Introduction

How does Tiki 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 Tiki Wiki 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 Tiki 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 Tiki community to identifies area to improve upon.

Tiki 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. Tiki 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!

Comparison chart

Criteria Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware Joomla! Drupal Plone Typo3 ImpressCMS (Xoops fork) Xoops eZpublish WordPress e107 DotNetNuke SPIP
Number of committers 186 53 29/2126 64 (error?) 51 45 28 89 19 21 ? 23
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 (August 2009 2008) 728 1207 ? 151 133
SSC toolbox 12 25 81 28 2 2 0 0 79 0 0 1
Freshmeat Rating / Popularity 8.70/10 (134) / 21.48% (45) 8.83/10 (N/A) / 2.44% (1994) 8.41/10 (317) / 8.38% (317) 8.07/10 (367) / 7.38% (380) 8.58/10 (239) / 5.47% (598) 8.62/10 (N/A) / 0.17% (26765) 8.26/10 (N/A) / 2.75% (1691) 7.97/10 (371) / 13.70% (113) 8.72/10 (N/A) / 7.31% (385) 8.65/10 (N/A) / 1.12% (5062) 8.89/10 (N/A) / 1.40% (3932)
SourceForge activity level click click click click click
LOCs Over 1 million
Downloads 6000-9000/month 1000/month
Criteria Tiki Wiki 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
2007 EContent 100 List yes no yes yes yes no no yes yes no no no
2008 EContent 100 List no yes yes yes no no no no yes no no no
GSOC 2008 no yes yes yes no no no no yes no no no
GSOC 2009 yes yes yes yes yes 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
Included in 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Survey yes yes yes yes yes no yes yes yes yes yes no
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? yes uses MediaWiki Added to Plone 3 uses MediaWiki uses MediaWiki integrated MediaWiki uses MediaWiki uses MediaWiki
Eats own's dogfood as a bug tracker? yes uses GForge yes uses Trac uses Mantis uses SourceForge.net uses SourceForge.net for core and XOOPS Module Development Forge for modules yes uses Trac yes uses Trac


This chart highlights some of the differences with other projects.

Opinions

Dries Buytaert, from Drupal wrote:
predicts: "However, near the end of 2008, we'll see the first signs of consolidation in the Open Source CMS market. The Open Source CMS space will become less fragmented; the "big three" (i.e. Wordpress, Joomla! and Drupal) will continue to grow but the growth of many other systems (i.e. Plone, Typo3, Xoops, e107, ezPublish, dotNetNuke, etc) will slow down significantly."

Marc Laporte wrote:

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 Tiki 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 Tiki 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, Tiki 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. 😊

General CMS systems

Big 4

In general, with focus on size of the community

2nd tier

In general with focus on size of the community

Who else is in 2nd tier?

Specialized

These are very popular projects but are typically single focus.


Wikis

Wiki Landscape

Other notes

Lists



GV: My suggestions will be written in red

Todo

  1. Find cleaner way to maintain data
    • web services?
    • Nicer table/chart
      • Double click editing?
      • Sorting
      • Swap X & Y axis
      • Perhaps a tracker
  2. Split into 4 charts (with TW stats contained in a all)
    • Big 3/4
    • Other popular CMSs (low hosting requirements)
    • Other wikis Wiki Landscape
    • Other popular Web applications (high hosting requirements)


More Stats