There are many online content management systems in use today. The top three that people talk about are WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. Each has their own focus and strengths. So which should you choose?
WordPress is by far the most popular CMS around. It’s free and open source. WordPress started as blogging software, not a true CMS. Over time people started using it to manage websites and more CMS features have been added. Today it powers more than 74 million websites and blogs, with a 63.2% market share (April 2020). It has a strong and active community of developers and users.
Joomla is in a distant second place behind WordPress in market share, carrying 4.2%. Joomla is really good for building portal sites and can have a slightly different approach to managing content instead of pages. Most of my clients have a difficult time understanding how Joomla is set up. If you need to build a portal site with a lot of content, Joomla may be your answer.
Drupal is another open source CMS that is extremely flexible and powerful, and comes in third place with a market share of 2.8%. It, too, has a vibrant developer and user community. Drupal tends to carry a steeper learning curve than WordPress. Many government agencies have adopted Drupal because its permissions and workflow are much better than WordPress.
Squarespace and Wix are some very popular website builders that are not open-source, and require monthly subscriptions. They each have about 2.5% market share.
There are many more good and powerful content management systems out there. Sitecore is very popular on the .NET platform (disclosure: I’m a Sitecore Certified Developer), MODX is great for marketing sites.
Online content management systems get most of the attention, but Dreamweaver is another solid option for building and maintaining websites. Dreamweaver is software from Adobe that gets installed on your computer. You manage the website locally and copy changes to your hosted website.
Have any questions about which CMS is the best pick for your specific needs? Get in touch!
(Market share source: https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_management)