CMS Watch’s Tony Byrne recently published his annual “kudos and shortcomings” report on 40 major web content management systems. It’s a summary of a much more in-depth pay-to-read report.
Byrne evaluted CMS in 30 different categories — user-generated content, usability, overall value, etc. In each category, he identified one leader, several “honorable mentions” and several laggards.
Scott Paley of Abstract Edge took the time to add up Bryne’s evaluations into a simple scorecard, and found that Plone handily topped the list, beating out both commercial and open-source competitors as CMS Watch’s most lauded CMS.
| Platform | Kudos | HM | Lagging | Score |
| Plone | 2 | 6 | 4 | 2 |
| Clickability | 1 | 3 | 3 | -1 |
| CrownPeak | 1 | 6 | 5 | -2 |
| Day | 2 | 4 | 5 | -2 |
| FatWire | 2 | 1 | 4 | -3 |
| Hot Banana | 0 | 4 | 4 | -4 |
| Mediasurface | 1 | 2 | 4 | -4 |
| EPiServer | 0 | 1 | 3 | -5 |
| Hannon Hill | 1 | 1 | 4 | -5 |
| Oracle/Stellent | 1 | 3 | 5 | -5 |
| RedDot | 1 | 3 | 5 | -5 |
| Tridion | 3 | 1 | 6 | -5 |
| e-Spirit | 1 | 0 | 4 | -6 |
| Ektron | 1 | 1 | 5 | -7 |
| Escenic | 0 | 1 | 4 | -7 |
| Midgard | 0 | 1 | 4 | -7 |
| Serena | 1 | 1 | 5 | -7 |
| CoreMedia | 0 | 2 | 5 | -8 |
| Ingeniux | 0 | 2 | 5 | -8 |
| Interwoven | 1 | 4 | 7 | -8 |
| PaperThin | 0 | 2 | 5 | -8 |
| Percussion | 1 | 2 | 6 | -8 |
| Refresh Software | 0 | 2 | 5 | -8 |
| eZ Publish | 0 | 1 | 5 | -9 |
| GOSS | 0 | 1 | 5 | -9 |
| Immediacy | 0 | 1 | 5 | -9 |
| TYPO3 | 0 | 3 | 6 | -9 |
| eZ Systems | 0 | 0 | 5 | -10 |
| TerminalFour | 0 | 0 | 5 | -10 |
| WebSideStory | 1 | 0 | 6 | -10 |
| Drupal | 2 | 2 | 9 | -12 |
| Enonic | 0 | 0 | 6 | -12 |
| IBM | 2 | 2 | 9 | -12 |
| Documentum | 0 | 3 | 8 | -13 |
| Joomla! | 1 | 1 | 8 | -13 |
| Sitecore | 2 | 3 | 10 | -13 |
| Vignette | 0 | 1 | 7 | -13 |
| OpenCMS | 0 | 0 | 7 | -14 |
| Microsoft | 0 | 5 | 10 | -15 |
| Alfresco | 1 | 2 | 10 | -16 |
What do I make of all this numerosity? A couple of things come to mind:
- First, it’s obvious that there’s no such thing as “the best CMS”, only tools that are well-suited to particular situations. That said, it’s nice to have folks like Tony providing high-level summaries that cover the broad landscape.
- The Plone community can be justly proud of Plone’s strong scores across the board. I think it signifies the overall high quality of Plone, and its relevance to a wide range of uses. I can’t wait to see how Plone 3 stacks up next year!
- Plone is the only open-source solution near the top of the scorecard. The next 14 top-scoring systems are commercial products. Other open-source products didn’t do so well. Midgard, and TYPO3 were in the middle of the pack. Drupal, Joomla! and Alfresco were down near the bottom (alongside heavyweight commercial offerings from Microsoft, IBM and Vignette!).
- I’d like to know more about the criteria Byrne used for evaluating, but
I suppose I’d need to buy the full report to find out.
Jon Stahl: Plone Blows Away Commercial and Open-Source Competition in CMS Watch Review
Originally from Planet Plone by