Comparison to Alternatives

When comparing solutions, it's important to evaluate the total cost of ownership (TCO). There are the start-up costs, but there are also ongoing maintenance costs and the costs of future major upgrades. In this regard, Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware is a fantastic solution.

vs WordPress

WordPress has a rapid release cycle, and this is great. Unfortunately, it is not paired with a Long Term Support (LTS) version. Thus, if you have a WordPress site, and want to continue to use supported versions, you need to upgrade your site very often. Most of the time this will work satisfactorily, but, eventually, some third-party plugin is very likely to cause issues.

When comparing our services with those of your potential WordPress service provider, ask that provider to commit, up front, to a multi-year contract, with predictable pricing and without any feature or data loss. The challenge to make this commitment will give your service provider the incentive to set up your solution in a future-proof way. And if a plugin is abandoned, for example, it will be the service provider's responsibility to replace it (which can be easy) and migrate your data (which can be difficult). If they are unable or unwilling to commit to a price, you should consider what you are getting yourself into.

In addition, WordPress has many fewer features than Tiki, so as your organization evolves and you need features that WordPress simply can't offer, you will be forced to use additional applications with the associated cost and complexity.

vs Drupal

Drupal has a very large feature set available via contributed modules.
Upgrades between major versions (for example, from version 6 to version 7) are notoriously difficult, but the release cycle is fairly slow so you can stay with minor upgrades for a decent length of time.

When comparing our services with those of your potential Drupal service provider, ask that provider to commit up front to specifying the cost of the upgrade to the next major version. This will help you to plan ahead. Also, if the service provider is responsible for upgrading your site at a pre-approved price, it will give them the incentive to set up your solution in a future-proof way. And if a module is abandoned, for example, it will be the provider's responsibility to replace it (which can be easy) and migrate your data (which can be difficult). If they are unable or unwilling to commit to a price for the next upgrade, you should consider what you are getting yourself into.

AvanTech can commit to both minor and major software upgrades in your support plan because

Tiki has a fundamentally superior Version Lifecycle Management and model, which makes upgrades much much easier.
AvanTech has a policy to upstream all fixes and enhancements, as Red Hat does.

Technology constantly evolves and, therefore, Tiki's integrated feature set allows you to take advantage of new possibilities. For example, when Tiki migrated to use the Bootstrap front-end framework, all Tiki features were converted and updated. In contrast, a similar change could never be achieved for all the 17,000 Drupal modules or all the 40,000 WordPress plugins.

vs MediaWiki

MediaWiki's role is to power Wikipedia. It will never become a general purpose collaboration and communication tool.