When searching for the best content management system to power your new website, you can easily become overwhelmed with the amount of options and details to be considered. One of the most important choices to be made when choosing a CMS for your website is to use an open-source CMS platform or a proprietary CMS.

When it comes to comparing costs, at a glance, the open-source option may sound like the way to go. While an open-source CMS appears to be free on the surface it is far from it when you take into consideration the time and resources required to customize and support the website. Any developer will require a learning curve to master a new technology, and since the technology labor is the most expensive part of any customization project, businesses that choose open-source will inevitably end up paying for this learning curve. The real costs of an open-source CMS solution usually become visible only during implementation. When you consider the time it can take to customize an 0pen-source CMS, the costs can easily outstrip the costs of a proprietary CMS that delivers the functionality in one solution.
The world of technology has seen an abundance of growth in the past several years, and with this growth, has come a wave of specialization across industries and needs. Some firms have developed software specific to the legal industry with legal CMS, while other firms have focused on creating a CMS for municipalities or for non-profits. These firms have typically developed their own software, and architected these CMS platforms to meet the very specific needs of clients by extending and customizing their technology. Due to specialization, flexibility and operational efficiency, proprietary offerings can often outreach their open- source counterparts.
Here is an excellent excerpt from The Net Impact’s blog, regarding details to consider when choosing an open-source CMS:
“There is not a corporate body with open source that is obliged to keep your personalized code and customization in step with new releases and or required web-wide advances. Once you pull a version off the shelf then it is an obligation of your team or your development partner to keep things running through all of the changes that move the web forward. Is there a fee for that? Sure but you are either paying that fee as a service expense or payroll expense anyway. Your new site will need fixed, debugged and modernized. That’s how it is. Plan on it. If up time is critical then you need a resource. 24/7 support? Inside or outside is up to you.” Read the full article on The Net Impact’s Blog
Bottom Line: In the end, choosing a proprietary CMS and forming a strong partnership with a successful, established web development company can not only result in a better outcome for your company, but also result in more money saved. Not to mention that successful CMS providers are around for a reason, they provide a value for their customers, that they can not find in using an open-source CMS.
There are a lot of options to be considered when choosing between implementing an open source CMS or a proprietary CMS, make sure you do your homework before investing the time and money, into a solution that may not be the right fit for your business. Never forget that the main purpose of a CMS is to make creating and editing content simple and easy, and you should never sacrifice user-experience for functionality.