When the marketing team decides to build a website, usually the first step is to select the right CMS for building the website. From the plethora of options available in the market, it can be a perplexing task to zero in on THE BEST CMS. The size of data incoming, outgoing, stored and processed is directly proportional to the size of the organization. The nature of your business plays a vital role in selection since usability and applicability of the end product is what matters. Hence, the speed of your website, its performance and the security plug-ins being used ought to be on the top in your list of considerations.

According to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, CMS is divided into four different quadrants namely leaders, visionaries, niche players and challengers. These are purely defined based on the completeness of the vision they have versus their ability to execute the requirements supporting the vision. Just as it is not advisable to go with the leaders in the industry when the niche players could better support your needs, using the CMS that trending might not be the best solution for you.

An open source CMS with a set of plug-ins could be the right choice for small and medium businesses or even for enterprises seeking a static website. Whereas for a complex business, what suits the company best would be a commercial CMS that is customizable and tailored according to their specific requirements.

In this article, we have critically gone through the various aspects of both open source as well as commercial CMS. Let’s start by exploring what is the difference between open and commercial CMS and what parameters you need to consider while choosing one.

Open source CMS are largely available to the public, mostly free of charge. They have an open community that contributes to the creation of the web content management system. This community consists of developers and coders from around the world that provide codes and plug-ins to choose from. Some plug-ins are free while some you have to pay for. The most popular open source CMS are WordPress and Joomla.

Commercial CMS also known as proprietary CMS, they are developed as well as owned by a single company, and the users usually need to buy a license. Commercial CMS comes with various functionalities and are integrated with all the required plug-ins. They do not allow a third party plug-in. The most popular commercial CMS are Sitefinity and Sitecore.

Below is a tabular representation of the major differences between an Open Source and a Commercial CMS and its advantages and disadvantages.

Whether to choose an Open source CMS like Drupal or Joomla or to go with a commercial CMS like Sitefinity or Sitecore, it all boils down to available skill sets, usability, requirements, the need of an IT support and your budget allocation for Marketing and IT. Below is an overview of the most popular open source and commercial CMS.

Over and above these comparisons, there are a few parameters that we shall explore in our next blog post, that will provide a deeper insight into the kind of features and benchmarks you should have while choosing a Content Management System. Check this space for more.