Content Management System Sanity Check – Drupal? Joomla? WordPress? What CMS road are you on?

It never hurts to double-check what road you are on, especially if it costs you money.  In a sense a content management system (CMS) is a digital road your non-profit organization or business is taking.

Let’s take a quick sanity check to see the “Google Earth” view of the CMS landscape.

Let’s narrow the scope to the GPL licensed CMSs because they are the more cost-effective and battle-tested platforms out there; that would be Joomla, WordPress, and Drupal.

There are several key metrics that we should take into account when reviewing which CMS to adopt. Certainly, the current global adoption rate of the CMS  is probably the most important. Another key consideration is vetted, professional reviews of our peers in the “crowd.”

Before doing a deep dive, I would like to preface with the disclosure that I am endeavoring to remain CMS neutral and strictly present the facts. We obviously implement quite a few WordPress sites, but we run a number of Joomla sites as well, one of which is a Fortune 100 company. We also have managed and developed Drupal sites as well.

Let’s start with the global adoption rate. BuiltWith.com is the authority in declaring what software platforms are currently being used now as well has historically. Their numbers simply don’t lie. A quick look at the current market share will obviously demonstrate that WordPress is the market leader, followed by Drupal and then Joomla. The data below is pulled from the top 10,000. There are also other samples, top 100,000 and top million sites. The top 10,000, however, are representative of higher-end non-profits and small businesses and how they vote with their feet.

The pie chart indicates as such – http://trends.builtwith.com/cms – with the break down as follows – WordPress 48%, Drupal 14%, and Joomla 1%.

G2Crowd is another reliable source of factual data. We use them all the time when trying to discern which SAAS products to use for our own company as well as for our clients. G2Crowd is basically a crowd-source approach to reviewing software. It receives its objectivity from the fact that members have to authenticate as a LinkedIn user and the surveying of those members is consistent and follows standard surveying norms.

The results for G2Crowd in many ways follow the BuiltWith.com report. What makes this data important is that it represents vetted user experience. That is key. G2Crowd has a proprietary method called “Grid Scoring” which we see in the chart below. Here we see that WordPress is the most popular CMS.

The report looks at various critical features such as scalability, mobility, integrations, forward compatibility, collaborative feasibility, marketing, to name a few.

WordPress (89%) pulls ahead with Joomla (53%) in second and Drupal (41%) in last. The full report is available for around $599 but for our purposes, this will suffice.

Certainly, this is not exhaustive, but it does give us a quick sanity check to see which road we are on.

Feel free to jump in here with your thoughts on all things CMS.