TechRadar Called Concrete CMS a Top CMS Pick. Here's Why That Tracks.

The article, published April 25, 2026, focuses on how easy Concrete CMS is to install and get running. The author walked through a full installation on a hosting provider, highlighted the in-context editing experience, and called out security and permissions as genuine differentiators. They also noted the active community and the SEO tooling built right in.

All of that is accurate, and it points at something we've believed since the beginning: the bar for what a CMS should do out of the box is higher than most platforms admit. When you're evaluating a CMS, you shouldn't have to go hunting for a third-party plugin just to manage who can edit what, or pay extra for workflow, or wire up a separate tool to handle multilingual content. That stuff should just be there.

Easy to Install Doesn't Mean Limited

The TechRadar piece is framed around ease of installation, which is a fair entry point. If you can't get a CMS running without a PhD in server administration, that's a real problem. Concrete installs cleanly, and if you'd rather skip all of that entirely, our SaaS hosting option gets you into a live environment immediately with nothing to configure. You can try it here.

But the installation story sells the bigger picture a little short. The reason Concrete CMS is worth considering isn't just that it's easy to stand up. It's that once you're in, you're not immediately hitting walls. Permissions, workflow, calendars, multilingual support, form builders, a marketplace of vetted extensions: these aren't add-ons you have to go find.

That matters a lot when you're managing a site for a team, or building something for a client who's going to have to live with it for years. The total cost of ownership on a CMS isn't just the sticker price of the software. It's the ongoing cost of maintaining a stack of extensions from six different developers, each on their own update schedule, each a potential point of failure when something breaks.

Security Is Not a Plugin

TechRadar specifically called out our security posture, and this is worth dwelling on for a moment. Concrete CMS powers a significant portion of the U.S. Army MWR's web presence. It runs sites for the California Secretary of State, banks, and NHS properties in the UK. These aren't organizations that treat security as an afterthought. They chose Concrete precisely because security is baked into the architecture, not bolted on.

For organizations in regulated industries, that distinction is the whole ballgame. You can't just go install a popular security plugin and call it a day when you're managing sites that touch sensitive government or financial data. You need a platform built from the ground up with access controls, permission granularity, and a core team that takes security releases seriously. That's what we've spent 20-plus years building.

Open Source, Commercially Supported

One thing TechRadar got right that often gets glossed over: Concrete CMS is MIT-licensed open source. Your security team can read every line of the codebase. You're not trusting a black box. You can self-host it on your own infrastructure if your compliance requirements demand it, or you can host with us and get the benefit of a team that's been running Concrete in production environments for a very long time.

That's a combination that's genuinely hard to find at this price point. And "free" in the TechRadar headline is accurate: the core software costs nothing. Hosting and enterprise SLAs are where we make a living, and we think those are worth paying for. But if you want to download Concrete and run it yourself, concretecms.org has everything you need.

Want to See It for Yourself?

The fastest way to understand what TechRadar was talking about is to get your hands on a live instance. Our SaaS hosting gets you there without any installation steps at all. 

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