September 9, 2009 I’m thinking about, over the next few weeks, revisiting a series of posts I put together way back in the day looking at WordPress MU vs. other multi blogging platforms.
Especially given the (allbeit somewhat distant) integration of WordPress MU into regular old WordPress – thus making this more of a WordPress (with special emphasis on MU) vs. post.
But, regardless of all of that, first we’ve got to figure out the state of the play regarding which platforms we should compare against, and as such I present to you this analysis of where WordPress sits in terms of the rest of the main blogging platform players.
There are actually two groups of players… the also-rans and the market leaders.
The also-rans – as far as I can see – are all dying a sorry slow death as far as stats are concerned :(
And they are, specifically TextPattern, Nucleus, b2evolution and Movable Type.
In terms of traffic they’ve been on the decline for some time and it doesn’t look like thy are going to reverse that process:
And the same can be discerned in their search performance, lo how the mighty have fallen.
And then there are the contenders, which – in that inexorable pattern are doing a serious rich get richer thang.
These are, specifically, Joomla, Drupal and – of course – WordPress.
In terms of traffic they are all increasing (although only wordpress.org does so significantly – possibly as a result of the rise of wordpress.com).
And in terms of search they are all much, much stronger… with Joomla making a particularly strong showing (maybe people who use Joomla google more… or maybe it means something in dutch :)
Think I’ve got it about right? Or am I missing a platform?
For my mind the main articles should be:
WordPress MU vs. Drupal
WordPress MU vs. Joomla
WordPress MU vs. Movable Type
Am not sure if people are that interested in textpattern / nucleus / b2evolution to make those comparisons – again, lemme know if you disagree.
And feel free to run your own stats tests on Google Trends for Websites or Google Insights for search.
Interesting article, and I think it would be really valuable to make those comparisons for all of us developing web sites out here. I did a “smackdown” of WordPress (not MU specifically) vs. Drupal vs. Joomla. Got a lot a comments as a result.
Another recent entry you might want to check out is Concrete 5. It’s not nearly as popular yet as any of the other solutions out there, but I really do like it. I wrote a “first look” article for that as well on my blog.
Anyway, looking forward to the new/updated reviews! Good luck!
Hey James,
Looking forward to this series of posts. I jumped on the wordpressmu wagon a year ago and haven’t looked back. I’m continually amazed by both the extensibility of wordpress as a blogging/cms platform and the community of wordpress devs. As a note (cause I can’t just let it go at that) the colors are reversed for joomla and drupal in the 3rd and 4th graph.
Again, looking forward to this series!
Thanks for the feedback guys!
I suppose that the reason I’m not super keen on looking at Concrete 5 or similar is just that it’s more a different set of posts, like an ‘up and coming’ review – whereas this is examining mature platforms and all that.
Yeh, sorry about the colours :)
There are several obvious reasons in my opinion for these trends:
1 – Open source => larger community, larger pool of available plug-ins and themes.
2 – WordPress is simple as heck to use and keeps getting better with every new version.
3 – Ability to create and customize niche focused sites. I used WP Mu to power http://resumesee.com – basically used pre-existing plug-ins to make it a resume hosting platform, not a blog platform.
4 – More self hosting options. I can set up and configure MU in a moment. there is no other turn key platform like WordPress MU – thank you to all the awesome people behind it. I make a full time income off of setting up and customizing WordPress (especially MU) and I owe a lot of that to the WP community.
PS if you are not already a premium.wpmudev.org member, you should be. I joined last month and have received several great leads from it.
Sign Up Here: http://premium.wpmudev.org/?ref=rfair404-7323
I like your line up with Drupal, Joomla, and Moveable Type. You might also include services such as Ning. You can blog with Ning but I think it’s main focus is social networking. You could also include applications like Moodle. Coming from the education side of things, this is what a lot of our teachers wrestle with – choice between WordPress and a course management software.
Thanks for taking the time to review these. It’s very beneficial to me and several others here in Nebraska. We have a statewide organization that is considering a move away from Manila/Frontier as our software to offer a web presence for schools and teachers to something else.
Besides asking readers to come up with reasonable competitor examples, one important think is defining the head to head matrix you’ll be using for the comparison – the features you will be aligning – but this might come after you publish the article.
Anyway, a great idea, waiting forward for reading it.
I fear you overestimate my professionalism ;) I doubt there will be many matrices involved – but feel free to suggest factors.
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