Date:
8 April 2024

Drupal use in the Australian public sector

At the recent DrupalSouth 2024, Sean Hamlin from amazee.ioExternal Link took us through some enlightening stats on CMS use for Australian government websites. This was as a follow-on to stats he provided at DrupalSouth 2022. Once again, he analysed Drupal use for each state/territory and also for Federal Government sites.

After briefly highlighting his methodology, Sean dived into the stats.

Victoria

The breakdown of CMSs used by government websites in Victoria is as follows:

  • Drupal (.vic.gov.au) — 32.2% (based on aggregation by score)
  • Unknown — 20%
  • SquizMatrix — 15.5%
  • Opencities — 9.4%

New South Wales

For New South Wales, the most used CMSs by the government are:

  • Drupal (nsw.gov.au) — 23.7%
  • Unknown — 19.5%
  • SquizMatrix — 15.7
The most used CMSs by the government in NSW

South Australia

In South Australia, the adoption rate of different CMSs by the government is as follows:

  • SquizMatrix — 43.5
  • CraftCMS — 13.5%
  • Unknown — 21.9%

Western Australia

In Western Australia, the rates of CMS adoption by the government are:

  • Drupal — 29.5%
  • Unknown — 22.1%
  • Spark — 17.6%

Tasmania

In Tasmania, the most used CMSs for government websites are:

  • SquizMatrix — 31.1
  • WordPress — 22.7
The most used CMSs by the government in NSW

Queensland

The most used CMS by the government in Queensland are:

  • SquizMatrix — 29%
  • Unknown — 22.6
  • Jadu — 12.5%
  • Drupal — 10.8%

Australian Capital Territory

In the Australian Capital Territory, the most-used CMS for government websites is

  • SquizMatrix — 66%
The most used CMSs by the government in ACT

Federal

At the Federal level, the most used CMSs for government websites were:

  • Drupal — 43.8%
  • Unknown — 38.4% (maybe custom frontend)

All sites

On average, the breakdown of the most popular CMSs used by the Australian government are:

  • Drupal — 29.9%
  • Unknown — 27.5%
  • SquizMatrix — 15.6%
The most used CMSs by the government in Federal level

Observations

Some key observations Sean highlighted were:

  • Drupal powers roughly 29.9 up by 2.7% from 2022
  • Drupal adoption is growing faster compared to the others
  • SquizMatrix, at 15.6%, is still the main competitor — up 3.5% from 2022

Drupal by version

Also, the breakdown of the versions of Drupal used are:

  • Drupal 10 — 68.6%
  • Drupal 9 — 8.2%
  • Drupal 7 — 5.4%
  • Drupal 8 — 1.4%

On Drupal 7, he noted that Drupal 7 usage dropped from 15.8% to 5.4% and that the most popular D7 website is NSW libraryExternal Link .

Open source vs proprietary

Sean also compared open source and proprietary systems as follows:

  • Open source — 53.4%
  • Proprietary — 46.6%

More stats?

You can see Sean’s source dataExternal Link if you’d like more information.