Joomla vs. WordPress vs. Drupal – Compared

Last updated on June 26th, 2022 at 11:41 am

There’s a lot to say about this this is a complex issue. It’s a war out there when people start comparing and discussing which one is better.

The truth is that there are so many systems around according to CMS Crawler.

Joomla vs. WordPress vs. Drupal - Compared

The top three CMS are WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. When fans of the three CMS’s are asked which one is better, they engage in passionate discussions and sometimes more than just discussions to defend one or the other.

I personally think everything has to be seen in perspective. Ultimately one opinion that I found and that I agree with is that the three are very good options and it really depends on what you or your client is trying to accomplish.

Joomla and WordPress are on the same average level according to Google search volume trend

Joomla and WordPress are searched three times as often as Drupal. However, the search volume for Joomla has been declining since 2010. You can see here that Joomla started declining right when the 1.6 release came out and I think this is when probably many Joomla users started shifting most likely to WordPress.

The big problem with Joomla has been the upgrades

It was just too difficult for some people to go through all the migration process and this is all the nature of open source applications. You don’t have support so you have to go through hours and hours of community posts and tutorials to find your way to upgrading your site.

But don’t get me wrong. Upgrades are necessary and these difficulties are past now for Joomla. Then there was the increasing popularity of WordPress due to its user-friendliness. There’s no question that WordPress became huge since 2010. WordPress became the number one choice for website building for marketers.

Compared to Joomla and Drupal, WordPress is the better marketing platform

WordPress understood this market very well and it can happen that the vast majority of people are just looking for something easy to use. So in the end, Joomla turned out to be too much for many people who were just looking to launch a simple site to make money on the Internet. Joomla is not for everyone. Joomla is for dynamic content driven sites.

WordPress on the other hand was conceived to be easy to use. The easiness comes with limitations. Since the platform has to be restricted in order to obtain a consistent output and so that many options won’t destroy the site’s usability and the look to the user.

I think Joomla will stabilize with its new version and will find its market mainly because it has such a strong community. And I think the buzz on WordPress will stabilize as well.

Conclusion

To wrap this up let me show you a comparison table that I prepared. Please note that this was done after reading hundreds of blogs forum post, comments, discussions, etc.

However, note that this is not an extensive comparison nor technical in terms of development since that is beyond the scope of this article. My intention is to give you some clues on when Joomla is the ideal platform to use. Joomla and WordPress have come closer and closer in terms of website building solutions.

WordPress did not start as a CMS but as a blogging engine. On the other hand, Joomla was not designed to be a blog although it can well be since laying out Joomla as a blog is purely a design issue and there are very good extensions such as Easy Blog or Zoo to turn Joomla into a blog.

Most of Joomla functionalities and flexibilities are right in the core. Joomla has very strong extensions for specific features such as a community or an e-commerce store.

So what’s the conclusion? I think Joomla falls a little bit between WordPress and Drupal. If you need a blog or a simple solution you might as well consider another CMS such as WordPress. Joomla is a strong CMS. It’s a content construction tool for simple to complex websites. On the other hand, if you’re planning on a complex enterprise level CMS, then Drupal might be the better choice for you. So each system has its strengths and its weaknesses. And most likely neither of them will do everything perfectly. And here’s a good rule to finalize: one is always better than the other when you have a specific purpose.