Charles Stricklin has published an article today that shows off Grafiti essentially slamming WordPress. According to Charles, Telligent has purchased the keyword WordPressPodcast from Google Adwords. Upon clicking on the promotional landing page, you discover that the Grafiti CMS is THE alternative for WordPress. Telligent claims that Grafiti has a 2 minute install time when compared with the 5 minute install time for WordPress. Some notable differences between the two: Grafiti is based on Microsoft.NET and IIS technology and costs $199.00 which by the way, is a limited time price, so who knows what the final price may end up being.
The final verdict? Grafiti seems to be taking some pretty sharp jabs towards WordPress which don’t even make sense. Although they have a pretty aggressive advertising campaign going on, what they are offering with Grafiti isn’t even close to what you receive with WordPress. I don’t know who they are trying to kid, but who in their right mind would pay at least $199.00 for this stuff?
As Charles mentions on his blog, the major downfall Grafiti has going against their software is that it’s proprietary. This means you have to lean on Telligents shoulders and hope to god they never go out of business. In retrospect, WordPress is an open-source project filed under the GPL. This means, even if the major developers stepped away from the project, nothing stops you from picking up where they left off.
Ever hear of the phrase, You Get What You Pay For? Generally, it’s true. In this case however, you get $199.00 worth of crap. Enjoy.
Thoughts and Insanity From Jeff 
Nothing will ever make me change from WordPress. A community driven piece of software, that Matt and his team have perfected.
And “Graffit” at $199, is probably the most expensive blogging software I have seen.
@Mark Yeah, I certainly won’t be switching publishing platforms any time soon.
I was reading through their site and seriously fail to see their customer value proposition. Saying that it takes 3 instead of 5 steps, and 2 instead of 5 minutes to install is simply stupid.
I couldn’t care less if it takes me a couple of minutes more to install something. It’s the ongoing usage and cost that count for so much more.
I can see that it’s clearly aimed at complete idiots. “Graffiti is built for people. You don’t have to know how how to program your DVR to use it. Why should you be required to write code to use a CMS?” What’s a DVR got to do with running a blog? If you’re incapable of programming a DVR, most likely, for the sake of humanity, you shouldn’t have a blog.