However, it's clear that a large portion of Bootstrap's growth has come thanks to integration with other software.

For example, Bootstrap is baked into the Joomla 3 core and will be in Joomla 4 as well. However, Bootstrap also dominates when it is not the default choice. You'll also find numerous Bootstrap themes for Magento, eZ Publish, Typo3 and more. Even platforms like Shopify now have hundreds of Bootstrap designs available.

Let's take a look at Bootstrap usage in WordPress and Drupal:

Bootstrap's popularity in WordPress

In the WordPress world, I've been counting the number of Bootstrap-based themes on WordPress.org:

January 2013 : 4 themes

: 4 themes Mid-2013 : 30 themes

: 30 themes 2016 : 250 themes

: 250 themes 2018: 420 themes

That is substantial growth in the WordPress world. There are even over 950 plugins that claim to use Bootstrap, although I suspect many more use it with explicitly saying so.

On the commercial side of WordPress, Bootstrap is also growing quickly. Back in 2016, ThemeForest had 2,500 Bootstrap themes for WordPress. That number is now over 6,600.

Bootstrap's popularity in Drupal

The most popular Drupal 8 theme is Bootstrap. It has over 160,000 installs, about twice as much as the second most popular theme. However, I think that vastly underestimates how popular the Bootstrap theme is now. Take a look at the growth of the Bootstrap theme. Using Drupal.org's stats, you can see that the theme now has over 45,000 Drupal 8 installs.

In contrast, look at the other popular themes on Drupal.org. All of them are seeing declining usage. This image below shows the usage Adaptive Theme, the second most popular Drupal 8 theme. Adaptive Theme has only 4,000 Drupal 8 installs, compared to 50,000 for Bootstrap.

In fact, no other Drupal 8 theme has more than 4,000 installs. Bootstrap is literally 10 times more popular than any other Drupal 8 theme. Here are the install numbers for the top ten Drupal 8 themes:

Bootstrap: 45,000 Adaptive: 4,000 Zymphonies: 4,000 Zurb: 4,000 Nexus: 2,900 Mayo: 2,000 Business: 1,800 Bootstrap Business ... based on Bootstrap, of course. Parallax: 1,700 Bario ... a Bootstrap subtheme.

After spending an afternoon looking at all this Drupal.org data, I'm going to make a big claim ... I would not be surprised if Bootstrap is more popular than all the other Drupal 8 themes combined.

All-in-all, there are around 200,000 Drupal 8 websites, and at least 20% of them use Bootstrap.

In my experience, a majority of Drupal 8 sites use a custom theme or a headless setup. So even at 20% of all Drupal 8 sites, Bootstrap can power the majority of sites using off-the-shelf themes.

Finally, as with WordPress, it's not only themes that rely on Bootstrap. There are also over 300 Drupal modules providing Bootstrap-related features.

Conclusion