Commercial vs. Open Source
Some of the more prominent open-source CMS projects offer incredible value to organizations seeking inexpensive information-management portals. However, few offer any direct hooks into popular office applications, a standard requirement of most commercial solutions. Even with the advent of open-source office suites, few, if any, OSS projects offer the required tight integration between the front-end client authoring application and the back-end data management systems. Another endemic problem with open-source offerings adopted into a business is the cost to customize and maintain the solution. These reasons, coupled with the fear that the person behind the project could lose interest or, as has happened with the Mambo CMS-oriented Web portal project, fork as a consequence of disagreements between participants.
Open source is also not immune to the costs associated with customizing page templates, extending functionality and ongoing maintenance and support. Finding qualified consultants and system integrators to facilitate open-source-based alternatives is a challenge, because none of the open-source choices featured in this guide make available any kind of certification or validation of a third party's expertise with the respective technology. Nevertheless, for those technologists competent with the execution of a selected open-source alternative, as well as the programming language it was written in, the end results can be just as good, if not better than, a commercial alternative.
Another key differentiator between commercial and open-source CMSs is that many of the more costly commercial solutions have been designed explicitly with large enterprise scalability in mind. These systems have been engineered from their inception to serve thousands, even hundreds of thousands of requests per minute, something that no open-source solution is willing to attempt. Additionally, more enterprises are being required to formalize content audits for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance and other IT governances. Few open-source solutions provide the robust reporting, tracking and content integrity features that the more advanced commercial choices currently offer. Nevertheless, for organizations seeking to migrate legacy in-house or stalled proprietary CMSs to a more flexible and up-to-date design, open-source CMSs deliver an excellent low-cost alternative that can catalyze serious discussions among content stakeholders seeking to identify the ideal set of features that a CMS for their respective businesses should deliver.
One idea that some commercial vendors have adopted from the open-source approach is making a fully deployed demo of the server available online. This is an excellent idea and should be a standard pre-sales requirement for any serious CMS product in the market today. Several open-source CMSs featured in this guide have an accessible sample deployment demonstrating both front-end user and back-end administrator interfaces. These URLs are included in the summaries for each OSS-based product.
