If your site requires a completely distinctive CMS (Content Management System) that is very different from any of the leading open source solutions, then you’ll undoubtedly need to build a custom one from scratch. Or else, you should certainly use open source. You’ll gain a huge amount by using open source. Even if you have to customize open source, you’re still getting hundreds of thousands of hours of development for free. Open source is the finest thing that ever happened to entrepreneurs. It’s a gift from the heaven and you must take advantage of it. If you don’t, your competitors certainly will.
CMS, as you most probably are mindful, stands for Content Management System. It is a system that lets you manage the content on your website. Customized CMS would mean that you give the development company a list of features you wanted in your CMS and it would be custom developed for you. In contrast, Open Source is freely available software developed collaboratively by like-minded persons or a group. So which option is right for you? Open source CMS is surely the finest option for any type of website wishing to utilize the power that comes with a Content Management System. Let us discuss the factors that tilt greatly in favour of Open Source.
Cost factor
Open Source is free and can be downloaded by anyone and used in his/her web design projects. As a result, when a website is designed using open source, you can be certain the cost charged by the design company is going to be for design only and not for development of the CMS. Like so, the cost is next to nothing compared to custom development of the CMS. In contrast, custom development is very expensive as the CMS is going to be custom coded for you.
Developments & Upgrades
Several years of research and development go into an open source CMS and it is continuously made better with every single upgrade. Do you really believe your customized CMS stands any chance here? Unless you are able to afford a group of developers who can continuously work on you custom CMS to upgrade it with time and frequently find and fix bugs and errors for you; open source is undeniably better.
Availability of Features
This may sound a bit strange, but yes, an open source CMS will have a lot more features than a custom developed one could probably have. Open source is used by lots of people and gets upgraded often over time. Because of the diversity of people using it, the open source team gets lots of request for new features and bug fixes for the next release of the software. Envisage all this being done for you for free. So to avail the new features, you can just upgrade your CMS when the next release is made available by the CMS team. Also, there are hundreds of free and paid plugins available that broaden the functionality of your open source CMS website.
Custom software is prone to errors and on-going bug fixes and maintenance is going to be expensive and unavoidable. With open source you can easily upgrade to the latest version at the click of a button, as in the case of WordPress. So when should you really go for a custom CMS? Only when your requirements cannot be fulfilled with any of the existing open source CMS available. That is possibly the only time you should consider a customized CMS, nevertheless, ensure that you have the budget required for this. And if you don’t have the budget, it is suggested to do away with the additional requirements and simply opt for an open source CMS.