Download websites that use OpenCms

About OpenCms

Java arrived in publishing with a promise of governance rather than of speed, and OpenCms is one of the platforms that kept that promise long enough to still be in service. Alkacon Software shipped the first release in 2000 under the LGPL, and the priorities of that moment are still legible in the product: editorial roles, structured content types, versioning of every resource, and publication as a deliberate step rather than a save button.

Open licensing matters more here than it would for a hobby project. A public body that must guarantee it can keep a site running after a supplier disappears is able to hold the source itself, and an integrator can ship a modified build to a client without a per seat negotiation. Licensing of that kind is one reason the platform survived in procurement environments where a proprietary contract would have been the harder sell.

A CMS written in Java is a statement about the organisation that bought it, not only about the site it renders. Running OpenCms implies a servlet container, an application server, a release process and staff or a contractor able to operate all of it. Websites of that shape belong to universities, ministries, municipal authorities, hospital groups and manufacturers with a multi language catalogue. Owners of that kind change slowly, procure formally, and stay on a platform for a decade because migration is a project rather than a plugin swap.

As of October 2026 we detect OpenCms on 509 sites. Absolute counts in the CMS field flatter software aimed at hobbyists and understate software aimed at institutions, so the number is better read as a count of organisations than as a measure of pages, budgets or traffic.

Detection depends on evidence the platform leaves in the open: characteristic resource paths, generator metadata and the layout of the editorial front end. A deployment served through a reverse proxy, stripped of its default markup or wrapped in a fully custom template set can pass unrecognised, and hardened installations are exactly the ones most likely to be invisible. The list is therefore a floor. Absence from it is not evidence that a domain runs something else.

Checking one domain answers one question. A downloadable list answers the question that generates work: which organisations, in which country and which sector, have committed to a Java content platform, and which of them are still on it. For an integrator the answer is a book of accounts whose skill requirements match the team already on payroll. For a vendor of connectors, search add ons, accessibility tooling or managed hosting the answer is an addressable market in a single file with the domains attached. For an analyst watching public sector publishing move toward hosted services, repeated snapshots show whether the installed base is holding, shrinking or quietly consolidating into a handful of large sites.