Drupal, a growing CMS, is a good bet for the future

As I write this, I am looking at the website of BuiltWith, a service that detects the prominence of technologies powering websites all over the Internet. 

One of BuiltWith's categories is Content Management Systems (CMSs), of which Drupal is one. Click to BuiltWith's CMS page, and you will be presented with 3 pie charts describing the breakdown of the top million, 10,000, and 1,000 sites in terms of traffic (for sites in which the CMS is known)-- in other words, the largest and most popular websites in existence. Drupal does not come first-- WordPress does in all 3 charts-- but the fascinating fact that should catch your attention is that Drupal grows in popularity as sites get bigger and more popular. 

Specifically, among the top million sites, Drupal is third in the race behind WordPress and Joomla, in that order, at a modest 8.84%. Among the top 100,000 sites, Drupal has leapfrogged Joomla for second place, and has doubled its market share to over 16%. And by the time we see the CMS distribution among the top 10,000 most highly-trafficked websites on the Internet, we'll notice that Drupal is a further 8% more popular, at nearly 24%. In other words, the more popular the site, the more likely it is to be powered by Drupal, and by the same token, it's less likely to use WordPress or Joomla.

This shouldn't appear as an insult to these other two CMSs: it's merely a sign of Drupal's power versus the other two in the "big 3" open-source PHP systems. Drupal is simply a better choice when complexity, size, and power are needed-- attributes that often go hand-in-hand with popularity.

In other related news, Drupal's overall market share has grown tremendously over the past year, from 1.2% to 1.6% of all sites in the top million (including sites in which the CMS is NOT known), and, stunningly, from 2% to nearly 2.7% among sites in the top 10,000.