How does Drupal compare to other CMSs?

Recently NTEN (Nonprofit Technology Network) put out their 2008 CMS Satisfaction Survey. You can find the full text and numbers for this survey on their web page, though it will cost you $50 if you are not a member. They are a valuable nonprofit themselves, so supporting them seems to be a good thing, and this report would go a long way to helping many of you convince your clients to use Drupal, more than you could achieve in $50 of billable time in many cases, so it would be $50 well spent.

In any event I thought I'd at least share the basics of that report with the group, on how Drupal ranked in customer satisfaction and related areas. Remember though that this is not representative of all your clients, but is nonprofit focussed, which is a group probably more likely to use free tools before most others, so it is unlikely that the world at large matches these numbers, fascinating as they are.

Firstly, their original survey had almost 30 CMS systems on it, and yet about 40% of respondents chose, "none of the above." So yes, there are many CMS systems out there. Over 1000 people participated in the survey, with 650 completing the full survey. Only 9 systems received 10 or more assessments, so usage is widespread. Industries the organizations served varied widely.

They split their report into small, medium and large organizations. In small and medium sized organizations, and also in the numbers for overall usage, the most commonly used systems were Drupal, Plone and Joomla (in that order). Large organizations mostly used Convio and GetActive WSM, followed by Drupal and Blackbaud. Drupal was first in both small and medium sized organizations, and third in large organizations. Drupal's real dominance/strength seemed to be in medium-sized orgs.

They also graded systems on various categories, and open source systems did not only dominate usage, but also dominated satisfaction grades, getting mostly As and no score lower than B. With the exception of Antharia, they scored generally higher than commercial systems, and custom CMS were at the bottom of the pile. Drupal, Plone and Joomla fared about the same in this area, with some variation.

About a third of respondents use open source CMSs, and I'd have expected that number to be higher amongst nonprofits, illustrating again how quality open source software has so many mindset obstacles to overcome. Just why do organizations choose proprietary over open, when the research shows that the open system is better, and/or a better value? The good news is that this report finishes by recommending that you use an open source CMS and they provide a list of reasons why this is a good idea. It is something we as a group should also focus on, ways to make it clear how Drupal/Open Source is better, and ways to make it easier to swap to (more CMS-conversion modules for example).

They stated some things we all know well, namely that there is no one CMS perfect for every organization. There are also surveys aplenty out there if you want to exercise your google-fu, or for example see this one: Idealware compares Drupal, Joomla and Plone.

Weaknesses of the NTEN survey, for me, include the inclusion of Wordpress, which, while it can mimic basic CMS functionality, is not really a CMS.

There is plenty more in the report, but I thought these the most salient points for our DUG to consider. If you want the numbers involved you will have to purchase their report.