Similar products & solutions
Hosted Application Service Providers
The following are companies that provide turnkey hosted ASP solutions that overlap broadly with the capabilities of CivicSpace.
Issues to consider when comparing other ASP solutions with CivicSpace On Demand include:
- Vendor Lock-In: Most of these services use proprietary technology, so you cannot readily "take your technology with you" to another vendor if you became dissatisfied with your current vendor.
- Community Focus: Most of these services focus on serving organizations as clients; while many organizations are clients of CivicSpace vendors, CivicSpace is developed with grassroots communities in mind as well. If you are engaged in bottom-up community building, CivicSpace really shines.
- Content Management: Some of these services add website building tools and content management as an afterthought, since their most "saleable" features are donation processing and the like; CivicSpace, by contrast, is based on a world-class Content Management System (CMS) called Drupal.
- Cost: These services are prohibitively costly for many organizations, especially smaller campaigns and non-profits, though DemocracyInAction.org in particular provides exceptional value for non-profit clients.
- Flexibility: Because most of these services use proprietary technology, new functionality can be developed only by their paid staff programmers; CivicSpace, by contrast, has armies of volunteer programmers around the world developing and regularly contributing new functionality to the platform. Similarly, you are always free to hire your own programmer to customize or extend the functionality of your CivicSpace site, which you cannot do with solutions from the proprietary ASP vendors.
- Network Effects: Because CivicSpace is designed to facilitate collaboration and sharing of resources between organizations that use it, CivicSpace becomes more powerful as more organizations adopt it. Because CivicSpace is lower cost, more flexible, and more powerful than the proprietary ASP solutions, the adoption rate of CivicSpace exceeds that of the proprietary ASP solutions, and is accelerating rapidly.
Groups and Social Networks
Yahoo groups and Google groups offer limited groups functionality focused on a membership, forums, mailing lists, and file hosting. These solutions are closed and advertising supported and do not offer a lot of freedom. Social networking services such as Friendster, Orkut, Meetup, and Linkedin are now proving themselves viable as businesses and have large user bases in the millions. However, they still are largely novelty networks for social interaction and are limited in the ability to translate a social network into an effective community.
Content Management Systems
There are a broad range of proprietary and open source content management systems. CivicSpace is a distribution of Drupal one of the leading CMS's, due to is emphasis on developing a platform that is easily extensible. A strong development community, and a large collection of contributed modules focused on community applications make Drupal the best choice for developing community software. Competitve CMS's include Joomla, focused on website development and ease of use, and WordPress a simple and elegant blogging solution. While both are good products they do not have the deep technical platform to allow for creative application development that is necessary for rich community interaction. They lack rich user management such as user permissions for applications, and per content permissions which are necessary for a community to function. The lack of a an extensible and defined API means they are currently limited in their extensibility.
Feel free to email dgeilhufe@civicspacelabs.org with any questions about whether CivicSpace is right for you. There is also a growing range of CivicSpace vendors offering sophisticated CRM, fundraising, bulk email, and other services fully integrated with CivicSpace, that warrant strong consideration.
Next: CivicSpace in action