Trends from Builtwith

I just found BuiltWith Trends, which has some interesting CMS data among other things. My understanding is that they sample a large (but unspecified) number of domains and determine the web technology used. Looks like they're only publishing data beginning late last November.

The graph here definitely puts the Google Trends stats in perspective. I've extracted the individual data for a couple CMS and compiled them into one chart. It turns out that Joomla and Plone each account for a tiny fraction (<0.02%), whereas Google Trends shows Joomla far outstripping Drupal. Speaking of Drupal, they just recently scrabbled above 1.0% after bottoming out at 0.70% last Christmas.

At the bottom of each technology page is a pie chart showing how the last survey slices the entire domain, in this case, CMS. Drupal's 1.35% is 38.5% of all CMSs surveyed. Joomla comes in with 5.13% and Plone has 1.71%. In terms of ranking, Drupal is on top, Joomla is fifth, and Plone ties for eighth.

BuiltWith conveniently lists top sites using a given technology, although I'm not sure how they determine this. Plone's top sites are the CIA, Discover Magazine, ACM, and Connexions. Typically BuiltWith lists a maximum of 20 top sites, so I'm not sure how they missed Oxfam America, NASA Science, and a couple thousand others.

Just to give you an idea of the other's top sites, Drupal's top 4 sites are BrightCove, Us Magazine, iVillage, and NW Source. Joomla's are The Hill, RCN, SpellingCity, and everythingiCafe.

Clicking on a listed site will take you to a summary page that displays all the technologies that BuiltWith was able to extract from the domain in question. Very interesting stuff.

Like all web stats, they are to be used cautiously, all the more so when an explicit methodology is not stated. None-the-less, I'll definitely be following BuiltWith to see how things track over time. There's considerable noise in the data and one can't yet tell a trend from seasonal noise or something associated with a new version rollout.

All that said, this may be as close to market share as we're likely to get in the near future. The numbers don't segment the marketplace, so we still don't know if Plone is killing Drupal or vice versa in the government, education, and not for profit areas. Quite frankly the big surprise for me was that the total usage percent for CMS is only 3.67% of all the sites sampled by BuiltWith. Looks like global domination is still a ways off.