Softweb Solutions Inc. 2531 Technology Drive, Suite 312, Elgin, Illinois 60124 Toll-Free Number: 1-866-345-7638 Fax: 866-345-7638 Article Title: Open Source or Commercial CMS Software – Which One Is Better? Keywords: open source technology, open source application development, open source software development, open source development Content: The debate that which type of software is better to develop software – Open sources or the Commercial software will be always ongoing. But the fact is there is nothing so extravagant about any of them which can make one better than the other. Supporters of open sources often claim that open sources are better than the Commercial CMS which is not available for free. But both the models serve equally good and fulfill specific needs or circumstances of the environment where the software needs to be deployed. When it comes to compare open sources with commercial CMS, we can’t overlook the viewpoints of Cost, Security, and Flexibility. 1] Cost: It has been always known that open source software is cheaper than the commercial software. But the cost of the software should be considered as the total cost involved in the complete lifecycle of the software instead of just considering the one time purchase cost of the software. Many other things are involved in the total cost of the software like – the long term support and maintenance needs costs, migration costs, etc. From a business point of view, the purchase cost of the software is one of the biggest factors that really matters for calculating total cost of the software development. 2] Security: Many arguments are done on the matter of security. Open source technology supporters claim that open source solutions are more secured as its source code is available for public scrutiny. While commercial CMS supporters claim that it gets very easy to take advantage of the software whose source code is being published. But the fact is security of any technological product and implementation can’t be predetermined by just development process. The things that actually matters are – design of the security features, how well software is deployed, how it is configured, and how the maintenance is being done. Security flaws can happen due to many factors that includes software design and implementation as well as behavior and usage of users.
3] Flexibility: It is always believed that open source solutions are more flexible than commercial software. However, the resources are available for both – commercial software and open source solutions to overcome the bugs and security weaknesses in the software. The commercial software solutions are better defined than the solutions built by open sources. Cost consideration should be done in totality and the primary consideration for security should be done according to the allocation of the resources done to ensure right installation, deployment and maintenance of the software. Always, software not maintained properly results to less security. Softweb Solutions uses Open source technology efficiently to provide open source software development services at an affordable price. The solutions delivered by us are secured, flexible, reliable, stable and cost-effective. Our open source development service includes Magento Ecommerce solutions, Ruby on Rails, Joomla development, Drupal development, PHP web app development, Zend Framework, and WordPress app development. For open source technology solutions, contact us at info@softwebsolutions.com. Summary: A lot of argument is done about what is better for software development – Open source technology or commercial software. This is explained here in this article by considering some important viewpoints.