This section explores some the most popular and common solutions available on the market today: Drupal, Wordpress, ExpressionEngine, and Joomla!. The main reason for the popularity of these platforms is that they are inexpensive when compared to much larger proprietary CMS platforms.

While all these systems are built using PHP and work best in a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) environment, each system has different approaches to content management. Some were originally built for a specific purpose and evolved into full-fledged CMSs, while others were built with content management as the central focus from the beginning.

Later, we provide rating tools to help you make the right choice when comparing multiple platforms.