Open Source Content Management System Comparison
Using Alexa, a traffic ranking service from Amazon, I compared drupal.org’s traffic with the traffic of other Free and Open Source content management systems’ websites. The term content management system is used broadly here as the list of projects include phpBB, Plone, TikiWiki, Wordpress, Xoops, Mambo, PHP-Nuke, PostNuke, Typo3, Xaraya and Drupal friend CivicSpace.
Popularity is compared based on Alexa’s daily reach-metric, which measures the number of users. Here, foo.com and www.foo.com are treated as the same site because they reside on the same domain. The results are presented in pretty graphs (generated by Alexa) and included below. Of course, the results must be taken with a grain of salt as the popularity of a product’s website is not necessarily related to the popularity of the product itself, or the quality thereof. So whenever I write popularity that really means the popularity of the website as measured by Alexa. Regardless, a number of interesting observations can be made …
- The popularity of most Free and Open Source CMS tools is in an upward trend. This implies that more and more people start using a Free or Open Source CMS to manage their website. The fact there is a clear correlation between the various growth curves (eg. most graphs show a dip in the summer of 2004) supports this observation.
- With a daily reach of 500M users, phpBB is by far the most popular community platform.
- phpBB, Xoops, Wordpress, Mambo and PHP-Nuke are more popular than Drupal. Plone, TikiWiki, Typo3 and Xaraya are less popular than Drupal.
- Drupal, Typo3, Xoops and Plone have comparable growth rates while Mambo and Wordpress are growing notably faster. Mambo and Wordpress have about the same popularity (i.e. a daily reach towards 300M users), yet Wordpress’ growth is much more aggressive so it won’t take long until Wordpress is much more popular than Mambo. Clearly, Wordpress is hot! Notable exceptions are PHP-Nuke and two of its derivatives, PostNuke and Xaraya, who have been steadily losing popularity over the past year.
What CMS do you use, and why? Please comment here.
Popularity: 3% [?]
on September 2nd, 2006 at 5:32 am
First off, Xaraya has absolutely nothing in common with PHP-Nuke. There is absolutely no PHP-Nuke code in the code base at all.
Second, I don’t know what view you are looking at, but http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=max&size=medium&compare_sites=&y=r&url=xaraya.com#top
doesn’t really show a decline in Xaraya’s traffic over the past year. It shows the highest levels ever.
In addition, Alexa is an IE only measurement tool, where Xaraya’s traffic is around 40% FF traffic, so the measurements are already skewed.
I never have understood the fascination of spreading FUD about other OS projects. If you want to disparage something, why not do so against some of the less secure and much more expensive, and not open code base products out there.
Thanks!
jc
on September 3rd, 2006 at 6:57 am
John Cox,
I have personaly used Xaraya, I do really like the Xaraya cms. For our upcoming open source proejct, we ourself, looked around for various cms, tried to evaluate the cms based on different methods.One of the theory we took was to compare Alexa traffic to understand the popularity out of many Open Source CMS. In our forthcoming article, you will find more details about the methods we followed and why we say Xaraya is loosing its popularity in comparision to other open source cms and Why We did not choose Xaraya. We do not have anything against any open source products, in fact, we mentioned, here, in point no. 1.