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To regular readers of this blog it’ll come as no surprise that I love WordPress, so when I saw this posting

WordPress Drupal Joomla Winning the CMS Game? at WebHelperMagainze.com by Scott Frangos I was a bit disturbed.  Scott uses data from CMSMatrix.org to run part of his comparison, but aparently CMSMatrix is using an old version of WordPress for its comparison because as Scott reports it they say that the spell checker is a “free adon in WordPress when actually it’s fully integrated and has been for a couple of versions now.  There are some other issues like this as well.

What else I found interesting, although inaccurate, was the data from Google trends.  In that data the author shows how many searches were performed for each of several content management systems.  He points to this as a metric of how popular each cms is and Joomla comes out slightly on top.  HOwever, Google has another more interesting component to Google trends that should have been used to demonstrate each site’s popularity Google Website Trends is the tool.

What this shows is that there are significantly more users or visits to WordPress.org than there are to Drupal or Joomla.  It gets even more interesting if you throw in WordPress.com which is WordPress’s hosted blog platform.  Throw that into the mix and all others sink away into relative oblivion.

Added to the above after Scott’s comment.

And here is what Google Trends for Websites looks like after you put in Wordpress.com

The line you can easily make out is Wordpress.com which is why I didn’t include it in the first graphs.

Scott makes another excellent point that a missing metric is how many installs of each their has been.  Actually the even better metric might be how many individual blogs / Websites are powered by them.  I couldn’t find that count, but what I could do as a much rougher estimate was a Google search for the term “powered by …”  with all three inserted individually.  Here are the numbers:

33,700,000 pages for wordpress
5,800,000 pages Joomla
3,690,000 pages for Drupal

Obviously there are many factors which can be skewing this data, WP folks might create more posts and pages as the above represents pages, they might be less likely to remove the powered by link, and I am sure there are several more possible explanations, but still the above shows a pretty big difference.

If anyone has more exact data on number of users of each, I’d love to see it.