Best Concrete CMS Alternatives in 2026
Concrete CMS gave small teams drag-and-drop editing on the live page before anyone else. In 2026 it still has that, and little of what has arrived since: no AI, thin headless delivery and a shrinking talent pool.
The short answer
Webflow and HubSpot Content Hub are the strongest Concrete CMS alternatives in 2026. Webflow keeps the on-page visual editing Concrete users rely on and adds real-time collaboration, AI agent support and published prices. HubSpot Content Hub adds the forms, email and automation Concrete never had, with nothing to run. WordPress and Drupal CMS are the open-source paths, Umbraco suits .NET shops, and Squiz fits government estates.
Key takeaways
- Nobody leaves Concrete CMS because the editor failed them; clicking a block on the live page is still its best feature. They leave because the core has no AI and none planned, the rich text editor is CKEditor 4, which reached end of life in June 2023, and every modern integration needs custom PHP.
- Decide first whether you are keeping self-hosting. Concrete's managed plans cost $4.99 and $19 a month but disclaim uptime and lock out custom code. Webflow and HubSpot Content Hub remove operations entirely; WordPress, Drupal CMS, Umbraco and Joomla keep you in charge of patching.
- The talent pool is the hidden cost. Concrete CMS has 841 GitHub stars and about seven US job postings mention it. WordPress and Drupal have the largest developer pools in the market, and that changes what every agency quote looks like.
- If you run many sites from one install, as the US Army's installation command does, only some alternatives match it. Drupal CMS, Umbraco and WordPress Multisite run many sites from one codebase; Webflow and HubSpot Content Hub price each site separately.
- Government and intranet buyers should check certifications before the demo. Concrete's managed hosting holds SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001 and meets FedRAMP Moderate controls. Few small-business CMSs match that, so the shortlist for a public body is shorter than this page.
Our picks at a glance
WebflowOn-page editing, real-time collaboration, published prices.
HubSpot Content HubForms, email and automation built in.
WordPressLargest ecosystem, any freelancer can maintain it.
Drupal CMSCanvas page builder, deep permissions, free.
UmbracoMulti-site core, bring your own AI model.
JoomlaFree software with access levels built in.
Our analysts’ take
Concrete CMS still does the thing it pioneered better than most: editors click an area of the live page and add, move or edit blocks right there. Permissions reach down to a single area of a page, approval workflows and version history ship in the core, and one installation can run hundreds of sites, which is how the US Army's installation command runs its garrison sites. The managed hosting holds SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001 and meets FedRAMP Moderate controls. Small businesses, local government bodies and intranet teams that want exactly that, and have a PHP developer to call, should probably stay.
The teams that leave have outgrown the ecosystem rather than the editor. The May 2026 town hall confirmed that the core has no AI features and none on the near-term roadmap. GraphQL was proposed in 2022 and has not shipped, there are no official SDKs, and webhooks need custom PHP. The rich text editor is still CKEditor 4, which reached end of life in June 2023. There is no A/B testing, no marketing automation and no customer data connector. The project has 841 GitHub stars and about seven US job postings mention it, so finding a developer gets harder every year, and the Standard Hosting agreement disclaims uptime guarantees and leaves backups to the subscriber.
This guide rates eight realistic destinations. Two are managed platforms that remove operations entirely. Four are open-source CMSs that keep you in control of hosting and cost. One is a developer-first PHP CMS from the same world as Concrete, and one is a managed suite for government and higher education. The ratings lean on marketer self-service, because the on-page editor is what Concrete users do not want to lose, then on low upkeep and budget predictability, because small teams run these sites with no operations staff.
What to look for
- 1
Editing on the page, not in a form
Concrete users click the page and change it. Have your editors build a landing page in each trial and note whether they see the rendered page or a form with a preview pane. Webflow, Drupal CMS and Squiz pass that test; the headless platforms and Craft CMS do not.
- 2
Who patches it at night
Concrete CMS 9.5.1 fixed five vulnerabilities, two of them remote code execution, and self-hosted teams applied it themselves. Ask whether the alternative patches itself, and if it does not, who on your side owns the calendar.
- 3
A price you can read
Concrete publishes $4.99 and $19 a month and charges nothing for the software. Hold every alternative to the same standard: a price list, the limits on each plan and what happens at double your traffic.
- 4
The marketing tools you were missing
Forms, email, automation and A/B testing are the reasons marketers push for a change. Decide whether the CMS must include them or whether a separate email tool alongside a simpler CMS is the cheaper pattern.
- 5
Permissions and paperwork for public bodies
Concrete's permissions reach a single area of a page and its hosting carries SOC 2, ISO 27001 and FedRAMP Moderate controls. List what your security team signs today and ask each vendor for the documents, not the slide.
The ratings at a glance
Ranked by Fit score for this topic. Dots run from one (Limited) to five (Excellent); each review below spells the ratings out.
| Platform | Fit | Self-service | Upkeep | Budget | Growth tools | AI | Speed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1HubSpot Content Hub | 6.8/10 | Good | Fair | Good | Strong | Good | Good |
| 2Webflow | 6.8/10 | Strong | Fair | Fair | Good | Good | Good |
| 3WordPress | 6.1/10 | Good | Fair | Strong | Limited | Fair | Good |
| 4Drupal CMS | 6.1/10 | Good | Fair | Good | Fair | Fair | Fair |
| 5Umbraco | 5.9/10 | Fair | Fair | Strong | Limited | Limited | Good |
6 Squiz DXP | 5.7/10 | Good | Good | Limited | Good | Limited | Limited |
7 Craft CMS | 5.6/10 | Fair | Fair | Good | Limited | Limited | Good |
| 8Joomla | 4.5/10 | Limited | Limited | Strong | Limited | Limited | Fair |
- 1HubSpot Content Hub6.8/10
- Marketer self-service
- Good
- Low IT upkeep
- Fair
- Budget predictability
- Good
- Campaign & growth tools
- Strong
- AI for marketers
- Good
- Speed to launch
- Good
- 2Webflow6.8/10
- Marketer self-service
- Strong
- Low IT upkeep
- Fair
- Budget predictability
- Fair
- Campaign & growth tools
- Good
- AI for marketers
- Good
- Speed to launch
- Good
- 3WordPress6.1/10
- Marketer self-service
- Good
- Low IT upkeep
- Fair
- Budget predictability
- Strong
- Campaign & growth tools
- Limited
- AI for marketers
- Fair
- Speed to launch
- Good
- 4Drupal CMS6.1/10
- Marketer self-service
- Good
- Low IT upkeep
- Fair
- Budget predictability
- Good
- Campaign & growth tools
- Fair
- AI for marketers
- Fair
- Speed to launch
- Fair
- 5Umbraco5.9/10
- Marketer self-service
- Fair
- Low IT upkeep
- Fair
- Budget predictability
- Strong
- Campaign & growth tools
- Limited
- AI for marketers
- Limited
- Speed to launch
- Good
- 6Squiz DXP5.7/10
- Marketer self-service
- Good
- Low IT upkeep
- Good
- Budget predictability
- Limited
- Campaign & growth tools
- Good
- AI for marketers
- Limited
- Speed to launch
- Limited
- 7Craft CMS5.6/10
- Marketer self-service
- Fair
- Low IT upkeep
- Fair
- Budget predictability
- Good
- Campaign & growth tools
- Limited
- AI for marketers
- Limited
- Speed to launch
- Good
- 8Joomla4.5/10
- Marketer self-service
- Limited
- Low IT upkeep
- Limited
- Budget predictability
- Strong
- Campaign & growth tools
- Limited
- AI for marketers
- Limited
- Speed to launch
- Fair
The shortlist, reviewed
HubSpot Content Hub
The managed platform for teams that want the marketing tools Concrete never shipped. Landing pages, forms, email, multi-branch automation, SEO and answer engine optimization come built in on HubSpot's CRM, hosting is included at every tier, and security patches apply themselves.
- Best for
- Small and mid-market B2B marketing teams that publish brochure and campaign sites and want lead capture and email in the same product.
- Watch out for
- Templates are written in HubL, HubSpot's proprietary language, exports lose module structure, and the content model is built around the CRM. No fit for intranets.
- What it costs
- Published. Starter from $15 per month, Professional from $450 per month (three seats), Enterprise from $1,500 per month.
Webflow
The visual editor Concrete users will recognize, rebuilt for 2026. The Designer gives drag-and-drop layout on the rendered page, Edit Mode lets marketers change content in place, several people edit together in real time on every plan, and the official MCP 2.0 server lets AI agents work on a site under role permissions.
- Best for
- Small businesses and marketing teams that chose Concrete for on-page editing and want the same without a PHP developer or a server.
- Watch out for
- Content, components and interactions sit in a proprietary format, code export strips CMS content, and User Accounts was retired in January 2026, so logged-in intranet pages are out.
- What it costs
- Published. Site plans from $15 per month, Premium at $25 per month (annual), seats from $15 to $39 per month.
WordPress
The open-source path with the largest ecosystem in the market: about 60,000 free plugins, the deepest talent pool of any CMS and page builders such as Elementor and Bricks that give editors drag-and-drop layout. With Yoast or Rank Math it is the reference SEO setup, and WordPress 7 adds an AI foundation.
- Best for
- Small businesses and agencies that want a familiar CMS any freelancer can maintain, at shared-hosting prices.
- Watch out for
- Plugins give it the largest attack surface of any CMS; Patchstack counted 11,334 new ecosystem vulnerabilities in 2025, 91 percent of them in plugins. Whoever runs the site owns patching, and there are no certifications of its own.
- What it costs
- Free software. Shared hosting runs about $5 to $15 a month, managed WordPress hosting about $25 to $35 a month for a small site, plus plugins and whoever maintains it.
Drupal CMS
Drupal's packaged, marketer-focused build, free under the GPL. Canvas drag-and-drop page building is the default editor, 22 site templates and a full SEO stack ship in the installer, permissions run to hundreds of granular settings, and the AI assistant uses your own OpenAI or Anthropic key.
- Best for
- Local government, higher education and nonprofit teams that want Concrete's permission depth and multi-site model with a modern page builder and a larger talent pool.
- Watch out for
- Composer-driven operations, 13 core security advisories in 2026 and Drupal specialists who bill $80 to $250 an hour. Canvas pages are not yet covered by moderation workflows.
- What it costs
- Free software. Budget for a managed Drupal host and a developer or agency; premium site templates are priced in the installer.
Umbraco
The open-source CMS for .NET shops, MIT licensed with no fee whatever the traffic. The free core runs many sites from one installation with field-level language variants, revision history and scheduled publishing, and Umbraco.AI lets you bring your own model from about ten providers.
- Best for
- .NET agencies and in-house teams running several brand or regional sites who want Concrete's multi-site economics on Microsoft's stack.
- Watch out for
- Personalization, A/B testing and analytics need the paid Engage add-on, there is no co-editing or conflict detection, and compliance stops at ISO 27001 with no SOC 2 or HIPAA.
- What it costs
- Free software. Umbraco Cloud from €45 per month, Standard €280, Professional €730.
Squiz DXP
The managed suite for government and higher education estates. A drag-and-drop Visual Page Builder, enterprise search built on Funnelback with 70 or more ranking factors, and personalization on a built-in customer data platform come as SaaS with monthly releases and central patching.
- Best for
- Government agencies, universities and utilities, mostly in Australia, New Zealand and the UK, running large multi-site estates with search at the center.
- Watch out for
- Quote-only pricing with metered page views, a proprietary asset-tree model that takes months to learn, no EU hosting, a SOC 2 report that is Type 1 only, and no MCP server for AI agents.
- What it costs
- Quote-only. No published tiers, free tier or trial; the subscription meters page views, indexed documents and storage.
Craft CMS
The developer-first PHP CMS from the same world as Concrete, with deeper content modeling, 26 built-in field types, multi-site across more than 100 locales and the GraphQL API Concrete never shipped. Craft Cloud, its serverless hosting, removes most operations work, and the MCP plugin gives AI agents 55 tools.
- Best for
- Agencies and developer-led teams building bespoke PHP sites who want structured content and headless delivery without leaving the LAMP stack.
- Watch out for
- Authoring is form-based with a preview pane, not on-page editing, so marketers lose what they had. Licenses are per project, there are no compliance certifications, and 2025 brought a maximum-severity remote code execution flaw.
- What it costs
- Published. Solo free, Team $279 and Pro $399 per project with $99 yearly renewals; Craft Cloud from $130 per month.
Joomla
The budget baseline. Joomla is free under the GPL with no editions, ships multilingual publishing, version history with one-click restore and a visual workflow editor in the core, and its hierarchical access levels gate content by audience the way Concrete's permissions do.
- Best for
- Nonprofits, associations and small member organizations on a minimal budget that gate content by group and have someone to run a PHP host.
- Watch out for
- The August and September 2026 releases fixed 26 core security advisories, there is no page builder in the core, and there is no commercial support tier, certification or data processing agreement.
- What it costs
- Free software under the GPL with no tiers or paid editions. Budget for a PHP host, from a few dollars a month on shared plans, and whoever maintains it.
Three reasons teams leave Concrete CMS
Concrete customers tend to leave for one of three reasons, and each one points at a different part of this shortlist. Name yours before you book demos.
The ecosystem stopped growing
No AI in the core, no GraphQL four years after it was proposed, no SDKs, and a rich text editor past its end of life. If this is your reason, Webflow, HubSpot Content Hub, WordPress and Drupal CMS all ship AI tooling and modern integration surfaces today.
Nobody wants to run the server
Concrete's managed plans disclaim uptime, leave backups to you and block custom code. If operations are the problem, Webflow and HubSpot Content Hub remove them entirely, and Craft Cloud and Umbraco Cloud do the same for teams that still want a PHP or .NET codebase.
Marketing needs more than a page
No A/B testing, no automation, no customer data connector. HubSpot Content Hub bundles all three, Webflow Optimize adds testing and personalization, and Squiz runs personalization on its own customer data platform. The open-source options add these through plugins or partners.
Questions to settle before you switch
Do editors need to edit on the page?
If yes, the list narrows to Webflow, Drupal CMS, Squiz and WordPress with a page builder. If a form with a preview pane is acceptable, Craft CMS and Umbraco come back in with better content modeling.
How many sites share one install?
Concrete runs many sites from one codebase at no extra license cost. Drupal CMS, Umbraco and WordPress Multisite do the same. Webflow and HubSpot Content Hub charge per site, so count your sites before you compare prices.
Which certifications does procurement need?
Concrete's hosting holds SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001. Among the alternatives, HubSpot Content Hub and Squiz hold vendor certifications, Umbraco holds ISO 27001, and the open-source options hold nothing of their own; their hosts do.
What does the free software really cost?
Concrete, WordPress, Drupal CMS, Umbraco and Joomla are all free to install. The bill is hosting, plugins and the person who maintains it. Get a three-year number from an agency for each, and compare it with the published subscriptions.
How does content come out?
Concrete stores content in a standard MySQL database and assets on the file system, so both are portable. Ask the same of every alternative. Webflow and HubSpot Content Hub export less cleanly than the open-source options.
Frequently asked questions
Why do people leave Concrete CMS?
The ecosystem, not the editor. The core has no AI features and none planned, GraphQL and official SDKs never shipped, the rich text editor is CKEditor 4, which reached end of life in June 2023, and there is no A/B testing or marketing automation. The talent pool is small, with 841 GitHub stars and about seven US job postings, and self-hosted teams own all patching and backups.
What is the closest alternative to Concrete CMS?
Webflow for on-page editing: marketers change content in place, collaborate in real time and pay published prices. Drupal CMS is the closest on permissions and multi-site, with Canvas drag-and-drop editing on top of Drupal's permission system. Both are a step up on AI and integrations.
Is there a free alternative to Concrete CMS?
Yes. WordPress, Drupal CMS, Umbraco and Joomla are all free open-source software, and Craft CMS has a free Solo edition. As with Concrete, the real cost is hosting and the developer who maintains it. WordPress has the largest pool of both; Drupal CMS has the deepest permissions.
What should a local government website use instead of Concrete CMS?
Drupal CMS if you want open source with Canvas page building and granular permissions, on a host that holds the certifications you need. Squiz if you want a managed suite with enterprise search and personalization, especially in Australia, New Zealand or the UK. WordPress is the budget option, with the largest choice of local agencies.
How hard is it to migrate from Concrete CMS?
Content is in a standard MySQL database and assets are on the file system, so exporting is straightforward. The work is rebuilding block layouts as the new platform's components and recreating area-level permissions, which few platforms match exactly. Plan a few weeks for a brochure site and longer for a multi-site estate.
How we rated these platforms
Each rating combines the relevant criteria from our independent scorecards into a five-point scale. The Fit score blends the ratings below, weighted for this topic, into one number out of 10. Ratings are recalculated whenever a scorecard is updated, so the order above always reflects current evidence. The written analysis was last reviewed on October 3, 2026.
Scorecards and platform inclusion are unsponsored: no vendor pays to appear in this guide or to change a rating. Full criteria, weights and evidence are in the methodology and on each platform’s scorecard. Spotted something out of date? Tell us.
Still deciding?
Answer seven questions for a shortlist built around your team, or put the top two side by side.