Blog Platforms Head to Head: Six Apart & Automattic Compared
Written by Guest blogger, Andrew Watson
In this article we'll compare Six Apart and Automattic, two independent firms focused on blogging
software. Most other blog platforms are owned by big companies (e.g. Google owns
Blogger), so the competition between Six Apart and Automattic is intriguing. Six Apart is
the firm behind Movable Type, TypePad, LiveJournal, and Vox, while Automattic is
associated with WordPress.
Overview Comparison
| Six Apart |
Automattic |
|
| Founded |
July 2002 |
December 2005 |
| First release available for download |
Movable Type 1.0, in October 2001 |
WordPress 1.0, in January 2004 |
| Free download? |
Initially no charge (but donations welcome), later introduced tiered
pricing |
Free/open source under GPL |
| Subsequently launched hosted service(s) |
TypePad, LiveJournal, Vox |
WordPress.com |
| Acquisitions |
Ublog, Danga Interactive (LiveJournal), Rojo |
None |
Similarities
Apart from both being independent companies (i.e. not owned by bigcos), the overview table shows further similarities. In each case, the founders made software available for download prior to founding the firm. Ben and Mena Trott founded Six Apart nine months after making Movable Type available. Matt Mullenweg founded Automattic just under two years after first making WordPress available. Each firm subsequently introduced hosted software.
Contrasts
One of the most significant
differences between the firms, in terms of product history, is that WordPress was free/open source at release. For those
already familiar with free/open source software: WordPress was a fork of b2, which was
under the GPL, so WordPress was in effect GPL'd before it existed. To explain some of the
terms associated with such software: the blogging tool b2 was released under the GNU
General Public License. This license allows you (or me, or Matt Mullenweg) to change
the software, provided that if you distribute your derivative work, you do so under the
GPL. Hence it would be possible for you or anyone else to build a fork from WordPress,
just as WordPress itself was originally a fork from b2.
While WordPress was built on an
existing and free foundation, Movable Type was
written from scratch. Movable Type was in a sense free at first release. Ben and Mena did
not demand payment, and neither (when it was initially founded) did Six Apart.
Then, on May 13 2004, Mena Trott blogged that It's About Time Six Apart got its licensing and pricing "right". Mena's post, and the changes it announced, was unpopular with many people who blogged using Movable Type. For example, Carthik Sharma remarked that with Six Apart's new policies in place, "it’s about time Movable Type users moved to WordPress" and then provided guidelines for bloggers wishing to make the move.
Hosted Services
Each firm offers hosted blogging, as well as a downloadable product. Six Apart has three hosted services, as the table above shows. Automattic has one, at WordPress.com (WordPress.org is the home of the downloadable product).
WordPress.com uses the freemium pricing model. There is no
charge to create a basic blog, but premium services are available at a price. One example
of such a service is domain mapping; it is due to my purchase of domain mapping that the
URI changingway.org points
to my blog (the original and basic URI for which was changingway.wordpress.com).
Automattic reserves the right to run Adsense on WordPress.com blogs, although it does not
seem to exercise this right frequently.
Revenue from premium services and from Adsense are not the only benefits of WordPress.com to Automattic. The site also illustrates the scalability of the WordPress software; there are now over a million blogs at WordPress.com.
Six Apart's hosted services use a variety of pricing
models. Its original hosted service, TypePad, uses a
tiered pricing scheme. Hence in pricing, as in look and feel, it is the most similar to
Movable Type. There is no free price point at TypePad.com. However free TypePad blogs are
available at Friendster.com; Friendster runs ads on these blogs.
LiveJournal, when acquired by Six
Apart in January 2005, used the freemium model. There are currently three main LiveJournal account types: as
well as the original Basic and Paid, there is Plus, under which LiveJournal provides
extra features in return for being allowed to run ads on the blog.
Vox, which was launched by Six
Apart in October 2006, is free of charge and ad-supported. Of all the hosted services
described in this post, it is the one that most emphasizes and encourages social
networking and multimedia.
Misc
Three further Automattic products merit mention. WordPress Multi-User enables the building of hosted
services based on WordPress, and so is used by blog system administrators. Akismet is a spam detection service, not limited to
WordPress or even to blogs in terms of the software that can use it; it is free for
personal use and a paid service for commercial use.
BBpress is forum software, originally written to power the
various WordPress-related online forums, and then made available for download under the
GPL.
Free and open source models
Mention of the GPL brings us back to the point of free/open source software. Although the fact that WordPress has always been open source is significant, the firms are closer together in terms of open source software than they have ever been. Six Apart has made two large steps toward the open source model. The first was the acquisition of LiveJournal, which is open source software (see LiveJournal.org). The second step was part of the recent announcement of Movable Type 4. There will be a completely open source version.
Turning now to Automattic, there is a view that services such as WordPress.com represent a step away from free software. Although WordPress.com is based on WordPress Multi-User, which is in turn based on WordPress, the source for WordPress.com is not available. The GPL does not oblige Automattic to make the WordPress.com source available. This is because WordPress.com is accessed using a web browser, rather than by being downloaded to, and run on, the blogger's computer system. Since the WordPress.com software is not distributed, there is no obligation under the GPL to make the source available.
This is regarded by some free software advocates as a loophole in the GPL (and one that persists in version 3 of the GPL). However, it would not be appropriate to single out Automattic for "exploiting the loophole". If it is exploitation, then other firms - such as Google - are far larger exploiters than Automattic. Further, most of the WordPress.com code is the code for WordPress itself, much of this code was written by Automattic employees, and all of the WordPress code is available under the GPL.
Conclusion
One of the other similarities between Six Apart and Automattic is that each is privately held. Hence one of the difficulties of comparing them is that financial data is not available. On a financial note, there is a curious absence of acquisition rumors about these firms. Given the centrality of blogging to Web 2.0, I am sure that acquiring one of these blogging indies has been considered at the bigcos. However, neither seems eager to be acquired.
The title of this essay is Six Apart and Automattic, rather than Six Apart versus Automattic. The purpose is to contrast, rather than to predict a winner. But the firms are certainly competitors. For example, individuals looking for free hosted blogging may well consider both Vox and WordPress.com, as well as Blogger. However, I believe that the various segments of the blogging software market provide many opportunities for the "major indies" like Six Apart and Automattic, as well as for bigcos such as Google. What do you think?
Andrew Watson blogs at changingway.org using WordPress. He is on his second career, having left the software industry to become a business school professor.
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I started out using MovableType, back in the day, and it was great for what it was, but something happened to SixApart. They became more concerned with making money than a great product. The same could still happen to WordPress and Automattic, but it hasn't, yet.
I tried to do all sorts of custom things, add-ons and what not, for MT, but with every revision it got more and more complicated. In fact, instead of getting easier for developers, there was so much legacy code, it got harder. When I changed to WordPress, I found the opposite design philosophy. I find it just as easy to create tools for the latest version of WordPress as I did for the first version I started using. Hopefully, that will continue.
I think SixApart screwed up when they forgot their customers and what their customers wanted. Then, they tried to back-track and fix what was wrong, but it was too late. OTH, they do seem to still be making money, so maybe I'm just talking through my hat.
It would have been great to see a feature comparison between products of these companies, even if I see this wasn't what you wanted to talk about. MovableType, or TypePad is quite impressive for this, and SixApart offers a real value-added for companies. I don't think these companies share the same market as I see SixApart in most newspapers website (such as lemonde.fr) and Wordpress.com mostly for individuals.
Anyway, the lack of acquisition rumours is quite strange, as you noticed and maybe that is their biggest strength: trying to make money by themselves and not relying on a hypothetical offer.
the other vision is that blogging is dead vs myspace/facebook stuff. Where is the need for a individual expression tool when the whole business is moving to social? they were just pre-2.0...
I consider these the more traditional platforms. Post title aside, I would love to see you look at some of the more non-traditional in another post.
SquareSpace...yes you guessed it...my platform of choice...is an excellent example.
Thanks for the comments. #2: I did consider including a product feature comparison, but, as you note, that wasn't my focus for this article. Further, including a feature comparison would have (IMHO) made the article too long, even for a blog like RWW that carries in-depth posts.
And thanks to Richard for editing and publishing this post.
I've used both. And I have to say that I like WP better. Although I still x-post my entries to LJ. :D
I'm not so sure blogging is dead, jm. New blogs pop up on every few seconds and the emerging markets in Asia and Africa are just starting to be tapped.
Blogging has certainly evolved over the past five years, but its final shape has yet to form.
Andrew, just wanted to drop a line to say I appreciate the focus on *not* making blogging an us vs. them competition. We've always been happy about the spirit of collaboration that was present in the blogging community when we started (we've always been very open about being influenced by teams like Pyra and Danga, which came before us) and work hard to preserve that.
I do have to quibble with the assertion that "They became more concerned with making money than a great product." of course. If that had been true, we wouldn't have been focused on making all of our products more free and more open, and the proof is in the community: We provide more free blogs and more free blogging software than any other independent blogging company in the world, by an order of magnitude. Nearly every independent review claims that our products are great for the audiences they're intended for, but I do understand if, for a while, the audience of individual hackers who wanted blogs felt like they weren't our focus. I think that'll change in time. I'd really urge anybody who doesn't see that to read our post about the mission we're trying to accomplish.
And one point I think is significant, when talking about motivations and money: Look at major technologies, like OpenID, which was first invented at Six Apart, made completely free and unencumbered -- no patents, no royalties, no licenses. And it's been embraced by an amazing community that have given it incredible momentum. Or look at Memcached -- the LiveJournal team created it, and since being acquired by Six Apart, we've invested in it and promoted it to the community, where it's used to scale every major Web 2.0 site, from Digg to Wikipedia to Craigslist. And again, an amazing community, with sites like Facebook making tremendous contributions to the open source code.
We do try to make money, as does every company. But we invest a ton of it in technologies that help improve the entire web. I would even argue we do that more than any other small independent company. If all we cared about was money, we wouldn't be creating and sharing fundamental technologies like that.
I think the most important comparison would be comparing blogging companies to those who are the real competition: People or organizations who don't understand blogging, or don't like the way it empowers people. There are still tons of people afraid of this stuff, or who don't get it and think it's just a fad. Blogs have the power to let people connect and communicate in amazing ways, and the only competition that matters is making sure nobody loses sight of that potential.
Oh, and #7 Jason's right -- blogging's just getting started! :)
I have to agree with Jason and Anil, blogging is far from dead. What is happening is all the people who want to write about their cat or what they had for breakfast are going to MySpace and Facebook. The rest of us who like to sift through our various niches and give our recommendations and thoughts to whoever wants to read them are giving a bit of context to all that content in this Web 2.0 world.
And I have used Blogger, Typepad and WordPress and they are all good products. It all depends what you want out of your blog.
I've used both but prefer WordPress. I think that MT is geared more toward being a full CM package that is centered on blogging while WordPress focuses on the blog with some light-weight CM thrown in for good measure. BTW, free, when used in the context of GNU and GPL should not denote price. As Mr. Stallman says, "...'free' as in free speech, not 'free' beer..." An elaborative blurb can be read at http://rackit.gartnerwebdev.com/2007/07/09/dont-be-fooled-linux-is-not-free/ if interested.
I've been tinkering with Mephisto -- http://www.mephistoblog.com -- and it's been pretty darn cool. Of course installing a rails application isn't exactly a task a simple readme.txt and shared hosting account are going to be cake to get through.
#2, actually newspaper sites like lemonde.fr are using WordPress too:
http://toni.schneidersf.com/2006/10/30/le-monde-moves-to-wordpress/
You can see a selection of other publishers using WordPress here.
Our marketing power is infinitely smaller than Six Apart or Google so we're not as good at getting brand new bloggers, as Anil pointed out. (Though WordPress.com has been growing great despite our inexperience in that area.) People might start on another platform, but thanks to happy customers and word of mouth they usually end up on WordPress, especially once they become experienced and need more powerful tools.
First a comment about a previous comment: Blogging is dead; Long live blogging!
The significant bit of the decision for me was trust. Matt’s openness and authenticity engendered it; Movable Type’s history of duplicity vaporized it.
The first public release of Wordpress was 0.71, in June 2003. I think I started using it around November, certainly before 1.0 was released.
Since logged-in users never see ads, it's difficult to judge how frequently they appear. Automattic are notoriously cagey on this point; many users of wordpress.com believe it to be entirely ad-free, since they're not informed about the ads when they sign up, and requests for a paid 'no ads' option have been ignored. Although Six Apart's decision to run ads on Livejournal was controversial (especially since Danga had previously promised users that they would never have ads on their journals), one has to give them credit for being upfront about it and allowing people to opt out.
It's good to see that the comments are still rolling in. I was particularly happy to see Anil's. I did try very hard to be balanced, while acknowledging that I use WordPress. Anil's reminder of 6A contributions to the community is a good addition to the discussion, as is Matt's note of WP's adoption by prominent "old media" sites.
The anti-6A quote that Anil picks up on is in a comment, not in my original post. I am confident that my favorite MT blogger (Richard) would have called me had I included anything like that!
Yes, just to clarify, I thought SixApart's focus was temporarily on making money, more than making a better product. Those pricing and licenseing structure changes were taken like a slap in the face by many who started out using MovableType and are what drove many of us to look at WordPress.
Now, SixApart has come full circle and is trying to make up for what I, and many others, see as mistakes in licenseing with their OpenSource version. However, as I wrote in my first comment, I think it's too little, too late. At least, it is for me. After being burned the first time, I'd have a hard time trusting SixApart again. That's also why I don't use OpenID, even though it is a great contribution. I just can't shake the idea that the license agreement will change in a way that I won't like later down the line.
Oh, and for the record, if it hadn't been for MovableType making the first relatively easy to use and freely available platform, I probably wouldn't have kept blogging at all. And, I don't think blogging would have taken off quite the same way if there hadn't been a tool like it to boost the people doing the writing. I just think SixApart lost a bit of vision when the money got big and stumbled. I hope the same thing doesn't happen to other such ventures.
Wordpress has to do something with security though. Seems like every other day, a hack is announced:
http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/4606
Movable Type’s history of duplicity vaporized it.
Honest question, since Joel doesn't have contact info and I see stuff like this from time to time -- what duplicity would you ascribe to us at Six Apart, and are there any companies you know of that haven't been guilty of "duplicity", by your standards?
Well, I link to my own blog and there's contact info there, but, you're right, it's a fair and honest question.
The original license agreement on MT included a "promise" that it would always be free, then, of course, it wasn't. And, by free, I assumed free as in beer. If I hadn't been out of work myself at the time, I would have donated. Regardless, that's water under the bridge.
Hey, don't take it personally, I don't trust Microsoft either, but I don't have a choice in using their products anymore. At home, on my own systems, I use OpenOffice and save the old version that includes the license that let's me use it, free of charge, just in case.
TBH, if not for that licensing issue, I'd have never moved to WordPress, which I love. As I mentioned in an earlier comment, I find WP far easier to develop for and use. I haven't had the time to do more development recently, but I plan on doing more this year. The structure of WP, and the user documentation, allowed me to develop two plugins with frightening ease. Mind, they're nothing spectacular or even appealing to a vast majority of the WP users, but my little MoonPhase Plugin has been popular enough to make it worth doing, for me. I guess, WP made certain aspects of blogging fun again for me, and that's a hard thing for *any* other blogging product, or company, to capture.
"the source for WordPress.com is not available"
Not totally true, the engine is open source:
mu.wordpress.org
Although MU doesn't include all the functionality, it has exactly the same potential. In other words: any user can build the same MU site using WordpressMU with MU-plugins.
Marco (#21), I believe that some of the WordPress.com code is not available. By that I mean that it's code that's not in WPMU and not in any available plugin. On the other hand, most of the code at WordPress.com is WPMU, to the extent that it is accurate to describe WordPress.com as a WPMU site.
I hope that Matt or someone else will step in and set me right if any of the above is incorrect.
Except, of course, they would have to write some of the plugins themselves. The point remains that wordpress.com does not back-port all its features into MU. It would make no commercial sense whatsoever if they did.
in an earlier comment, I indicated that I have used both WP and MT. My preference is WordPress, as also stated. I did fail to mention that there are some minor back end performance/resource issues with MT due to the fact that it is written in PERL. The pages that it generates load plenty fast for the "consumer" though. WordPress, on the other hand is fairly uniform in speed from front to back ends. SQL queries every time a page is requested is a bit resource intensive too, but can be greatly reduced by using wp-cache.
Blogging never dies! That's all I could say. There's time when I almost installed MT for my blog. But after comparing several blogging platforms, my choice is, no doubt, WordPress.
Well done, great blog and great posts!!!!
I was search for a blogging script when I find your website. Its a great blog on blogging. Although wordpress is free, I’m still looking for better ones. After all, I don’t want to bore my visitors with the same format.
I found interesting community scripts with blogging features. I love blogging and wish to have blogging features on my website. However, it is easy to start a blog site but not easy to populate one.
Of course content is important. I created a rather unique search engine on my site and hope to develop it into a mega portal like yahoo one day. I’m looking forward to see blogs with video, audio, and nice information on many niche subjects on my website one day.
For some who still don‚Äôt know what a blog means, blog is derived from the words ‚Äúweb log‚Ä? which becomes ‚Äúwe blog". So let's blog.