Plone - A powerful enterprise-level content management system and application platform with great security
Rating: 10 out of 10
May 16, 2025
RO
Vetted Review
Verified User
16 years of experience
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.
- 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
93.75%
9.4
94%
9.4
100%
10.0
100%
10.0
N/A
N/A
- Zero licence cost on 100+ systems we have on Plone. On some other systems the costs might be astronomical based on our user or content amount.
- Our customized and well integrated LMSs - since 2009 we have received some 200,000 assignment submissions through our Plone-based systems. The amount of time saved compared to other ways of returning assignments is huge. Integration between Plone, our study management system and payments system allows students to enroll, pay and immediately access course content.
- Workflows - we have many systems where we utilize Plone's flexible workflow management, allowing us to easily digitize manual work and sending papers around campus. Again, saves a lot of work and time.
Since 2004, when we first started using Plone, here hasn't been any feature or request or system that we couldn't have been done with Plone.
Sometimes there have been cases, where we pilot or test other workflow-based systems, but usually the problems come with licences - as a university we have tens on thousands of users, and the licence costs tend to go so high that we cannot use them.
Sometimes there have been cases, where we pilot or test other workflow-based systems, but usually the problems come with licences - as a university we have tens on thousands of users, and the licence costs tend to go so high that we cannot use them.
30000
Teachers, students, administration, researchers, external audience.
4
Plone is one of the systems the developement team supports and maintains. So there is no one doing just Plone or supporting just Plone, despite us having tens of different services buit on Plone.
You will need developers and someone to answer users questions and manage new projects.
If you want, with one installation you could build public website, intranet, extranet, small sites, custom solutions so there is no limit of what just one Plone site does.
- Video sharing platform
- Intranet
- Secure video platform for sensitive research material
- Public websites
- Student wellbeing portal
- Building 1000+ forms without much support
- Custom workflow builder
- Video sharing platform created before YouTube and still in use
- Secure video sharing platform for researchers
- Mobile application integration for secure audio recording and automatic transcription in the video platform above
- Registration portals for international students with 10+ integrations
- Websites
- Custom solutions
- Registration portals
- Video sharing
Yes
In 2004 it replaced plain HTML pages.
- Scalability
- Integration with Other Systems
- Ease of Use
Back then, we wanted to have university website that was easy to update by normal people at the faculties just by logging in via browser. Plone provided that, as we had seen in few of our test cases.
Use lots of money on external consultation and get recommended something that is market leader in Gartner.
- Online Training
- In-Person Training
No need. Plone is free and will always be, thanks to it Foundation backed open source model.
For support, we have internal team.
Yes
Yes. Plone community is active and wants to keep the product great.
Just contacting core developers around the world in Discord or forums has helped. No need to pay anything, just ask.
- Content management with lots of content - the ability to divide content into folders and pages is easy to understand and allows many different functions. The ability to copy, cut, paste stuff from one place to another
- Editing page content.
- Forms - easy to edit, yet powerful to use.
- Speed. Super fast to edit pages.
- Simplicity of the user interface for a content editor
- Listing and search blocks for dynamically updated views
- Can't think of anything
Yes
Responsive UI, can be used in a mobile device. Easy to customize further if needed just using CSS.
- LDAP
- Keycloak
- Signicat
- AD
- Our own study information systems
- Various external systems
- Various internal systems
From simple to massive.
- Some local LLM
- File import/export
- Single Signon
- API (e.g. SOAP or REST)
- Javascript widgets
You can do it.