Open Source Is Losing Ground – Europe Must Act on Data Sovereignty

Cloudflare's 2025 Year in Review reveals a compelling story about the state of web technologies: open source platforms continue to power the majority of the internet's top websites, yet their market position shows subtle but important shifts that demand our attention.

The Numbers Tell a Clear Story

Cloudflare's 2025 Year in Review analysis of the top 5,000 domains reveals significant trends in open source technology adoption for websites:

CMS Market Share - Dramatic Year-over-Year Shifts:

• WordPress: 53% (2024) → 41% (2025) - a significant 12 percentage point decline
• Drupal: 4.8% (2024) → 4.1% (2025) - a modest 0.7 percentage point decline
• Combined open source (WordPress + Drupal): 57.8% (2024) → 45.1% (2025): 
• Proprietary platforms as a whole gaining ground: Adobe Experience Manager at 14%, Webflow emerged at 15%, Contentful at 6.9%

Okay, the decline isn't only about open source losing to proprietary solutions across the board—it's about market fragmentation and specialization. New entrants like Webflow (15%) and Framer Sites (2.2%) are capturing market share primarily from simpler use cases, while established proprietary players like Adobe Experience Manager actually declined from 20% to 14%.

Please note that for this statistics only the top 10 technologies are taken into account. Having access to the full data would be more conclusive. Also note that this data is coming only from cloudflare's own network. Websites with a focus on data privacy will very likely not use cloudflare as a service. But this data is still showing very valid trends, as cloudflares network is so huge.

Programming Languages:

• PHP continues its dominance alongside Node.js and Java
• These three maintain a commanding lead over alternatives including Ruby, Python, Perl, and C
• PHP's sustained market position validates the ongoing viability of open source web technologies

Drupal-Focused PaaS Providers 

While Drupal's CMS market share experienced a modest decline, the specialized infrastructure ecosystem supporting Drupal tells a different story:

• 2024: Pantheon (1.7%) + Acquia Cloud Platform (0.96%) = 2.66%
• 2025: Pantheon (1.6%) + Acquia Cloud Platform (1.1%) + Platform.sh (0.84%) = 3.54%

Platform.sh entering the top 10 PaaS providers in 2025 (displacing GitHub Pages) signals maturation rather than decline. These are enterprise-grade hosting platforms serving high-value deployments—government sites, universities, major NGOs—exactly the organizations seeking digital sovereignty. The infrastructure ecosystem is growing even as the overall CMS numbers shift, demonstrating Drupal's strength in the segments that matter most for European digital independence.

The Missing Open Source Tools

Analytics and Marketing Automation: Notably absent from Cloudflare's top-tier analysis are open source alternatives like Matomo (analytics) and Mautic (marketing automation). This gap in conventional metrics actually reinforces the fact that tools that provide true digital sovereignty often don't appear in enterprise-focused market analyses, despite their strategic importance for organizations seeking data ownership and control.

The Digital Sovereignty Imperative

This data becomes particularly significant when viewed through the lens of digital sovereignty – a concept Drupal founder Dries Buytaert addresses in his recent article on funding open source. As European institutions like the International Criminal Court, Denmark's Ministry of Digitalisation, and Germany's Schleswig-Holstein region move away from Microsoft and towards open source alternatives, the question isn't just about market share – it's about control.

Buytaert's core argument is straightforward but powerful: public money flows around open source instead of into it. When European governments procure open source solutions, contracts go to system integrators rather than the maintainers who actually build and secure the software. This creates a disconnect that undermines both sustainability and sovereignty.

The Procurement Challenge

The Cloudflare data validates what open source advocates have long argued: these technologies already power the internet's infrastructure. The challenge lies not in adoption but in sustainable funding.

One solution is letting open source projects vouch for contributors directly. Drupal's credit system maintains a public directory of companies ranked by their contributions to the project, showing at a glance which vendors actually help build and maintain the software.

Fortunately, momentum is building across Europe. APELL, an association of European open source companies, has proposed making contribution a procurement criterion. EuroStack, a coalition of 260+ companies, is lobbying for a "Buy Open Source Act". The European Commission has embraced an open source roadmap with procurement recommendations that could fundamentally change how public institutions invest in the software they depend on.

These discussions are happening right now. The Open Forum Europe Summit is currently underway, bringing together European policymakers, industry leaders, and open source advocates. Drupal has a strong presence at the event, with ACOLONO represented by Nico Grienauer among the participants. The timing is significant: Open Forum Europe has just launched a landmark study calling for an EU Sovereign Tech Fund to secure Europe's digital future. This initiative directly addresses Buytaert's argument—creating structured mechanisms to fund the open source maintainers and builders that European digital sovereignty depends on.

Moving Forward

The Cloudflare statistics demonstrate that open source has won the technical argument. PHP, Drupal, and WordPress aren't experimental technologies – they're proven platforms running the world's most critical digital infrastructure. Drupal's continuous evolution showcases exactly what open source promises: innovation without vendor lock-in, community-driven advancement that outpaces proprietary alternatives, and the flexibility to integrate emerging technologies like AI while maintaining full control.

The question for European organizations isn't whether to choose open source, but how to invest in it strategically. This means funding the maintainers and contributors who build features like Drupal's AI capabilities, not just the integrators who package existing work. 

Digital sovereignty isn't built through market dominance alone. It's built by ensuring that the open source foundations we depend on receive the resources needed to thrive – from the maintainers who actually create them, supported by the vibrant communities that drive innovation forward, year after year.