Deciding between Alfresco, DotNetNuke, Drupal, Joomla, and Plone

When it comes to deciding between the various open source CMS’ solutions (Alfresco, DotNetNuke, Drupal, Joomla or Plone), the first thing that attracted you – is the FREE tag associated with these open source products.

Question is what is FREE and what is NOT FREE exactly?

• The base deployable code is FREE
• The code needs to be hosted somewhere , somebody needs to pay for the Data centers – NOT FREE
• The Staff to maintain the installation is NOT FREE
• Any customization or integration to the product is NOT FREE
• Most of these products support various standards – JSR-170, JSR-168 and so on, that means you get industry standards for FREE
• The base underlying database used by them is most likely to be MySQL. In case, you do not want to use MySQL, then any other commercial DB is NOT FREE
• The staff training costs for any of these products is NOT FREE

So, even though the software’s are free, there are other hidden costs that need to be accounted for before taking the decision.

Mike Heck has done a very good study of the comparison among the open source Web CMS (content management systems) available in the market (Alfresco, DotNetNuke, Drupal and Joomla, and Plone). He has looked at the standardization effort among these products and his experiences in using the products. The comparison score is like

Read Mike Heck's complete article here.