Open Source at a Crossroads as Europe Confronts Digital Sovereignty

Cloudflare’s 2025 Year in Review shows a marked decline in open source CMS usage among the top 5,000 websites. WordPress fell from 53 percent to 41 percent, and Drupal declined from 4.8 percent to 4.1 percent. At the same time, platforms like Webflow and Framer Sites gained ground. Although the data only covers Cloudflare’s network, it highlights a shift in platform preferences and market fragmentation.

Christian Ziegler notes that Drupal's infrastructure ecosystem is expanding despite the modest drop in CMS share. Pantheon, Acquia Cloud Platform, and Platform.sh now support more than 3.5 percent of top-tier sites. These providers serve high-value deployments in sectors focused on data control, including government and education.

Christian references Drupal founder Dries Buytaert’s concern that public money often bypasses open source maintainers in favor of system integrators. This funding gap threatens sustainability and weakens Europe’s push for digital sovereignty. Buytaert argues that investment should flow directly to the people who build and secure public code.

Policy initiatives are emerging to address this. APELL and EuroStack are advocating for procurement reforms that reward contribution. The European Commission’s open source roadmap and the current Open Forum Europe Summit, where Nico Grienauer represents Drupal, reflect growing support for this approach. Ziegler concludes that Europe must fund the maintainers of open source to safeguard its digital future.