Last Updated on November 8, 2015 by Mathew Diekhake
So you have rooted your Android and you want to know which custom ROM to install. Two of the most popular custom ROM makers are the AOKP and CyanogenMod. Let’s put them head to head and see which comes out on top.
CyanogenMod or CM for short was founded by a guy named Steve Kondik. It grew into a household name in the Android community and was without a doubt the ROM to get. CM was known for being heavily customizable and also an outstanding ROM. Since then it has expanded to over 70 different devices and a record amount of users said to be over 5 million. The huge growth of CyanogenMod began to limit its level of customization because they had to think about everything they were affected when making a simple change simply because there was just so many people using it. Or so the story goes anyway. Today CyanogenMod focuses on a level of excellence as a pose to extra customization. Their goal? To be as steady as stock ROM while giving the extra options a stock ROM doesn’t.
Then along came the Android Open Kang Project (AOKP) founded by a man named Roman Birg. Today, the AOKP is known as being the best ROM for customization, and even though it too has grown to over 1 million users, it seems to have a better way of going about its business to remain extremely customization. This is only looking into the future, though, and many would argue that fact. The main reason being that AOKP was originally based off of the CyanogenMod ROM – therefor they might be heading down the same path. That’s not to say that the AOKP doesn’t strive for the same level of excellence as CyanogenMod, but in my opinion, the CyanogenMod team has the ROM is known for being most perfected, while the AOKP team is known for being most customizable.
Having said all of that, there are a lot of traits that both of the ROMs share. However, there are also just as many features that they don’t share. The AOKP ROM has so many features it would literally take me half a day to research and type them down. For that reason, I’m not going to.
So which ROM should I choose? Both ROMs are fantastic, and there is no better ROM per-se. It is purely a personal preference. So what are you waiting for? There is only one way to find out which ROM you want to have, and that is to go out and give them both a try!
You can review some of the ROM’s for both devices on our custom ROM page.