Open source content management systems keep winning over marketers. Here’s why.
Marketers today are responsible for more than just publishing content. They manage complex digital experiences across many channels and devices, while staying nimble and data-focused.
Because of this shift, marketers need more than content control. They want flexible tools to launch campaigns faster, personalize at scale, and respond quickly to changes. The goal is a tech stack that’s scalable, adaptable, and free from restrictive vendor contracts.
That’s why open-source CMS platforms continue to gain ground in 2025. Here are just a few of the ways they can support business goals while giving marketers more control over how they work and what they build:
Full Creative Freedom
Open-source CMS platforms allow marketers to design without being boxed in by templates or proprietary rules. With complete freedom to customize look, feel, and functionality, marketing teams can build experiences that truly reflect their brand.
Faster Time to Market
Open source CMS supports agile workflows, prebuilt modules, and integrations with marketing tools. Campaigns and site updates can go live faster, without heavy development delays.
Omnichannel Delivery
An open architecture makes omnichannel delivery easier. Marketers can use API-first and headless-friendly systems to publish content to websites, apps, and social platforms from a single location.
Cost Efficiency
Without license fees, teams can save money and invest in what matters. Open source tools let marketers avoid unnecessary features and build the stack that fits their needs.
Ownership and Control
With open source CMS, marketers keep full ownership of their data. That leads to stronger privacy, easier compliance, and better insights without third-party limitations.
Industry Trends in 2025
Emerging trends are making this shift even more urgent, and open source platforms are built to keep up.
For example, Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs) are becoming more popular as businesses seek to deliver seamless, personalized interactions across all digital channels. Open source CMS solutions fit naturally within DXPs, offering the flexibility and control needed to create rich, adaptable user experiences.
Accessibility, performance, and SEO also matter more than ever. Composable architecture lets marketers build the tools they need.
Seamless Integration
Integration with AI and personalization tools is smoother in open environments. Marketers can plug into new tech quickly and adapt campaigns as tools evolve.
Security and Reliability
Security and compliance have also improved. Open source code is transparent and widely reviewed. Active communities help patch issues quickly and keep systems up to date.
Modern Usability and Support
Current open source platforms offer intuitive backends, strong user management, and rich ecosystems of extensions. Community support is fast, dynamic, and often more cost-effective than proprietary vendors. Old myths about open source being too hard to manage simply don’t hold up.
What to look for in a CMS partner
Marketers should choose open source CMS partners who lead with strategy. Look for someone who begins with business goals and customer needs, then selects tools that support them.
Want to be prepared for the future? Consider open source CMS
Open source CMS gives marketers the flexibility, control, and speed they need to succeed. It’s more cost-effective, secure, and scalable. That makes it the smart choice in a fast-changing digital world.
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates over 15% of the world’s population — or 1.3 billion people — self-identify as having a disability.
That’s why creating inclusive and accessible websites isn’t just a nice-to-have in today’s online world; it’s an absolute necessity.
As hospitals, universities, and nonprofits strive to meet the needs of everyone who visits their websites, it becomes all the more crucial to understand the diverse challenges folks face when attempting to interact with inaccessible content (and the impact this can have on customer acquisition, applications, and fundraising.)
Here at Kanopi, we’d argue that to understand what people with disabilities need from your website, you should develop accessible personas — detailed representations of your different website visitors, particularly those with disabilities.
This blog explores why accessible personas are essential, how they help design better user experiences and the best practices for developing them. Let’s get started!
What are accessible personas?
We’ve written about them before here, but simply put, a persona is a fictional yet data-driven representation of your target customer, written as if the persona were a real person. It’s documented in a way that lists everything from demographic information to hobbies, to pain points, and motivators.
A persona is a tool you can use to create sales and marketing materials that have a specific target user in mind, rather than a generic one. They are designed to guide content writers, designers, and developers in crafting websites that can be easily accessed and navigated by everyone, regardless of their abilities.
But what many personas lack is taking accessibility needs into account. We can’t forget or ignore that site visitors can have various impairments, including permanent, temporary, and situational disabilities (see below for more on those). This is particularly critical in healthcare, where users come to a website with any number of accessibility needs and need information quickly and easily.
Example: a persona for a UCSF Department of Urology patient
By focusing on different disability types — such as mobility, visual, hearing, cognitive, and neurological impairments — organizations can better anticipate the needs of folks who may face barriers when interacting with their websites.
Dyslexia alone affects 20% of the population and represents 80–90% of all those with learning disabilities. It’s the most common of all neurocognitive disorders. Limiting all capitalization and breaking up large walls of text to add white space are just a few design solutions that help ensure your site content is dyslexia-friendly.
It’s also essential to consider the three different types of impairments:
Permanent impairments, like blindness or permanent mobility limitations.
Temporary impairments, such as an eye injury or recovering from surgery.
Situational impairments, like those faced by a person in bright sunlight or within a noisy environment.
There’s a strong business case for developing accessible personas.
Improved usability for everyone
Accessible personas help organizations understand the unique challenges faced by people with disabilities, leading to more inclusive and user-friendly web design.
The insights drawn from accessible personas ensure that accessibility isn’t an afterthought but an integrated part of the design process.
By considering different abilities, you create a better experience not only for folks with disabilities but for everyone — whether they’re navigating your website with a keyboard, voice control, or even in a noisy or visually cluttered space.
Then there’s the issue of ethics. Put simply, ensuring your website is accessible to people with disabilities means equal access to your site’s content for all, not just a few.
Enhances content, UX, & design
Creating accessible personas encourages teams to focus on key aspects of accessibility, such as content clarity, navigation ease, and intuitive design.
For instance, a persona with a hearing impairment might require captions for videos and a visual indicator for sound cues.
Additionally, a person with a visual impairment might need large text options and high-contrast colors.
These solutions — along with many more outlined in our content scorecard — help ensure that everyone who visits your website can read, navigate and use your content as intended.
Fosters empathy & inclusion
Developing personas based on real-world impairments fosters empathy among strategists, content writers, designers, and developers.
When teams are guided by detailed personas that represent real-world people, you can create a stronger emotional connection to your organization’s accessibility goals.
This empathy can shift the focus from mere compliance to a genuine commitment to creating more inclusive and usable digital experiences for everyone.
Disabilities can vary widely in terms of permanence. Some folks might have lifelong disabilities, like blindness, while others might have temporary conditions, such as an eye injury.
Situational impairments — like a noisy environment or bright lighting — also affect how people interact with your website.
Account for diverse impairments
A disability can impact someone’s senses and abilities differently, including:
Mobility: People with limited motor control may require options to navigate your website without precise mouse movements. Ensure your site provides keyboard navigation, large buttons, and clear visual cues for all clickable elements.
Visual: Permanent impairments like blindness or color blindness and temporary issues such as cataracts or eye injuries require solutions including alt text, high-contrast colors, and adjustable font sizes.
Hearing: People with hearing impairments need captions and transcripts for videos and visual cues for audio content.
Cognitive & Neurological: People with cognitive impairments benefit from clear, simple language, step-by-step instructions, and tutorials that help them navigate your website easily.
Embed accessibility in Drupal
Once you’ve designed your personas, make it easy to implement how you’ll meet people’s needs.
The Drupal A11y Project Checklist created and maintained by developers at Kanopi offers helpful, integrated guidance on interaction methods, navigation, and structure for individuals, organizations, and governments.
Practical solutions for a variety of impairments
Avoid taking a one-size-fits-all approach. Different solutions assist different impairments. For example:
Mobility Impairments: Ensure folks can navigate your site using their keyboard or screen reader. Avoid requiring precise mouse movements, which can be difficult for people with motor impairments.
Visual Impairments: Craft high-contrast color schemes and resizable text options, and use descriptive alt text for images and videos. These features benefit people with blindness, color blindness, and even temporary impairments like eye injuries.
Hearing Impairments: Use captions, transcripts, and visual cues to replace audio information. Additionally, provide clear, concise language to ensure understanding.
Cognitive Impairments: Simplify language, use step-by-step instructions, and minimize complex interactions. Visual aids can be beneficial for people with cognitive or neurological impairments.
Neurological impairments: Avoid extreme flash and strobe of visual content, parallax effects, and scroll-triggered animations, considering the needs of the 50 million people worldwide who have epilepsy and the 1.8 million adults worldwide who have bilateral vestibular hypofunction (BVH).
Where to start for creating your own accessible personas
The UK Government Digital Service (GDS) has developed seven different open-source accessibility personas that you can use as a reference to get started. However, the GDS also notes that creating accessible personas is not a substitute for including people with access needs in your user testing.
Guidelines from Microsoft’s Inclusive Design methodology provide a comprehensive approach to developing accessible personas as well.
Accessible personas not only humanize your site’s users but also help prioritize and align content, UX, and design solutions to better meet their needs.
At Kanopi, we create personas from many different sources, including:
While it may seem like a daunting task, taking small, incremental steps can improve your site’s accessibility over time. For example, you could start by focusing on your website’s forms.
We recently came across a very interesting blog post from our friends at Orbit Media on a subject we’ve actually wanted to cover for a while now: the average website lifespan.
They discovered that the average lifespan is two years, one month. That’s it.
A low bar, indeed.
They also point out that you can extend your website’s lifespan well beyond two measly years by following some established best practices. This is something we know about first hand here at Kanopi.
In fact, we’ve found that the websites we build for our clients regularly last 10 years or more.
So what’s our secret sauce? It comes down to two things:
how we define support, and
how we provide that support.
Both of these are based on years of experience and focus on a complete process that leads to steady improvement and intentional growth.
We focus on setting clear expectations from the start, ensuring clients understand the purpose, share our mindset, and are fully on board. It’s not just about making updates; it’s about bringing marketing, design, and development together so every change has a real impact.
In fact, it’s been a core part of how we work for so long that we see it as more than just a methodology. It reflects our mindset as an agency. And it’s the #1 reason the websites we build for our clients enjoy the longevity that they do.
If you’re curious to learn how we help clients build websites that last five times longer than the industry average, it starts with these steps:
We begin with both qualitative and quantitative research. Every project begins with qualitative and quantitative research. (If you’re unsure what the difference is or why both are equally important, check out this post.) The research we do informs our UX design and content strategy, ensuring optimal usability right from the outset — which results in fewer problems down the road and helps avoid premature obsolescence. This is why even when the budget we’re given is relatively small, we do as much research as possible with what we have. This step is far too important to omit.
We employ skilled, experienced professionals. Senior-level website designers and developers are capable of superior-quality work, faster problem-solving, and efficient project execution. This results in websites that remain performant, efficient, and relevant for years. By minimizing technical debt and ensuring adaptability, their experience and skill helps prevent costly rebuilds.
Also, we’ve found that full-time employees tend to have a more vested interest in client projects. So while we may occasionally complement our staff with contractors (who are also senior-level), our clients can trust that their projects will be handled almost entirely by full-time staff.
The talented Kanopi staff
Support is not the same thing as maintenance.
The word ‘support’ in our industry has come to be synonymous with technical tickets and tasks. And notifying a help desk when there’s a problem with your site, and speaking with a technician to get the problem resolved, and then forgetting about them until you need them again.
Of course, this type of maintenance work is nonetheless important and we do provide it for our clients. But it has very little to do with how we define ‘support’ at Kanopi.
It’s more than making sure the code works and the add-ons and features don’t glitch. Instead, it’s a process that involves ongoing evaluation and iteration, where we continually ask questions like these:
User Experience & Accessibility
Have user needs evolved?
Is the website fully responsive and optimized for different devices and browsers?
Are there any new accessibility standards or guidelines we need to implement?
SEO & Content
Is the content current? Are we keeping things fresh, adding interesting new content and archiving/repurposing older content that’s no longer relevant?
Are we monitoring search trends and adjusting our SEO strategy accordingly?
Are we leveraging AI tools or automation to enhance SEO performance?
SEM & Paid Marketing
Are our paid search campaigns (Google Ads, social media ads) optimized for ROI?
Are we testing and iterating on ad creatives and messaging for better engagement?
Are we using remarketing strategies effectively to re-engage visitors?
Conversion & Engagement
Are our landing pages optimized for conversions?
Are we A/B testing CTAs, headlines, and page layouts to improve engagement?
Are we analyzing user behavior to refine marketing strategies (e.g., heatmaps, scroll depth, click tracking)?
Brand & Positioning
Are we maintaining a consistent brand voice across all marketing channels?
Are we engaging with our audience through social media, email marketing, and community-building efforts?
Scalability & Infrastructure
Is our hosting environment still the best fit for our current traffic and resource needs?
Has the open source community recently invented or improved features that would enhance this website, or be a better fit than those we’ve previously implemented?
Are we monitoring uptime and performance metrics to prevent downtime?
Would implementing a CDN or other optimizations improve site speed?
Automation & Workflow
Can any repetitive development tasks (e.g., updates, testing, deployments) be automated?
Are there any new integrations (AI-Search, APIs, CRM, analytics tools) that could improve efficiency?
Performance & Security
Are all core, theme, and plugin/module updates applied and tested for compatibility?
Are there any deprecated functions or outdated dependencies that need refactoring?
Is the site loading efficiently (e.g., optimized images, caching, minimized scripts)?
Are security best practices being followed, such as firewalls, backups, and malware scans?
By revisiting these questions regularly, we ensure your digital presence continues to evolve with your users and the broader web landscape. And it helps us focus on what matters most: performance, usability and long-term value.
Conclusion (in convenient listicle form)
We didn’t actually set out to write this post as a how-to guide, but if you want to ensure your website enjoys unnaturally long life blessed with perpetual relevance, usability and neverending optimal results, these are the steps you’d need to follow:
Do your homework; include both quantitative and qualitative analytics as part of your thorough research process.
Entrust your strategy, design and development to the most deeply skilled, experienced team of professionals you can find. Bonus points if most of them are your full-time employees.
Transform your definition of support from something that happens only when problems occur into a mindset of constantly looking for opportunities to enhance and improve every facet of your site.
Simply commit to these three steps with every fiber of your being and your website is guaranteed to exceed the average lifespan by a great many years. And if that seems overwhelming, you can always partner with an agency that demonstrates their passion for website longevity by writing lengthy blogs.
Drupal has always been a huge part of the Open Web, empowering its users to create ambitious websites. The Drupal community continues to make the platform more accessible and feature-rich. One of the most exciting advancements in this space is the introduction of Drupal CMS, which is designed to provide an easy-to-use, out-of-the-box experience.
What is Drupal CMS?
Drupal CMS aims to make Drupal more accessible to a broader, less technical audience. This project joins the best of Drupal’s contributed project ecosystem to create a streamlined experience. Building on top of Drupal core, Drupal CMS takes advantage of recent core initiatives like Recipes, Project Browser, and Automatic Updates.
The goal? To make it easier than ever for users to go from installation to a fully functional website, even if they have little to no prior Drupal experience. Drupal CMS comes pre-packaged with carefully curated “recipes” that cater to everyday use cases. By guiding site builders through a smoother, faster setup process, Drupal CMS aims to reduce barriers to entry and attract new users to Drupal.
Drupal CMS is designed to compete directly with Wix, WordPress, Squarespace, and other out-of-the-box solutions so users can spin up a site quickly and effectively, but with the bonus of getting the most commonly used components of Drupal — and the power of Drupal — built in!
What’s in Drupal CMS?
Administration experience
Drupal CMS has a stunning admin experience out of the box, using Gin for the admin theme to give the user interface (UI) a gorgeous, airy look. Users can log in with a username or password. Once they do, they will land on a brand-new Dashboard.
Drupal core’s Navigation module adds a new left-hand navigation bar. Together with the search in the top bar provided by the Coffee module, this makes navigating the Drupal admin screens much faster.
The Page
The base Drupal recipe comes with a Page content type and many niceties, such as a Trash bin, auto-saving of edit forms, page duplication thanks to Quick Node Clone, core Media enhancements like Focal Point, and, of course, Project Browser to find new recipes, modules, and automatic updates.
Content types
Additional content types can be added in the installer or later in Project Browser.
The Blog, Case Studies, Events, News, Person profiles, and Project recipes all have their respective content types, dependent entities like taxonomies to categorize themselves or locations for events. They also have a listing page and a Drupal view that lists individual news, events, and other content types.
Additional Recipes
Not only are there content-type recipes, but you can also add functionality to Drupal CMS’ using prebuilt add-ons provided by recipes. The application is fast, and what would take a developer hours or days to configure is now done in the blink of an eye. These recipes include:
SEO Tools
It adds standard search engine optimization tools such as meta tags, XML sitemap, robots.txt management, and more.
Google Analytics
This recipe adds tracking of website traffic using Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. Requires a Google Tag Manager ID.
Accessibility Tools
Adds automated checks to help ensure content conforms to web accessibility guidelines.
AI Assistant
Adds integration with AI services, such as alt text generation and a chatbot to assist with site-building. Requires an API key from Open AI or Anthropic.
Search
Adds a search to help visitors find content.
Forms
This recipe adds a simple contact form and tools for building forms.
This is one of the advantages of Drupal CMS: If a marketer wanted to expand their Drupal CMS site into a more complex one as their needs grow, it would be easy to do! Drupal CMS installs the latest version of Drupal 11. So the goal is one spins up a Drupal CMS site, grows it over time, and when additional support is needed to expand the site, it can be seamlessly expanded to take advantage of all the flexibility and complexity that Drupal offers.
The Future of Drupal CMS
Drupal CMS 1.1 will be released in the short term in early 2025. This release will contain not only bug fixes but also minor enhancements. Still, it will also include a demo of Experience Builder (XB), then a new page builder that will empower site builders to construct and theme their entire website solely within their browser using basic HTML, CSS, and templating markup, eliminating the need for extensive coding experience and Drupal expertise. A full release of XB is expected in the fall of 2025 and will be the main feature in Drupal CMS 2.0.
2025 will also bring new tracks to Drupal CMS as work wraps up on existing tracks.
Project Browser
Work will continue on the Project Browser initiative as an official Drupal CMS track. The tool continues to evolve to support recipe application and re-application, module discovery, and as a gateway to automatic updates with the eventual goal of adding Project Browser to the core.
Workspaces as content moderation
Workspaces is a module in Drupal core that allows for staging content changes beyond simple Draft <> Published workflows. As page creation evolves with Experience Builder, making changes to any number of different components and pages at once will be possible, and those changes will be able to be published en masse, providing next-level content staging.
Telemetry
Telemetry is a process of collecting information about how software acts in the real world and how users interact with it. Besides collecting module usage information, Drupal has never previously collected data about how users interact with Drupal. This is a new initiative where we aim to improve the product with actual data from users.
Migration
Migrating into Drupal’s structured data architecture has always been a developer-centric task. As more folks adopt Drupal and may want to migrate off their existing platforms, the track aims to simplify content importing into Drupal. AI-assisted migration demos have already been demonstrated using existing websites and even PDFs. Still, this track will look at all options for making migration to Drupal easier.
Tours
The Drupal Tour module, powered by the open-source Shepherd JavaScript library, provides users with tours through web content using tooltips. This track aims to provide user-facing documentation of the Drupal CMS administration area in an instructive and seamless manner to educate users about all the tools and possibilities.
Translation
Initially slated for the initial release of Drupal CMS, extending Drupal core’s multilingual capabilities to recipes and Drupal CMS is a big task that will expand its global audience. Since Drupal CMS is built on top of Drupal, users can manually configure all of Drupal’s multilingual tools. Having them preconfigured with improvements in translation tools and workflows will make Drupal CMS much easier to use.
Single Sign On (SSO)
Single sign-on, managing who can log into your CMS and what permissions they have in an external system, is a popular request for sites we build. Numerous platforms and services can be used, each with nuances and requirements. This track will aim to create easy-to-use solutions to aid organizations in user management.
A New Design System
Experience Builder will require a design system of easy-to-use components that site builders can adapt to their own organization’s styles and one that designers can adapt to their visions. Mediacurrent, an open-source product agency, has been selected to lead that track. Look for a preview at DrupalCon Atlanta 2025.
Contribution in Drupal CMS
Kanopi Studios is playing a key role in the development of Drupal CMS, sponsoring contributions first on the Recipes Initiative going back to 2022, and now being a top-tier agency committing time and resources to the development of Drupal CMS 1.0.
Engineering Manager Jim Birch serves as a Drupal Recipes Initiative Coordinator and a Drupal Core Subsystem Maintainer for Recipes and Default Content. These roles are vital because Recipes form the foundation of Drupal CMS, ensuring that preconfigured solutions are available for various website use cases. Recipes simplify the site-building process by providing modular, ready-to-use solutions that are easily customized to meet specific needs.
In addition to his work with Recipes, Jim is a Drupal CMS Lead for the SEO Track alongside John Doyle from Digital Polygon. Together, they oversee the integration of SEO best practices into Drupal CMS. This ensures that websites built using Drupal CMS are optimized for search engines out of the box.
Kanopi Studio’s involvement doesn’t stop there. Jim Birch is also a member of the Drupal CMS Advisory Council, which helps guide Drupal CMS’s strategic direction. The council bridges the Drupal CMS team, the Drupal Association, Drupal core, and the wider community.
Drupal CMS is a bold new chapter for Drupal!
This is an exciting development in the Drupal project that really speaks to those marketers and content creators who are looking for easier and better ways to share their content online. By combining Drupal core with pre-packaged recipes, Drupal CMS aims to make the web a nicer place.
Algolia is a powerful search and discovery API for creating fast and relevant search experiences. Designed to optimize user interaction, Algolia enables teams to build and refine custom search functionalities. It offers features like instant search, autocomplete, faceted search, and typo tolerance, ensuring users find what they need quickly and accurately.
Why we like (and use) Algolia
There several compelling reasons why we use Algolia here at Kanopi:
Speed & performance. Algolia provides lightning-fast search capabilities, enhancing the user experience on our websites.
Developer’s perspective: Offloading the search functionality to Algolia instead of relying on the main site database significantly speeds up overall site performance. By handling search queries separately, the primary database experiences reduced load and faster response times, leading to a smoother and more efficient user experience.
Relevance. The advanced search algorithms ensure highly relevant search results, improving user satisfaction and engagement.
Query suggestions. Algolia’s query suggestions feature provides users with real-time search suggestions as they type, enhancing the search experience by predicting and displaying relevant queries. Also, developers or editors can easily rank, add and/or remove query suggestions as needed, ensuring the search interface remains intuitive and relevant.
Customization. Algolia’s flexible API allows us to tailor search functionalities to meet specific client needs and preferences.
Developer’s perspective: Being able to easily customize the frontend to meet design and client expectations is a wonderful thing! Algolia’s ease of customization stands out, thanks to its extensive documentation and examples for adding search functionalities to a site.
Algolia covers all popular JavaScript frameworks, such as React, Vue, Angular, as well as iOS, Android, and vanilla JavaScript. This comprehensive support empowers frontend developers to effortlessly integrate and customize search interfaces to meet specific client requirements.
Scalability. As our clients grow, Algolia scales effortlessly, handling increasing volumes of data and traffic without compromising on performance.
Ease of integration. Algolia integrates seamlessly with various platforms and technologies, including Drupal, making it a perfect fit for our technical stack.
We use Algolia to enhance the search capabilities on our clients’ websites. Here’s a brief overview of our approach:
Search implementation. We integrate Algolia’s search API into the client’s CMS, customizing the search interface to match the website’s design and user needs.
Developer’s perspective: The Search API Algolia module for Drupal allows us to easily set up content for Algolia to build a search index using a method familiar to anyone who’s ever worked with the Drupal Search API.
However, Developers aren’t limited to this one Drupal module for sending data to Algolia. There are actually many ways to push and pull data to Algolia’s service. Developers can also create custom modules to meet specific client search needs if the Search API module doesn’t meet their requirements. The flexibility with which Algolia ingests data enables developers to curate the data before passing it to Algolia, ensuring a tailored and optimized search experience.
Indexing content. We set up and configure indexing rules to ensure all relevant content is searchable. This includes real-time indexing for dynamic content updates.
Developer’s perspective: When using the Drupal Algolia Search API module, any new, updated, or deleted content is immediately pushed to Algolia and can be searched almost instantly. This seamless integration makes indexing both new and existing content easy and efficient.
Search optimization. We fine-tune Algolia’s search settings to prioritize the most relevant results and ensure a seamless user experience.
Analytics and refinement. Using Algolia’s built-in analytics, we can continuously monitor search performance and user behavior, making data-driven adjustments to enhance search accuracy and effectiveness.
Using one of our clients — the Exploratorium — as an example, here are images showing examples of Exploratorium’s Algolia Analytics metrics:
Examples of Algolia in action with Exploratorium
Renowned San Francisco public learning laboratory the Exploratorium needed to revamp their search experience. We used Algolia to create an intuitive, responsive search interface that caters to diverse visitor needs. The improved search functionality has significantly boosted user engagement, search relevancy, and satisfaction. (See the full case study for Exploratorium here.)
Specifically, we used Algolia’s Autocomplete and InstantSearch.js UI libraries:
Example of Algolia Autocomplete library
We integrated the Autocomplete library into the header, providing users with real-time suggestions as they type into the input field. This autocomplete feature predicts and displays full terms or results, forming the core of the autocomplete experience.
Let’s say your organization needs a new website. You meet with your team to discuss the best way forward. Some are touting the benefits of an open-source content management system (CMS) like Drupal or WordPress. Meanwhile, others argue that a proprietary system is the right way to go. But you’re the one who has to make the final call. So, which one will it be? In this post, we’ll look at open source vs. proprietary CMS and what each one has to offer.
If you know anything about us, you already know that we strongly prefer open source for a long list of reasons. We’ll get into those reasons below, but we’ll also give proprietary systems a fair shake — promise. Hopefully, the more you know about each option, it will be clear why we’ve built our organization around open source right from day one.
What is a proprietary CMS?
A proprietary CMS is a software platform owned and controlled by a company. Its users need to purchase licenses or subscriptions for access and updates. It typically offers limited customization compared to open-source CMS, with restricted access to the source code.
Organizations that choose the proprietary route usually cite a few main reasons:
Dedicated Support: Proprietary CMS platforms typically have dedicated customer support, offering immediate help with technical issues, bugs, and updates.
(Perceived) Security: With a closed-source environment, clients sometimes have the perception that proprietary CMS platforms have fewer vulnerabilities, since the code is not accessible to the public. The vendor manages security updates and patches. (Below, I’ll get into why this is more about perception than reality.)
Tailored Solutions: Proprietary CMS vendors may offer customized solutions, features, or integrations to meet specific business needs within a particular industry.
Legacy: In many cases, the client is already deeply invested in other proprietary platforms/software from a provider (their suite of office applications for example), so they’ll also use their CMS for the sake of convenience and continuity. There’s a pretty large company whose name starts with ‘M’ that relies heavily on this in their sales pitch.
These benefits, however, often come with trade-offs, such as higher costs and limited flexibility compared to open-source CMS options.
So, what about open source?
Open-source CMS platforms like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal account for a majority of websites on the internet. WordPress alone powers approximately 62.7% of all sites. They’re also usually more cost-effective to maintain in the long run compared to proprietary CMS platforms for a number of reasons:
For Starters, They’re Free: Open-source platforms like WordPress and Drupal are free to use, eliminating the need for expensive licensing fees associated with proprietary software.
No Vendor Lock-In: With a proprietary CMS, the vendor retains ownership of the code, limiting your control and flexibility. With an open-source CMS, clients own and control the code, meaning full customization and portability is yours. Using open-source software also means you’re not dependent on a single company for updates, support, or hosting.
Flexibility and Customization: Drupal and WordPress offer extensive customization options with thousands of themes, plugins, and modules; users can tailor their websites to meet their needs without being locked into vendor restrictions.
Community Support: Open-source platforms have large, active communities of developers and users who contribute to forums, create plugins/modules, and more. This collective knowledge base can provide faster solutions and innovations.
Continuous Improvement: Open-source platforms are regularly updated with security patches, new features, and enhancements contributed by the community, making them more dynamic than proprietary software, which might have slower release cycles.
Ownership and Control Is All Yours: With open-source software, you have full ownership and control over your website, including the ability to host it anywhere and modify the underlying code. Proprietary systems may impose hosting restrictions and limit access to the source code.
Security and Transparency: Open-source platforms are generally considered to be more secure because the code is publicly available for scrutiny, allowing security experts to identify and patch vulnerabilities quickly. Proprietary systems may be more opaque, making it harder to spot and fix security issues. So while it’s true that many more people have access to open-source code, this results in greater platform security — despite what many proprietary system providers (and their sales teams) would like you to believe.
Scalability: Open-source platforms like Drupal are highly scalable, making them suitable for both small websites and large enterprise-level applications, whereas proprietary solutions may have limitations or require expensive upgrades to scale effectively.
Integration Capabilities: Drupal and WordPress are known for their ability to integrate with a wide range of third-party tools, APIs, and systems, providing more flexibility in building feature-rich websites — while proprietary platforms may restrict integrations or charge extra for them.
Innovation: Open-source platforms often lead in innovation, as developers from all over the world can contribute new ideas and functionalities, fostering a continuous flow of creativity and technical advancement.
It’s your call.
So, returning to our opening paragraph scenario, it’s your call; you have proponents in your organization on each side of the coin. Which do you choose? Do you listen to those team members clamoring for a proprietary CMS and its benefits? Or do you choose the flexibility and efficiency of an open-source platform?
Not that we would openly encourage you to choose one over the other. Good heavens, no! However, if you should decide to go with an open-source CMS — specifically Drupal or WordPress — we have a little motto here at Kanopi:
Never build alone.
Since 2010, we’ve been building websites that meet our clients’ unique needs, whether designing and developing from the ground up or enhancing existing sites with upgrades and CMS migrations. Our approach combines UX research, discovery, and visual design to create a user-friendly digital experience, followed by expert development to bring your vision to life. Even after launch, we provide ongoing support to ensure your site continues to perform at its best. With us as your partner, even the staunchest proprietary fans will be tipping their hats to you.
