Business. Universities. Governments. Individuals. Around the world.
Here are some selected highlights of Plone sites in production.
They use Plone
Plone use cases around the world.
Plone in the real world
Feel free to submit your case study!
Government and Public Institutions
Government technology decisions are measured in decades. The European Environment Agency and the EU’s cybersecurity agency ENISA have been using Plone for twenty years. The OiRA risk assessment platform serves 17 countries and earned explicit recognition from the European Commission. These are not projects. They are long-term public sector infrastructure.
What keeps them on Plone is not inertia. It is what they cannot get elsewhere: a platform with no licensing cost squeeze, a security architecture trusted by cybersecurity professionals, and automated upgrade paths that have proven their worth over decades.
That same logic applies at every scale of government. The UK Land Registry chose headless Plone to open up a 160GB historical archive. Modena runs its civic network, intranet, and tourism portal as a single integrated suite. Different countries, different problems, same conclusion: when the data is public and the stakes are permanent, you need infrastructure you actually control.
Research and Higher Education
Universities do not buy platforms. They adopt infrastructure and then maintain it themselves, for decades. York College (CUNY) has done exactly that — a team of four runs Plone across the main website, parking permits, digital ID, and faculty reappointment workflows, and has for fifteen years.
Scale tells part of the story. Forschungszentrum Jülich runs hundreds of research subsites from one Plone 6 installation. Bologna manages over 600 degree programme sites, migrated programmatically from SharePoint. DLR, Germany’s aerospace centre, relaunched its portal for 10,000 staff.
Beyond scale, what matters is freedom and flexibility. Each deployment is deeply customised and integrated into institutional back-office systems. At Jyväskylä, a university team wired Plone into payment processing, workflow orchestration, and three different authentication systems. Saarbrücken replaced a stalled SAP procurement project in four months, at a fraction of the cost.
Institutions that think in decades choose infrastructure they can own.
Case studies: York College (CUNY) · Forschungszentrum Jülich · DLR · Bologna · Jyväskylä · Saarbrücken · Baden-Württemberg · Study in Denmark
NGOs and Civil Society
Non-profits operate under constant uncertainty. Funding cycles shift, political winds change, staff turn over. The last thing they need is a technology platform that adds to that pressure.
Plone provides a stable foundation: no licensing renewals or vendor roadmaps oriented towards extracting money instead of improving operations.
ACQF coordinates qualifications across 55 African countries on a platform their team owns and extends as new countries join. DDP strengthens democratic participation in South Africa with editorial tools their programme staff control directly. NITheCS advances computational science from astrophysics to quantitative finance on infrastructure they migrated from WordPress in one move, with no ongoing licensing cost. Three very different missions. One shared requirement: technology that stays out of the way.
Case studies: ACQF · DDP · NITheCS
Healthcare and Public Services
Healthcare institutions manage data that is both sensitive and time-critical. Clinical trials, staff directories, procurement tenders — when this information is wrong or stale on the public portal, the consequences are not just embarrassing. They affect patient trust and regulatory compliance.
IRCCS, an Italian cancer research institute, solved this by connecting Plone directly to four internal management systems. Clinical trials, tenders, medical staff, and facility data are synchronised in real time. No manual duplication, no drift between what the institution knows and what the public sees.
The OiRA platform, built for the EU’s safety and health agency, applies the same principle to occupational risk assessment across 17 countries. Its Plone-based engine has proven robust enough that organisations outside the public sector, including Mercedes-Benz, have adopted it for their own use.
Enterprise and Intranet
Modern intranets are where teams find documents, share knowledge, and coordinate across offices. When that infrastructure sits on a commercial platform, organisations pay twice: once in licensing, and again in lost control over how their own teams work together.
HORN + HORN, a German civil engineering firm, replaced a disused legacy intranet with Plone 6. Over 1,000 technical documents became searchable wikis with rapid previews and Solr-powered filtering. Three offices, one knowledge base that people actually use.
Quaive (case studies forthcoming) is an enterprise-class social intranet product, based on Plone, serving tens of thousands of users.
Plone powers large-scale digital workplaces at organisations across sectors, from NGOs coordinating hundreds of staff to municipalities managing cross-departmental collaboration. On-premise deployment, granular permissions, and deep customisation are not premium add-ons. They are how Plone works. No data leaves your infrastructure unless you want it to.
Case studies: HORN + HORN
Use Case Highlights
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Check out Plone success stories throughout the years.
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