A CMS solution for 10 users from a popular proprietary CMS vendor will typically cost around $17,500. A similar open-source solution will cost around $7,500. Cost savings of two-to-one are not unusual. And this does not include savings related to productivity gains from a best-in-class, open-source CMS application.

One common problem for proprietary CMS solutions is that much of the offered functionality is never used because the application interface is not intuitive or designed for productivity. When users are forced to adapt to the application, adoption and ROI suffer.

Best-in-class, open-source CMS is easier to use out of the box than complex proprietary systems because it has fewer bells and whistles, features that are frequently never used. The emphasis is on ease-of-use, which reduces learning curves and quickly enhances user productivity. Sophisticated presentation of varied content by non-technical users is possible in a matter of hours. Plus, new feature modules, styles, and templates are routinely added by hundreds of open-source developers.

If your CMS software malfunctions or fails, you shouldn’t have to wait for a proprietary CMS vendor to deliver another product release or a patch to fix the problem. Open-source CMS alleviates these delays since 100 percent of its source code is available to developers. This allows the open-source community to promptly fix and test problems or bugs—a radical departure from the world of commercial vendors.

For example, in a government-sponsored test, Coverity used its software analysis tools to scan millions of lines of code from 32 open-source projects. Acting on those results, open-source developers fixed more than 900 flaws in only two weeks—reducing code errors to zero for some projects. Explained Coverity CTO Ben Chelf, “My impression is that the open-source community is producing software defect patches at an extremely fast rate.”

Most significant problems, including security issues, are discovered and fixed quite rapidly because an extremely wide array of solutions and environments are using the open-source application. And literally hundreds or thousands of users are deploying and testing open-source applications. Open-source VARs also work closely with the developer community to quickly create fixes and updates.