for developers to build off," which matches the site's separate "For Content Creators" and "For Developers" entry points.

AI is a recent addition. A blog post dated July 22, 2026 introduces Atlas and an MCP Server, two open source tools built by Hissy at Macareux Digital, under the headline "Concrete CMS Gets Permission-Aware AI." The post says Hissy built two open source tools that change what AI can do with Concrete CMS, and it promises to explain what Atlas and the MCP Server do and why they matter. Both come from a partner rather than the core team, so they sit alongside the marketplace add-ons rather than inside the editor.

Internationalization has its own entry in the resources menu, and the industry pages cover Banking and Finance, Manufacturing, Healthcare, Education and Government or Military. Another recent post, on intranets versus dealer portals for manufacturing companies, says such companies need two different websites, one for employees and one for dealers, and sets out what each requires from a CMS. Documentation, forums, a members area and support are all linked from the resources menu.

What the end user sees is an ordinary website or portal. The company's own blog, in a roundup of content management systems, describes Concrete CMS as "a versatile platform suitable for a variety of websites, from simple blogs to complex intranets." The same post lists what the company sees as its strengths: in-context editing that makes it easy for non-technical users to manage content, a comprehensive permissions system, an active community that offers extensive documentation, and integrated SEO tools that help with search visibility "without the need for additional plugins." It also mentions a try before you buy feature that lets you test extensions on a SaaS hosting platform before making a purchase. The company is candid about the limits in that post too: advanced features may take some learning for new users, the marketplace for themes and plugins is smaller than on some other platforms, and large sites can be resource-intensive and need solid hosting.

On the hosting side, the site offers a way to try the product ("Try it Now!" and "Get Started for Free") and then a choice of hosting types, which are covered below. The Custom SLA tier is the route for custom code: the company says you work with the team behind Concrete to manage a custom codebase for a mission critical web application, and you use GitLab to deploy your custom code to hosting environments optimized for Concrete CMS.

Plans, security and customers

The homepage publishes three hosting tiers.

• Starter, $4.99 per month, billed annually. Described as "The perfect fit for something small you need to manage yourself." It includes 1 site editor, unlimited support questions, upgrades managed for you, configuration support, nightly backup, 10,000 page views per month and 2GB of storage space. The page states "NO ACCESS to source code" for this tier.
• Business, $19 per month, billed annually. Aimed at "a team of professionals managing an important website together." It includes 5 site editors, unlimited support questions, upgrades managed for you, configuration support, nightly backup, a content delivery network, free SSL, DDoS protection and mitigation, 50,000 page views per month and 20GB of storage space. It also states "NO ACCESS to source code."
• Custom SLA, call us. Built to your needs, with unlimited support questions, continuous backup and restoration, 1 staging and 1 production server, custom development as needed, co-managed upgrades and development, custom staging and CI/CD, hybrid development teams, high availability and large data stores.

The security section reads "Ironclad security and compliance." Its claims are "Out-of-the-box ISO:27001 certified security," "SOC 2 and HIPAA compliant hosting for assured data protection," "Chosen by the U.S. Army for stringent security needs" and "Tailored hosting to meet specific organizational compliance." A quote from Melanie Reagin of U.S. Army, IMCOM says Concrete CMS powers an Army web presence that hundreds of editors use with very limited training and that it meets the Army's complex security and compliance requirements.

Other named voices on the homepage are Ben Dickie, Research Director for Enterprise Applications at Info-Tech Research Group, who credits the product with pairing functionality with ease of use and a low cost of deployment, and Stefan Glut, Online Communications Officer at BASF Corporation, who says "Because the system is a pleasure to use for our authors, our content is fresher."

The homepage invites visitors to schedule a demo and says the team will "help you decide if Concrete CMS should be on your shortlist."

Who it suits and who it does not

Concrete CMS fits teams where several people edit one important website and need to control who can change what. The block-level permissions, approval workflow and change logs are aimed at organizations that answer to compliance reviewers: healthcare, finance, education and government appear in the industry menu, and the Army quote supports the government case. The Business plan, with 5 editors, is the entry point for a small team, and the Custom SLA tier is for organizations that want the vendor's engineers involved in a bespoke application.

It also suits teams that want one system for a public site and an internal portal, since multi-site and intranet use are listed as first-class applications.

The caveats are concrete. The Starter and Business hosting plans state no access to source code; custom code on managed hosting is what the Custom SLA tier is described for, and that tier is priced on a call. Page views and storage are capped on the entry plans, at 10,000 and 50,000 views a month. The product is a website and portal platform, and its workflow is content approval rather than general business process automation. A solo founder who wants a booking app in an afternoon is not the reader the homepage is written for, though the Starter plan, at $4.99 a month billed annually for one site editor, is a small enough step to try the editor on a real site.