Plone Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 9 out of 10

Score

9 out of 10

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Plone are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

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.

Reviews

13 Reviews

Plone an Excelent Open Source, Well Documented CMS Solution

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

July 31, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Is a old proven open source tool very flexible to communicate the content we need to our customer´s employees. We help our employees to design and implement strategies supported with our proprietary app. Thus, for us is very important to be able to have a flexible way to communicate:

<ul><li>Strategies</li><li>Goals</li><li>Best Practices</li><li>Whitepapers </li><li>Instructions </li></ul>It´s easy to make changes in separate parts or our clients divisions. It´s easy to use the same content structures and exported to new situations.

Pros

Security
Scalability
Extensibility
Documentation Availability

Cons

Graphics and design
Notification customization
eCommerce Framework

Likelihood to Recommend

<b>Well Suited</b>: When you need a lot of customization in the management of the content (our case).

<b> Less Appropriate</b>: When you have simple content management necessities. Since it is open source, the learning curve could be complex, so in simpler cases is much better to use simpler and broad use CMS solutions.

Mauricio Quiroga-Pascal Ortega

Founder & CEO in Information Technology at Openpreneur (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

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Plone - A powerful enterprise-level content management system and application platform with great security

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

September 25, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Plone is widely being used in our organization: from public websites to intranets, customized LMSs or customized sites designed to do some special thing, to smaller sites and different portals. We have had video publishing platforms, payment systems, customized forms, workflows and countless integrations to other internal and external systems. Plone is an extremely solid and safe platform to use, which is very important for us as a university. The content management is easy to use, and customization options are limitless. Especially important for us is the robust, yet flexible permission management; we may, if we want, to control the access permissions to a smallest detail in every page available.

Pros

Easy to use content management
Lots of features out of the box
Excellent security
Flexible permission management
Flexible workflow system
Limitless possibilities to extend and customize, also through the web without programming skills
Free to use, open source
Helpful and welcoming community
Customizable content types
Robustness
Accessibility
Multilingual features

Cons

As a big and mature system it might take time to learn how to develop
Not as well known as some other CMSs
Not so easy to find external developers, if needed

Likelihood to Recommend

Well suited for: Huge public sites with hundreds of content managers and granulated permissions Intranets with hundreds of content managers and granulated permissions Customized services with workflows, automated content rules and integrations. Sites that require excellent safety and flexibility to develop further. International, multi-language sites. Customized forms.

Not so good fit for small sites with little amount of content editors

Rikupekka Oksanen

IT Specialist in Information Technology at University of Jyväskylä (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

16 years of experience

View profile

The best CMS most people will never use...

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

July 17, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The slowprint.com public web presence has been on a Plone stack since SlowPrint started in 2007.

I also use Plone for other web properties, including my consulting at fraterdeus.com

As a content management system, Plone provides the ability to manage changing content requirements, for updating, adding new content, integrating a Twitter feed, etc.

Pros

Rock-solid technology stack. The python/Zope/Plone stack is as solid as anything else out there.
Highly customizable TTW, if needed, via the Zope Management Interface, or Diazo XSL-transform theme design.
Good support from core developers, lots of solid add-ons which address just about any needs.
Amazingly customizable workflow, permissions and security management.

Cons

Error messages are often cryptic, rising up with a traceback from deep in the system.
It's perhaps hard to control this, since add-ons will always bring uncontrolled elements to bear.
Perhaps some way to better visualize the source of the problem? End users should never see a traceback.
TTW design options. In fact, Diazo based theming is remarkably powerful, and there are many tools for TTW design, but to better integrate this essential part of web development would make for a more useful end product.

Likelihood to Recommend

Is there an experienced sysadmin to install and maintain the stack? If not, Plone is not a good choice. However, hosted solutions are available. It's important to have qualified and knowledgeable personnel available who are able to address development concerns. For end-users, and content managers, it's a great system overall. Publishing workflow, multi-level undo and rollback, etc make Plone very attractive in active publishing environments.

Peter Fraterdeus

Director of Design in Professional Services at SlowPrint.com (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

You cannot go wrong with Plone

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

March 17, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I'm a Plone developer and integrator, and provide managed hosting services specialized for Plone to my clients. Plone is a solid, enterprise-level and extremely secure content management system that can faithfully serve many different usage types over the long term.

Pros

Plone shines in its usability for content editors: unlike other CMSes, there is no "admin" interface separate from the public-facing site, with many confusing settings and screens. Instead, when you edit or create a page, you do so right in the place where the change needs to occur.
One of Plone's greatest strengths is its ability to model your organization's specific workflows, and to give all your staff members the appropriate roles and permissions on different sections of your site. Therefore, you can give certain users a role that allows them to create new content, other users will have the ability to review newly created or edited content and publish it or send it back for further edits. You have full control over what content is made available to the public, etc.
In the last few years, Plone has made great strides in two specific directions: theming, and custom content types. For theming, Plone has embraced a new technology named Diazo, which allows virtually unlimited flexibility in mapping any arbitrary page elements into an existing HTML theme. Thus, it is possible to select any theme from the thousands of free or low-cost designs created for any other blogging or CMS platform, and very quickly and cheaply turn it into a native Plone theme. For content types, the Dexterity architecture allows site administrators to very easily create new custom content types through a browser, with no programming required, and integrate them into the full set of features available in Plone.
Plone's security track record is legendary. NASA, the CIA, the FBI and many national, regional and local governments, as well as higher education institutions have chosen Plone because it's secure.
Plone scales up to any size website, with any level of traffic, thanks to its solid architecture and the availability of an industrial-strength ecosystem of add-ons for virtually any applciation.

Cons

Plone's main drawback is that it has higher system requirements that make it more expensive to host. Recently, newer low-cost cloud-based offerings have emerged that might eliminate this weakness.

Likelihood to Recommend

The larger your organization, the more appropriate Plone will be. This is not to say that Plone is a worse choice for small websites, only that the minimum investment for a Plone site is certainly higher than for other platforms. If you already use Plone for your site and are looking for a redesign or an overhaul, I would only advise switching to a different platform such as WordPress or Drupal if your organization is downsizing. For any other situation, Plone is the natural choice for your growth.

Fulvio Casali

Principal - Soliton Consulting in Information Technology at University of Washington (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

Plone, a high mountain to climb, but a beautiful view reaching the top.

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

March 4, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Plone to develop professional responsive websites for small and medium companies. Plone has a perfect separation of logic and templates using Diazo and a very powerful toolkit under the hood to develop any possible web application.

For my clients it is the best I can offer as a CMS, being the most user-friendly I have encountered in the last decade. Where in my price-range mainly Joomla and Wordpress websites are developed, I have a really strong competing product, offering a much less vulnerable environment. Further more it is possible to completely version-control the whole development, and scripting the whole deployment environment using Buildout.

Pros

Plone is a folder-based system, organising content in a similar way desktop-users are doing for the last two decades. No need to teach non-tech customers some relational-database like paradigm for content management.
Plone is secure. It is the most secure CMS you can get your hands on.
Plone is flexible, and makes fast development easy.

Cons

Plone development is hard to learn. Plone is on the right track to make simple development more easy, but is far from its goal.
Documentation is always a problem. This is due to Plone's complexity.
There are only few providers capable of running Plone-websites.
Plone is not very well known to the public, making it harder to sell.

Likelihood to Recommend

Plone is very well suited for medium and large websites with a lot of authenticated users. That said I mainly use Plone for very small companies with only one user.

The templating engine makes it possible to connect virtually any design to a Plone-site, making it also very suitable for the more creative designs.

Building a webshop in Plone is not advisable.

Ronnie Stevens

Owner in Information Technology at Studio ZOO (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

Plone - A Superb CMS

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

March 1, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Plone is the software used to manage the content on the entire University of Wisconsin Oshkosh's website. My place of work (the department I worked for when I used Plone) uses Plone to run it's specific pages within the department's website.

Pros

When uploading files, Plone gives great options of where you'd like your content to be stored.
After uploading your content and easily storing it, its extremely simple to retrieve it from any page you're working on.
Plone has a great toolbar for writing and editing content for your pages. Managing links, files, and aesthetic aspects of your site using Plone is simple and enjoyable.

Cons

When creating a table-like view (for example - an organized and lined-up photo gallery), Plone doesn't give you the option of holding down your cursor and sliding the picture (r other content) to a specific spot. Plone only allows you to move pictures to an absolute-positioned area, sometimes causing content to not be aligned.
I've had a few problems when uploading files with certain file extensions. It would be nice for Plone to have a pop up window or some sort of message that stops you from adding a file that doesn't fit their compatibility, rather than you encountering error messages or bad-looking sites due to having the wrong type of file uploaded.
Plone is slightly more complicated than Wordpress, a large CMS competitor, possibly causing people to stray away from it.

Likelihood to Recommend

Managing a large site, for example a university, Plone makes it easy to access all pages securely and edit them easily and appropriately. One must be properly trained in order to use it though.

Key questions when choosing your CMS: How large is your site, how educated are the developers or employees that are going to be updating the site using Plone?

Gracie Wardin

Social Media Intern in Information Technology at BrownBoots Interactive, Inc. (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

-45 years of experience

Plone GG 24.02.2014

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

February 24, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Plone for all the help pages of the ICT products of our group. We have decided to use it for all help pages concerning ICT products. Many of our SAP programs and web applications link to a Plone page.It's main purpose is therefore educate our users and minimize the amount of help desk questions.

Pros

Very easy to use framework, even without any training.
Pages are made exactly the same each time, giving all your pages a coherent look. Also, company specific templates are available to reach this goal.
Easy and clear management of pages and visibility into the process.

Cons

Bullets and formatting sometimes make it difficult to add text to an existing paragraph. The 'code' button is useful in those cases, but only to those who know html.
Sometimes the pages don't save correctly and you use information.
Uploading and displaying images is a bit too much work.

Likelihood to Recommend

Well suited for most colleagues since it is easy to use.

Gilmer Govaert

SAP business analyst in Research & Development at KULeuven (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Developing for Plone is not fun

Rating: 3 out of 10

Incentivized

February 22, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Plone was used for a 3rd party organization to manage their workings as an organization serving a large interest based community. For them, it was a place to manage information about the organization leaders, current events and eventually for community involvement. As a software engineer I built and plugged new pieces of product into Plone so that they could solicit and facilitate community involvement.

Pros

Does a lot straight out of the box - user and content management with varying levels of privileges
Fairly easy to set up a running instance of Plone on either windows or linux
There are various themes and plugins that can be integrated (the existence of them is good, actually doing so is not so fun)

Cons

Not everything is configurable or editable by Plone, and when you need to adjust or add custom pieces in, you need to deal with Zope. Zope has an ugly, confusing and difficult UI and structure as a backend.
Using 3rd party products is difficult to do - there are a few different ways to get them installed, all of which take a bit of luck to get right.
Building custom products for Plone is not fun. You've got to deal with an archaic framework to tie in that is not well documented (there is documentation about many things, but not great documentation and there are a lot of holes in the documentation).

Likelihood to Recommend

If you're not going to do anything different than what Plone offers out of the box then it could be a good choice. If when you do want things configured differently, you don't mind paying a premium for someone to go and fix things for you then Plone would be fine for you. It's just unfortunate that tweaking and adding things in is not more intuitive.

Kelv Cutler

Software Engineer in Engineering at Ancestry.com (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Plone the enterprise open source CMS

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

February 20, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have been using Plone for more than ten years to deploy websites, intranets, document managements systems and collaboration portals for our clients. We also use it for our websites and intranet and also for some internal applications. It allows to easily create web applications and above all to let them be managed by non technical users.

Pros

Websites - with Plone you can give the complete management of the website to editors who don't have to be expert in web development. Thus, they can even create complex web application without coding.
Intranets - Plone has a strong content distribution system where anyone can only see and search what is reserved to him. It can be used to create workgroups and can handle many different types of content.
Collaboration portals - Plone can be easily integrated with any user base and provides natively tools that let people to collaborate together both within organization and outside.

Cons

Plone has a steep learning curve if you want to manage all its aspects. Some things can be done easily, but others require great skills.
The Plone templating system is very specific and requires to be fully understood if you need to customize it deeply.

Likelihood to Recommend

Its best job is to manage generic contents even mixed together. For example web pages, files, images, events, projects, user discussions can be easily managed in the same portal. It is less appropriate when you need a traditional database application such as an accounting software or an ERP. Being based on an object oriented database is most suitable for non structured contents.

Fabrizio Reale

Chief Technology Officer in Information Technology at Redomino S.r.l. (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

Plone - enterprise opensource CMS

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

February 20, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Tom Cameron

Technical Manager in Information Technology at Kitovu (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

13 years of experience

View profile

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Reviews and Ratings

You cannot go wrong with Plone

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

March 17, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Plone shines in its usability for content editors: unlike other CMSes, there is no "admin" interface separate from the public-facing site, with many confusing settings and screens. Instead, when you edit or create a page, you do so right in the place where the change needs to occur.
One of Plone's greatest strengths is its ability to model your organization's specific workflows, and to give all your staff members the appropriate roles and permissions on different sections of your site. Therefore, you can give certain users a role that allows them to create new content, other users will have the ability to review newly created or edited content and publish it or send it back for further edits. You have full control over what content is made available to the public, etc.
In the last few years, Plone has made great strides in two specific directions: theming, and custom content types. For theming, Plone has embraced a new technology named Diazo, which allows virtually unlimited flexibility in mapping any arbitrary page elements into an existing HTML theme. Thus, it is possible to select any theme from the thousands of free or low-cost designs created for any other blogging or CMS platform, and very quickly and cheaply turn it into a native Plone theme. For content types, the Dexterity architecture allows site administrators to very easily create new custom content types through a browser, with no programming required, and integrate them into the full set of features available in Plone.
Plone's security track record is legendary. NASA, the CIA, the FBI and many national, regional and local governments, as well as higher education institutions have chosen Plone because it's secure.
Plone scales up to any size website, with any level of traffic, thanks to its solid architecture and the availability of an industrial-strength ecosystem of add-ons for virtually any applciation.

Cons

Plone's main drawback is that it has higher system requirements that make it more expensive to host. Recently, newer low-cost cloud-based offerings have emerged that might eliminate this weakness.

Likelihood to Recommend

Fulvio Casali

Principal - Soliton Consulting in Information Technology at University of Washington (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience