In 2008, when this list was created, the CMS (Content Management Systems) market was the Wild West. WordPress was perceived mainly as a blogging platform, and systems you probably don’t even recognize today were fighting for dominance.
The original list recommended: Frog CMS, SilverStripe, Liferay, miaCMS, MoinMoin, ImpressCMS, MODx, Textpattern, Radiant, CMS Made Simple.
Let’s check what happened to these WordPress “competitors” over the years. It’s a fascinating lesson about open-source and technology evolution.
Big losers and niches
- Textpattern: Once beloved by minimalists and designers for clean code. Still exists, has a small, dedicated community, but its market share is a statistical error.
- MODx: Had its 5 minutes as “CMS for developers”, offering full freedom in HTML structure. Still alive (MODX Revolution), but lost to WordPress’s ease of use and Headless CMS flexibility.
- Liferay: Interesting case. Didn’t disappear, but went full Enterprise. Today it’s a powerful portal platform (Java) for banks and corporations, completely inaccessible to average users.
Why did WordPress win?
In 2008, we complained about the lack of a “reliable WordPress” on “Top 10 CMS” lists. Today WordPress powers over 43% of the entire internet. What decided?
- Ecosystem: Plugins and themes. We criticize their quality, but they allowed amateurs to build professional sites.
- Backward Compatibility: WordPress from 2025 will still (theoretically) run a theme from 2010. Other systems (like Drupal or Joomla) often broke compatibility with major versions, forcing users into expensive migrations.
- Community: WordCamps, meetups, forums. It’s people who built WP’s success.
The 2025 landscape
Today, a “10 Free CMS” list would look different. Alongside the immortal WordPress, we’d see:
- Static Site Generators (SSG): Astro (which powers this site!), Hugo, Jekyll.
- Headless CMS: Strapi, Ghost.
- Website Builders: Wix, Squarespace (though these aren’t fully “free” and open source).
