How does TikiWiki compare to the hundreds of Open Source CMS Systems?
People often ask us this. Ideally, to answer this question we'd need people with intimate knowledge of several systems. This tends to be pretty rare because once you get to know a versatile tool like Drupal, Joomla!, Plone or TikiWiki CMS/Groupware you can pretty much do everything you need with it (or you can certainly bend it to your needs). "He who works with a hammer thinks everything is a nail".
The other frequent question is "Which one is better?". Really the answer is "it depends" on what you are trying to do. However, with the wiki-powered collective intelligence we should be able to get some better, more detailed answers. 😉
You'll also be interested in SMACKDOWN :: Who are the Open Source Content Management System (CMS) market leaders in 2008? which comments on the comprehensive 2008 Open Source CMS Market Share Survey. This survey outlines well the challenges of trying to measure popularity by number of downloads or number of installs. This could, of course, be very interesting, but how do you count the number of installs behind the corporate firewalls? Also, many applications offer each module/feature/extension/language pack/theme as a separate download (where as TikiWiki bundles everything in one large download). So to be more accurate, you'd have to try to measure the number of "core" downloads, adding complexity and subjectiveness.
Notwithstanding these challenges, this chart below has an angle of comparing activity level / size of the community which is just one thing to look at. It is not a side-by-side comparison of features (which would be nice if done like www.wikimatrix.org). It is also a way for the TikiWiki community to identifies area to improve upon.
TikiWiki strives to be the best possible system and yet still be installable on cheap shared LAMP hosting. However, it has many features from so called enterprise systems. TikiWiki is somewhat a strange animal as it shares the Corporate Wiki space with TWiki, shares the CMS space with Typo3 and shares the groupware space with egroupware.
What is the future of a wiki-centric system? see for yourself!
| Criteria | TikiWiki CMS/Groupware | Joomla! | Drupal | Plone | Typo3 | ImpressCMS (Xoops fork) | Xoops | eZpublish | ))WordPress e107 | DotNetNuke(( | SPIP | ||
| Number of commiters | 155 | 48 | 19/1216 | 267 | 33 | 33 | 7 | 84 | 17 | 18 | ? | 22 | |
| Ohloh stacks | 39 | 169 | 227 | 97 | 63 | 23 | 25 | 31 | 317 | 8 | 7 | 15 | |
| IRC chat room size (freenode) | 32 | 80 | 248 | 132 | 40 | 5 (must use something else) | 2 (must use something else) | 18 | 141 | 27 | 0 (must use something else) | 35 | |
| Facebook group | 152 | 1628 | 1755 | 271 | 213 | 54 | 89 | 88 | 1484 | 35 | 195 | 103 | |
| CIA activity (hours between messages) | 2.04 | 1.44 | 3.42 | ||||||||||
| SSC toolbox | 12 | 25 | 81 | 28 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 79 | 0 | 0 | 1 | |
| Freshmeat Rating / Vitality / Popularity | 8.70/10 (134) / 0.14% (820) / 21.48% (45) | 8.83/10 (N/A) / 0.17% (732) / 2.44% (1994) | 8.41/10 (317) / 0.03% (1948) / 8.38% (317) | 8.07/10 (367) / 0.03% (2202) / 7.38% (380) | 8.58/10 (239) / 0.01% (4594) / 5.47% (598) | 8.62/10 (N/A) / 0% (24654) / 0.17% (26765) | 8.26/10 (N/A) / 0% (8710) / 2.75% (1691) | 7.97/10 (371) / 0.19% (684) / 13.70% (113) | 8.72/10 (N/A) / 0.11% (933) / 7.31% (385) | 8.65/10 (N/A) / 0% (25438) / 1.12% (5062) | 8.89/10 (N/A) / 0.05% (1539) / 1.40% (3932) | ||
| SourceForge activity level | click | click | click | click | |||||||||
| LOCs | Over 800 000? | ||||||||||||
| Downloads | 6000/month | 1000/month | |||||||||||
| Criteria | TikiWiki CMS/Groupware | Joomla! | Drupal | Plone | Typo3 | ImpressCMS (Xoops fork) | Xoops | eZpublish | ))WordPress e107 | DotNetNuke SPIP | |||
| Installs | tens of thousands | millions | new project | ||||||||||
| Printed documentation | 960 pages | 41 books in print | 19 books in print | 7 book in print | 17 book | new project | 8 books in print | ||||||
| Started | 2002 | 2008 | |||||||||||
| Events | small | many | huge | yes | not yet | many | |||||||
| License | LGPL | GPL | GPL | GPL | GPL | GPL | GPL | GPL & proprietary | GPL | GPL | BSD-style | GPL | |
| Community project or Open-sourced by a company | Community | Community | Community | Community | Community | Community | Community | eZ Systems | Automattic | Community | DotNetNuke Corporation | Community | |
| Language | PHP | PHP | PHP | Python | PHP | PHP | PHP | PHP | PHP | PHP | ASP | PHP | |
| Coding style | Simple with community coding as a design choice | Object-oriented | Object-oriented | ||||||||||
| Template engine | Smarty | Smarty | Smarty | ||||||||||
| Other | applied for openID bounty in Oct 2007 awaiting verdict | awarded openID bounty | awarded openID bounty | awarded openID bounty | |||||||||
| EContent 100 List | yes | no | yes | yes | yes | no | no | yes | yes | no | no | no | |
| GSOC 2008 | no | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no | no | yes | no | no | no | |
| Fantastico shared hosting | yes | yes | yes | no | yes | no | yes | no | yes | no | no | no | |
| Included in 2008 Open Source CMS Market Share Survey | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | no | yes | yes | yes | yes | no | yes | |
| Alexa | 45,761 | 4,319 | 7,913 | 63,091 | 121,438 | 47,272 | 70,678 | 55,900 | 3,275 | 41,536 | 44,196 | 145,261 | |
| Eats own's dogfood as a wiki? | ((dogfood | yes | uses MediaWiki | Added to Plone 3 | uses MediaWiki | uses MediaWiki | integrated MediaWiki | uses MediaWiki | |||||
| Eats own's dogfood as a bug tracker? | yes | uses GForge | uses Trac | ||||||||||
This chart highlights some of the differences with other projects.
1- I see the landscape as more of a "big 4" which includes Plone. If I had to limit to three (and there is no reason to do so), I'd put WordPress with the more specialized systems like MediaWiki. However, with all the plugins, you can do quite a bit with ))WordPress((, thus it fits as a CMS. On the other end, Plone has higher entry level (hosting requirements, etc.) than PHP systems but nonetheless has a huge & active developer community.
2- I don't see why the great success of the top systems would have such an effect on all other systems (certainly not in absolute terms). History may show that rapid growth by the leading systems grew the field for all and in fact, accelerated the development of the others (again, in absolute terms).
Similarly, the success of Wikipedia/Mediawiki has been a great thing for TikiWiki and for other wiki engines like DokuWiki, MoinMoin, Twiki, xwiki, etc. because it has brought wikis to the masses. When systems like Drupal/Joomla!/Wordpress get coverage in the mass media, it increases the space. I think the overall usage of Open Source Applications is growing and it is not about to slow down!
My prediction is that TikiWiki will continue improving in user base, functionality and stability very much like it has over the last 5 years. Even if Drupal and Joomla! are overall several times larger, TikiWiki is one of the largest open-source teams in the world and is in the top 2% of all project teams on Ohloh. This is more than enough to sustain a great community, improve the application and to benefit from the Network effect.
So go! go! go! Drupal, Joomla!, MediaWiki, etc. 😊
In general, with focus on size of the community
In general with focus on size of the community
These are very popular projects but are typically single focus.
GV: My suggestions will be written in red
More Stats
| 1) |
21 Nov 2024 14:00 GMT-0000
Tiki Roundtable Meeting |
| 2) |
19 Dec 2024 14:00 GMT-0000
Tiki Roundtable Meeting |
| 3) |
Tiki birthday |
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