According to water & stone, the “big three” open source CMSes from 2010 continue to dominate in 2011. WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla all topped the company’s survey of open source CMSes, with WordPress “clearly outpacing” Drupal and Joomla.
The survey started with 35 systems, which were narrowed down to 20 after getting the survey responses. The report primarily looked at rate of adoption and brand strength. All we really care about is rate of adoption, so let’s look at that.
For adoption, the survey looked at downloads, installations and third-party support.
WordPress blows the doors off the competition when it comes to downloads. This year WordPress averages more than 640,000 downloads a week – which is actually down from last year by 34%. Joomla is a distant second, with more than 86,000 a week, and Drupal is at nearly 23,000 per week. However, the report notes that Drupal is significantly under-reported due to users who grab Drupal via the git repository, which is not tracked.
Third party analysis shows WordPress far and away more popular, with 53.6% of the Alexa One Million. Joomla has 9.6%, Drupal a mere 6.4%. Another third party, BuiltWith, shows WordPress as having more than 4.2 million installs, Joomla nearly 1.7 million, and Drupal with nearly 308,000.
The survey also looks at third party developer support by comparing Elance and Guru stats. Here developers are advertising their skills, and WordPress tops the list on Elance. It comes in second on Guru, whereas Joomla tops that list. Drupal once again comes in third, and there’s a strong fourth-place showing from DotNetNuke. Note that this may say less about any of the CMSes than it does about the job market – nearly all the major CMSes showed growth.
Another metric? Books in print. WordPress sports a field of 83 books, with 23 released in 2011. Drupal has an impressive 64, with 22 released this year. (Including Drupal User’s Guide by a friend of mine, Emma Jane Hogbin.) Joomla has 65 books, but only 13 released this year.
Though not quite up there with the top three in most metrics, Concrete5 made impressive gains. It came in with 19.3% of the respondents saying they were using Concrete5. WordPress has 34.2%, Drupal 19.8 and Joomla 18.5%. Its downloads are up by more than 500% according to the project’s spokesperson.
The survey responses were mainly from Europe and North America, though the company says that there was participation from 86 countries. More than 50% of respondents identified that their organization was 10 or fewer employees, but more than 20% (21.3% to be exact) were from organizations with more than 100 employees. More than 8% of respondents were from organizations with more than 1,000 employees.
