Comparative Downloads on SourceForge.net

Here is a selected group of open source projects from SourceForge.net.  The graphs on the right are pulled live from SourceForge.  If they don’t show up, the statistics server might be down.  Just check back later.  It usually recovers pretty fast.

Why am I posting this?  Well, we love the traction that we have received in the past few months.  We’re on track to reach 20,000 downloads per months for October.  To put this into context, we only reached 10,000 downloads of Deki Wiki in June 2007 since launching in July 2006.  In other words, we’re now achieving every two weeks what it took us almost a year to achieve in the first place.  Wow, that’s pretty nice!

But I say we can do better!  And to do so, we have to compare ourselves to those who are ahead of us.  For the longest time, we’ve been keeping an eye on Socialtext since they come closest as a commercial open source wiki provider.  However, we have outgrown, outrun, and out-competed them into the ground.  There is no point in continuing to compare ourselves to them: it’s of no value to us and it’s not fair to them.

Hence, the question is who do we need to compare to?  That’s where the below graphs come into play.

Socialtext Open Open source enterprise wiki application written in Perl September downloads: 582
MindTouch Deki Wiki Open source wiki platform written in C# and PHP September downloads: 17,659
Zimbra Email & collaboration server written in Java September downloads: 19,552 Recently acquired by Yahoo! for ~$320M.
Alfresco Content management system written in Java September downloads: 54,744
DotNetNuke ASP.NET content management system written in Visual Basic .NET September downloads: 131,584

Missing from this list are some notable other open source wikis, for which no public numbers are available.  According to Gartner, Twiki (Perl) has about 10,000 downloads per months.  But, there is no source for MediaWiki (PHP) downloads, but if I had to guess, I would say they must be achieving around 200,000 per month.

Ok, so where does this leave us? Currently, we perform at Zimbra level.  Next we will need to reach Alfresco level.  But ultimately, we want to dethrone the reigning champion: mediawiki.  Unfortunately, it appears that there is no other wiki competitor between us and mediawiki.  And since mediawiki is not commercially supported, well, that makes Deki Wiki already the #1 commercially-supported open-source wiki.  But I can’t be happy with that.  I want MindTouch to become the number #1 wiki, period.