WordPress vs. Concrete5

Noupe takes a look comparing Concrete5 to WordPress.

Your TL;DR version here:

WordPress

Pros

• Most popular CMS
• Numerous third-party themes and documentation resources

Cons

• Heavy reliance on plugins
• Advanced users may find the abstraction too rigid

Concrete5

Pros

• Ideal balance between abstraction and customization
• Features such as Sitemap are native, and not via plugins

Cons

• Needs some more ready-made premium themes (probably a WooThemes-like provider for Concrete5)
• Seriously requires some more third-party resources (probably a Blog.com-like service for Concrete5)

The best part of the article though is probably this interesting observation:

Concrete5 manages to have a target audience which is eerily similar to that of WordPress. The average user of Concrete5 is not someone who wishes to have the customization prowess as offered by MODX. Instead, the average Concrete5 user is extremely similar to the average WP user: blogger, artist, magazine website creator, and so on.

The author goes on to say that that the “newbie” of Concrete5 though is not the same as a newbie for WordPress. Interesting distinction and from what I gather it’s probably true.

I’m personally not a big fan of Concrete5 and that’s only because I don’t use it. At this point in the game I’m not interested in learning a new CMS or technology for the things that I build – but that doesn’t mean that you should hold this perspective!

Take a look into Concrete5 and see for yourself.

It’s also worth noting that Concrete5 holds an MIT License as opposed to WordPress’ GPL.