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Concrete CMS vs CMS Made Simple: catalog facts
Concrete CMS	CMS Made Simple
Free Free and open source under the MIT licence.	Free Free and open source under the GPL-2.0 licence, funded by donations.
Self-hosted	Web, Self-hosted
Permissive MIT licence Long-running project with legacy branches available	Themes built from plain HTML and CSS with Smarty Modular with third-party modules and tags
Needs a PHP server and Composer to install Older concrete5 sites need upgrading to reach version 9	Requires PHP hosting and some setup Smarty templating is a learning step for new designers
Self-hosted	Self-hosted
Open source	Open source
License: MIT	License: GPL-2.0
Not stated if an account is needed	Not stated if an account is needed
Not stated if it works offline	Not stated if it works offline
Official website Full listing and sources Checked October 2, 2026	Official website Full listing and sources Checked October 2, 2026

Catalog facts only. Anything “not stated” is unconfirmed. Check full listings for details.