Plone Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services Reviews & Insights

Score9 out of 10

23 Reviews and Ratings

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.

Plone Reviews

7 Reviews

Professional, Scientific, and Technical ServicesInformation Technology & Services4Marketing & Advertising1Research2

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 (Research, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

16 years of experience

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

Rating: 10 out of 10

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 (Information Technology and Services, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

Plone GG 24.02.2014

Rating: 8 out of 10

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 (Information Technology and Services, 501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Plone the enterprise open source CMS

Rating: 8 out of 10

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. (Marketing and Advertising, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

Plone - enterprise opensource CMS

Rating: 10 out of 10

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 (Information Technology and Services, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

13 years of experience

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Plone. It pays off in the long run.

Rating: 9 out of 10

February 19, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Currently Plone powers most of the websites in the University of Jyväskylä. It is used across the whole organization. Plone provides us an easy to use interface for managing our web content in a way that a lot of people can participate in the editorial work.

Pros

Good security record.
Flexible workflows.
Indefinitely extendable.
Ease of use.

Cons

Not widely known.
Slightly esoteric software stack.
Better desktop integration.

Likelihood to Recommend

Is the problem content management or something else? If it has something to do with content and users' permissions to do something with it Plone is a good choice. More lightweight solution might be more appropriate for other cases.

Jussi Talaskivi

Information Systems Analyst in Information Technology at University of Jyväskylä (Research)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

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

Rating: 9 out of 10

February 18, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Verified User

Technician in Information Technology (Information Technology and Services company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

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Plone - enterprise opensource CMS

Rating: 10 out of 10

February 20, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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

Tom Cameron

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

Vetted Review

13 years of experience

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