If you’re thinking about building a website or blog, you should consider using one of the best CMS available in the market.
A CMS (content management system) helps you create, manage, and modify the contents of your website without the need for any HTML or CSS coding skills.
The easy-to-use nature of the modern CMS platforms means that anyone can build themselves a great-looking website all on their own. You don’t need to be a web developer, a designer, or have any previous experience with website building either.
In this post, we look through three of the most popular and best CMS platforms coming into 2022, compare their pros and cons, and help you pick one.
The three best CMS that we’re looking into are:
- WordPress
- Joomla
- Drupal
Table of Contents:
Here’s everything you need to know about them:
1. Costs and Expense Comparison for the Best CMS
Talking about the costs involved in using any of these CMS gets real tricky real fast.
Here’s the deal:
- Each of these three best CMS is 100% free in itself – you can download either one directly from the official websites in just a couple of clicks
- But there are other side costs that you have to take onto yourself
These side costs involve chiefly two things: a domain name and web hosting.
- A domain name is your website’s address on the web. This website’s domain name is
websitesetup.org. Buying and keeping a domain online costs around $10 annually. - A web hosting setup is where your website sits and from where your visitors can access it. Good hosting starts at ~$3 a month.
Building your website on either of our three best CMS will cost the same in terms of the domain name and hosting.
One more thing…
While the CMS platforms are free to download, in some cases, users will want to extend the native feature sets of their CMS with extra modules and/or designs.
You’ll find:
- WordPress plugins available for $0-$200
- Joomla plugins: $0-$70
- Drupal plugins: $0-$100
The same thing goes for themes – installable design packages. You’ll find:
- WordPress themes available for $0-$250
- Joomla themes: $0-$200
- Drupal themes: $0-$80
All three of the best CMS have add-ons in roughly the same price range. Ultimately, you don’t have to buy any add-ons if you don’t have the budget.
In the end, if you intend to get only the bare minimum, your bill is going to be:
- $10 (domain name) + $3×12 (hosting) = ~$46 a year
2. Level of Expertise Needed
At the end of the day, you will be able to use either of our best CMS from this lineup without any previous experience.
That being said, your results may vary depending on what your expectations are and how advanced of a site you want to build.
WordPress is arguably the easiest one to use. Expanding the functionality of your site and finding and customizing the designs is much more approachable.
Regarding customization, WordPress comes with a friendly interface for tweaking the looks of your site, changing the colors, backgrounds, and other visual elements.
Joomla and Drupal are more developer-centered and do expect you to be reasonably comfortable working with HTML and PHP – that is, if you want to build a more custom-looking and custom-operating website.
There are not as many versatile add-ons available for either CMS, and the ones that are there are not as refined as their counterparts for WordPress.
In most cases, you can expect to either have to hire someone or learn the inner workings of either Joomla or Drupal if you want to end up with a custom-looking website.
This all comes down to the size of the community – there are many more people working on WordPress-related products and add-ons than they are working on Joomla or Drupal. This means that if you want to get a feature for your website that’s not available via a plugin, you’ll have to create that feature yourself.
3. The Popularity of the Best CMS
The popularity contest is actually a no-contest. WordPress takes this round hands down. Take a look at this chart – it presents the usage of content management systems on the web:
Here are the numbers in raw:
- WordPress is used more than 43% of the entire web.
- Joomla 1.7%
- Drupal 1.3%
Example websites running on WordPress:
- The White House
- University of Washington
- PlayStation Blog
Example websites running on Joomla:
- RogerFederer.com
- United Nations Regional Information Centre
- ItWire
Example websites running on Drupal:
- NASA
- Harvard University
- Tesla
4. Choice of Designs
The design quality is a huge factor in choosing your CMS. We all want our websites to look nice and not be an eyesore.
First, let’s talk out-the-box design – meaning, how good the CMS looks on its default setup right after the installation.
Here’s WordPress:
Joomla:
Drupal:
Both Joomla and Drupal look a bit archaic if you ask us. WordPress sports a modern and optimized design.
Setting the default design aside, most users will want to change to a unique one. This is where themes/templates come into play.
There are thousands of themes available for WordPress. Both free and paid ones. To start with, you can go to the official directory of themes at WordPress.org. There are more than 8,000 free themes available there. Then, you’ll also find thousands of other free themes throughout the web.
Then come in paid themes. There are multiple quality theme houses that will sell you optimized and beautiful themes starting from $2.
Overall, you’ll certainly have no shortage of design choices with WordPress.
The choice for both Drupal and Joomla is much smaller. Most importantly, there are hardly any free themes that look good. We’re talking in the range of hundreds compared to thousands for WordPress.
That said, the paid themes do look good and offer a good variety of designs and functionality. There’s just way fewer of them vs WordPress.
5. Customization Options
Each of the best CMS here offers its own spin on installing new features on your site:
- WordPress calls all new add-ons plugins
- Joomla calls them extensions
- Drupal calls them modules
The idea behind them is basically the same – to let you extend the default range of features that come with your CMS.
Let’s talk numbers first:
- You’ll find more than 50,000 plugins for WordPress available in the official directory alone. There are thousands more available from third-party developers.
- There are almost 6,000 extensions available for Joomla in the official directory, and a couple hundred more throughout the web.
- There are around 48,000 modules available for Drupal in the official directory, but only a handful elsewhere on the web.
WordPress offers the biggest number of plugins, and those plugins are the most user-facing. Meaning, they’re meant to be used by the final user of the site, they provide a refined UI and easy-to-comprehend control panels. You can also safely expect that if you need a new feature for your WordPress site, there’s probably a plugin for that already.
Joomla offers a good catalog of extensions as well, albeit much smaller than that of WordPress’. You’ll still find extensions to handle all of the most crucial aspects of your site, such as galleries, SEO, analytics, contact forms, and more.
Drupal modules are much more developer-focused. You’ll find various solutions to expand the APIs, set up additional tokens for devs, do more advanced user management, and so on.
Overall, they will help you further customize the inner mechanisms of Drupal if you’re working on a more serious project. There are not as many user-facing modules, though. Even doing a search in the module directory for something as simple as “contact form” doesn’t produce optimistic results.
6. Security and Updates
You can expect a new WordPress version update roughly every 50-60 days. Many of those updates are minor and just fix small bugs and issues here and there. Bigger WordPress releases come out a couple of times a year.
Small Joomla updates come out a bit more frequently, roughly every 10-40 days, but the bigger ones come only about once a year or even less frequently. Joomla version 3.9 has been with us since 2018, for instance.
Drupal works on a set release schedule, delivering one bugfix update and one security update a month. Bigger updates – major versions – come around two times a year.
Now let’s talk security. First, the numbers. Here’s the website hack trend report from 2019 by Sucuri – a web security company:
As you can see, this doesn’t look good for WordPress. More than 90% of all infected CMS websites run on WordPress. By 2022 this number has probably increased (there are no recent studies published just yet).
This low score of WordPress’ is due to a couple of factors. First, it’s simply the most popular CMS on the web. It will naturally receive a much bigger piece of the hacking pie.
Also, since these many sites run on WordPress, hacking into WordPress yields a higher ROI for attackers – investing in building an exploit for WordPress can result in breaking into thousands of sites vs a much smaller number for Joomla or Drupal.
On the other hand, it’s worth pointing out that both Drupal and Joomla are hacked into proportionally less than WordPress – even once we factor in the popularity levels of all three CMSs. This is no coincidence. Actually, security is one of the main selling points of Drupal. Many government agencies and other institutions have trusted Drupal chiefly due to its strong focus on website security.
7. Support and Community
All three of our best CMS offer ways for you to get help if you’re struggling with a task:
- WordPress has its support section on the official website. You’ll find user guides there, documentation, and you can also access the user forum where other like-minded people can help you solve your problem. Moreover, you can contact FixRunner, who is our recommended WordPress maintenance and support provider.
- Joomla has a couple of sections on the official website where you can find various forms of help. There’s the main documentation, the community portal and training, and also the user forums.
- Drupal follows a similar approach, offering sections for documentation, support, community portal, and various tutorials and user guides.
When it comes to the quality of all those docs, Joomla’s and Drupal’s offerings seem to come on top. While WordPress has a decent documentation section and user guides, you’ll probably find more in-depth tutorials and information elsewhere on the web (like on our site, for example).
The official support forums are all quite similar to either CMS.
Lastly, if you need to hire a professional to help you figure out some more complex stuff, or even work on your entire website, then it’s going to be much easier to find WordPress developers than Joomla or Drupal developers.
For instance, if you go to Freelancer.com (one of the most popular sites to hire freelancers) and look up each CMS, you’ll get these results:
- “WordPress” – over 77,000 freelancers offering WordPress-related work
- “Joomla” – around 7,300
- “Drupal” – around 4,300
To Wrap Up:
Now that you have an overview of all of the three CMS’s, let’s go over when to use each of these.
When to Use WordPress?
WordPress is a great all-around CMS if you want to DIY a website and also make sure that it will look properly and have all the features you need.
It’s the easiest platform to use if you’re a beginner and also one that offers the best designs and the biggest choice of them.
Plus, if you ever want to expand your site, you can choose from thousands of plugins that can handle pretty much any new feature you can think of.
When to Use Drupal?
Drupal can be your solution if the website you want to build will have a lot of custom functionality and will require first-class security at the same time.
Drupal is more geared toward developers rather than DIY users who are working on their sites in the afternoons.
You will also likely require a lot of custom work and coding done to achieve your final desired effect with Drupal.
When to Use Joomla?
Joomla kind of meets you in the middle between WordPress and Drupal. On the one hand, it does deliver a lot of user-facing features but also expects you to custom-code the non-standard elements.
Joomla has a more advanced user management scheme, which can be handy if your website is meant to be managed by multiple people. The same goes for multilingual support. With Joomla, you can set up multilingual sites right out the box, while doing so with WordPress requires a separate plugin.
That being said, you will still find Joomla’s learning curve to be quite steep. This can be troublesome if the only thing you want for now is simply a “working website.”
Randy Booth
Thank you for providing this comparison. I am in process of deciding on the CMS for a new venture that is a membership freemium type of site. Has to handle logins, training lessons, completion progress, video training, SECURITY, SEO, hidden content from free members etc.
I am leaning towards WordPress with Elegant Themes, DIVI, Learning Management System Layout pack since I have lifetime membership to Elegant Themes.
My website will be structured to help adults learning and becoming comfortable using computers. Maybe a learning center, a blog and a forum for members.
Any thoughts or tips would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you,
Randy Booth
Nick Schäferhoff
I think if you already have a membership to Elegant Themes, going with their theme will be the cheapest and easiest option. You may also want to look into an LMS plugin like LearnDash, which could make your life a lot easier. Aside from that, for security, SEO, etc. it’s all about educating yourself about best practices for WordPress. Install a good SEO plugin and consider using a managed hosting company that takes care of most maintenance tasks and you should be well on your way.
MALLEM Mourad
When I get started with WordPress can I import plugins by Joomla or Drupal?
Nick Schäferhoff
Unfortunately, these plugins are not compatible. However, some developers offer their plugins for more than one platform. Otherwise, you can usually find similar products on all platforms with a bit of search.
Jurgen
This is by far the more detailed and balanced comparison that I could find. As a long time Joomla integrator, I always compare it with Lego: WordPress is like Duplo blocks (easy to work with, you quickly have a result), Joomla is the regular lego blocks and Drupal is Lego Technics (you can go all the way, but you really need to know your stuff).
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Thanks for your kind words, Jurgen 🙂
Kaliswarran Rao
We are a non-profit international organisation and want to integrate an eCommerce website, an affiliate membership platform and payment portal with our CRM.
If we were to integrate with our current CRM (Copper), we would face some challenges:
1) It would require several additional platforms. Eg Zapier, Wufoo
2) Privacy concerns exist with multiple platforms. Eg Zapier, Wufoo
3) Recurring high costs of integration
Our eCommerce vendor is recommending Zero BS CRM (WordPress CRM Plugin). We did not see this in your list of comparisons.
What is the best CRM programme to meet our needs? Your expert advice is highly appreciated.
Thank you.
Best,
Kaliswarran Rao
K
One of my clients used Solve360 Integrated with Jotform into WP, and they seem pretty happy with it
Nick Schäferhoff
Thanks for the input! Much appreciated.
Nick Schäferhoff
Zero BS CRM is a plugin for WordPress, not a CRM program in itself. It works together with WordPress, one of the CMS in this comparison. Unfortunately, I don’t have any experience working with CRM, so I can’t make any recommendations. However, maybe someone else in this comment section has an idea.
J. Shook
I’m a web developer who’s used WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, as well as some older CMS’s like Nuke and PostNuke.
WordPress is garbage. The biggest reason it has 30+% of the websites in the world is because it has such a low barrier of entry. But building a GOOD WordPress site is, in my opinion, way more difficult and expensive than building a decent Drupal or Joomla site. There are literally millions of bad and un-maintained WordPress sites on the web. It’s why hackers now almost exclusively target them.
I’ve literally NEVER had to buy a Drupal module to build a decent site for a customer. I’ve bought themes, but it’s relatively easy to customize several of the contributed open source themes. Drupal definitely has much better community oversight on their contributed modules and themes as well.
I don’t use Joomla as much but it’s still better than WordPress, and has (in my opinion) better e-commerce integrations than Drupal. You’ll pay for them though.
Telling beginners to use WordPress because it’s simple just invites them to build bad sites. If they’re not a programmer, they should use Wix or Squarespace if they really want to build their own. If they WANT to be a programmer, I’d still recommend Drupal – it’s a steeper learning curve, but will give them a better end result and better community support for budding developers.
Even most WordPress development firms do nothing except install paid plugins. A pretty hefty percentage of them couldn’t program their way out of a paper bag.
Nick Schäferhoff
The low barrier of entry is exactly the point. People choose WordPress because it allows them to have a site up and running very quickly and do it by themselves. No need to hire someone, you can get up and running in minutes. Plus, many developers appreciate the platform because it is easy to teach to clients.
On the other hand, I agree with you that there are a lot of badly made WordPress sites out there. As with everything in life, you need to be willing to educate yourself in order to use the tools at hand properly. For WordPress users that means learning how to make your site fast and keep it safe. Not everyone can or wants to be a programmer but there’s still stuff you need to be aware of or hire someone to take care of for you.
Wix and Squarespace come with their own set of issues, namely lack of flexibility and the fact that you don’t really own your site – you rent it. It’s also hard to move on to some other platform and take your content with you. Therefore, even for beginners, I’d still recommend WordPress, maybe in combination with a page builder plugin.
I think each of the CMS has their own market and areas they excel at. WordPress has definitely struck a nerve, otherwise it wouldn’t be the most successful platform out there. Sure, it has its issues and no system is perfect but WordPress has also helped revolutionize web publishing and given many people the means to start their own businesses and online presences that they otherwise would not have been able to.
So, while I don’t share your opinion, I appreciate you taking the time to leave such a detailed comment. Thank you!
Diane McLeod
I called WordPress and it is NOT user friendly! I was told it takes months to learn how to use it and if I’m not taking a class i would probably need their help at $100 monthly. Like I said, it could take months. Why do you recommend such a difficult website for a beginner?!
Dan McDermott
Hi Diane, I have used Drupal in the past and currently use WordPress. My experience is that there is definitely a learning curve with both but the vast number of plugins, themes, tutorials, etc. for WordPress make it an attractive choice. My main site is for a local newspaper. I host it on WordPress.com and pay $300 a year and I can chat with their support people 24/7 and as long as I work with one of their themes, they provide detailed help. (They can still help with other themes but don’t train on them.) If I have a problem or can’t figure something out they explain it and often fix it. They will even figure out what custom CSS I need to change a font or color or alignment of something, etc. and give it to me in the chat.
I don’t know if I will stay there forever, or if I will always use WordPress. I am there now because the site has been running on wordpress.com for 12 years and I initially had the address like mysite.wordpress.com and now use our domain. Because I keep it there the old links will still work. Plus they handle backups and maintain WordPress automatically. I don’t have to worry about hackers or the site crashing and losing everything because I was inattentive to something.
There is no perfect solution and all cause occasional frustration and require some time. But I can’t imagine a scenario where the typical person would have to pay $100 a month.
Nick Schäferhoff
Compared to the other two solutions in this comparison, WordPress is definitely the most user friendly. However, every website system you start out with will have a learning curve. From your comment, it also sounds like you went with WordPress.com, not self-hosted WordPress (WordPress.org). I recommend you look into installing WordPress locally to test drive it without any risk. Here are a few useful articles:
https://websitesetup.org/install-wordpress-locally-xampp/
https://websitesetup.org/customize-wordpress-101/
https://websitesetup.org/best-popular-wordpress-plugins/
Let us know if we can help somehow!
Kurt Tietjen
This is a very good comparison. Would have loved to have seen some performance information and how difficult it is to scale the CMSs for large #s of pages and high volume sites.
Nick Schäferhoff
Thanks for the input, Kurt. I’ll note this down so we can maybe amend the post accordingly.
Paul Aydelott
I expected a fair assessment of the three content management systems. It’s quite obvious that the author has little or no experience with Joomla. As for the comment that a Joomla developer needs to be skilled in PHP, nothing could be farther from the truth. Joomla is extremely flexible without resorting to the management of code.
The last time I started to develop a WordPress site, I quit when I realized that I was going to have to edit the code to insert a simple logo in the header. (Yeah, I know that some templates already have that built-in.) I know developers that make a lot of money writing PHP and Javascript to make WordPress do what it wasn’t designed to do. Pretty much all the things those developers want to do can be done in Joomla with much difficulty.
As for the appearance of the site, the example shown is of a starter template that almost nobody would use. Many of the best WordPress templates have a Joomla version that is just as good or better.
Nick Schäferhoff
Hey Paul, thanks for your input. Since Joomla is built on PHP, if you want to be a developer, it’s probably a good idea to be skilled in that language. The same is true if you want to develop for WordPress, though here, JavaScript is becoming more and more important.
Whether you are working with Joomla or WordPress, knowing the right tools to get the job done will always make your life easier. Most modern WordPress themes will allow you to change the site logo from the back end without editing code.
As for the starter template, WordPress comes with a new default theme every year that is built on the latest technology and design trends. Since the same doesn’t happen for Joomla or Drupal, WordPress tends to look a little better right out of the box. Of course, nobody is saying that you can not change Joomla’s look with another template. We just compared what a site built with the different CMS looks like right after installation.
In the end, which is the right solution for you depends on your needs and skill level. We just think that WordPress is the easiest solution to get into as a beginner (which is our main audience) but we are also aware that the other two CMS’s can be used to build awesome websites.
I hope this clarified some of the points in the post.
Andy Anderson
I will compliment you with an expertly written article. WordPress is my CMS choice since 2004. I choose it because of the aesthetics and extensive library of add ons but I have also had no real issues with security. Most developers will tell you that 90% of security issues are user-related. They don’t use recently updated themes and plugins and don’t stay up to date on their core install which gets security tweaks a couple of times a month because WordPress is such a big target. There are also exceptional security suites like WordFense and server-side security systems as well that keep sites safe.
In the 15 years of using WP, I have only had 2 of over 2 dozen sites hacked and bother were only cosmetic breaches and they were weak password situations. Joomla and Drupal are clunky and not visually on par with WordPress. Most clients are not tech-savvy and WP has a lesser learning curve as you mention.
Nick Schäferhoff
Thanks for the comment, Andy. We also like WordPress a lot and agree with your assessment when it comes to security: https://websitesetup.org/wordpress-security/
Jack
Thank you for your interesting article. Since 2016, as a church in the Netherlands, we have to meet the new EU ‘privacy law’. For one thing, you are not allowed to gather personal data of your members without their explicit permission. A big step to realize this on the church website would be the possibility for church members to select themselves which items they would register/ disclose in the membership database. To make this possible the website needs a password protected area and functionality which enables members to fill in their own data. Which CMS facilitates this functionality the best?
Nick Schäferhoff
Hey Jack, unfortunately, I don’t know any solution for your request from the top of my head. I know that there are a lot of GDPR-ready plugins for WordPress. You can find many of them here but you would have to make your own research as to what fits your needs.
Overall, I would recommend you to go with WordPress or Joomla as those two solutions are much easier to implement than Drupal. Especially, if you want a relatively simple site.
Szymon Chmielowiec
Yes, I must also thank you for the work you have done! You compare the most popular CMS on the main areas that are important for website owners before making a decision.
Looking from the perspective of a person who creates dedicated solutions every day, I think that Drupal 8 is by far the best CMS for larger organizations that need extensive functionality – non-stop updated while maintaining the security of the site. There is a reason why so many websites of government organizations and universities use Drupal 🙂
Robert Fabian
The big argument in favor of Drupal, for me, is the degree to which a Drupal site can be customized to fit the client’s needs. The back end may be more complex, but it’s relatively easy to provide a simplified interface for those who are to have editorial responsibilities on the site. The content managers can deal exclusively with information blocks that make sense in their world.
There is a new option in the Drupal world. There was a fork from Drupal 7 that provides some of the Drupal 8 benefits, but with a commitment to simplicity (albeit relative simplicity). The Backdrop CMS is an attractive alternative to Drupal 7/8, at least for smaller sites. It still allows the back end designer to present editors with information blocks that make sense in their world, but with a strong back end commitment to simplicity and (relatively) easy upgrades. For me, it’s the most promising of the serious CMSs.
Jennifer
Great article. You outlined some costs in another article which was also helpful. But I’m still not clear on the big picture cost differential. I understand it’s tied to feature, function and individual developer costs, but generally is Drupal xx% more than WordPress but x% less than Joomla for development (or whatever the math is)?
Thanks!
ssnobben
There was a real test comparison between Drupal, Joomla and WordPress a couple of years ago to see which system was built fastest easiest from ground up from a specification from 3 developer teams from each of these CMS.
Unfortunately the commercial interests from competitors took that comparison away when it was not favourable for them. That was the best non personal biased comparison that has been made.
And Joomla won that competition for being fastest to set up and with best looking result. And Joomla have also winning Best Free CMS – Joomla! many years ie 2018 and before. https://www.cmscritic.com/awards/
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Hi Jennifer,
It’s hard to make a general estimate like that, but WordPress has the most free stuff out of the 3 so it will likely be the cheapest with Joomla in the middle and Drupal having the most costs, assuming you’ll hire someone to develop on it as it’s a difficult platform to work with.
Nikola
That is not true that the most of the WP stuff is free.
The most of the WP plugins are not totally free, those plugins which are free, actually have just basic features, to be able to use all the features you have to pay.
Joomla have many extensions which are totally free or partially free similar such as WP plugins.
Nick Schäferhoff
Hey Nikola, it’s true that there are a lot of freemium WordPress plugins. However, in my experience, for most functionality you are able to find a free solution in WordPress. This is especially true because the WordPress sphere is a lot bigger than Joomla’s. Depending on the scope, you might also have to purchase premium solutions, however, these are usually quite affordable. Overall, both CMS are quite similar in this regard.
Wynn
Great article. If I need an easy to build website with a secured section for members – as in login required, should I go for Joomla? Thank you.
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Hi Wynn,
Yup, Joomla would be a nice choice. WordPress can work well too with its numerous membership plugins.
Gurmanroop Kaur
Hey Nick, Thank u for this wonderful article. Yes, I agree with “WebsiteSetup Editorial” that Joomla is a better choice than WordPress. It is not fast necessary to be a developer if u want to use Joomla. If anyone has a little bit of knowledge of HTML codes, u can use Joomla easily. Thank u!
Areeb Raja
I first check your website (https://websitesetup.org), Its on wordpress so i assume WordPress is best 🙂
Nick Schäferhoff
We are definitely fans…
Ivan Kartov
I’m using Joomla for more than 10 years (i’ve built more than 100 websites with Joomla) and I find it very difficult to accept the fact that Joomla is dying.
Very little new templates, lack of updates on the extensions and fewer new extensions available.
Meanwhile WordPress is flourishing holding more than 60% of the market share.
Although Joomla can do the trick for most of my needs I must stop delaying and start using WordPress immediately.
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Yup, WordPress is definitely getting way more content so learning it will be a good move to future-proof yourself.
J.J. Oli
Excellent article! I have experience with Drupal and with WordPress. I expect to hit some of Joomla soon. I like your comparisons and tend to agree with everything. One thing that impressed me is how well you have kept this up to date with these CMSs always changing! It’s funny reading the comments though because some of them are from 2014 and make remarks that were true in 2014 then you have other people responding to them in 2017-18 and it just makes me laugh. A word to readers: Beware when reading and responding to comments because things have changed over the last 4 years.
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Thank you for the kind words! It’s good that you pointed out that the old comments might not be applicable anymore, if anyone reading this is in doubt about something then feel free to ask when unsure. Good luck with Joomla, J.J. 🙂
Lisa Renshaw
Great article.
Though the last section where you stated you reached out to experts for their opinions – yet you list 2 and they are both biased towards WordPress. Why not include some expert opinions from those who chose Joomla or Drupal and why they chose those?
Personally, I’ve been web developer for over 14 years. I first started developing in HTML/CSS and then found clients really wanted to edit their sites more and moved to WordPress. After only a few sites, I found it’s limitations and was introduced to Joomla. Based on my prior experience with HTML/CSS, Joomla fit the bill. It allowed me the opportunity to built a completely customized site with ease and once I trained the client it was easy for them to update.
Currently we develop in both WordPress and Joomla out of necessity b/c different clients have different needs. We haven’t chosen one as a one size fits all though Joomla is definitely our preference. I recognize that WordPress is great for blogging and ecommerce; Joomla is great at handling large professional business sites with good organization system right out of the box. Recently I’ve had the opportunity to develop 3 WordPress sites and my preference is still Joomla b/c of the core functionality already built in, lack of conflicts between plugins and template [theme] and overall ease of customization.
People have mentioned the ease of client training. We have had no problems with clients learning Joomla and some have even switched from WordPress to Joomla and now prefer the Joomla interface. I believe it comes down to really knowing your client, their learning style, how they work and ultimately what is the purpose of their website. From there we choose the best solution to meet their needs. I believe if you limit yourself as designer / developer to one preferred platform then you also limit the realm of possibilities for a client…. when one software (that you don’t normally use) may actually be the better option.
Nick Schäferhoff
Hey Lisa, thanks for the detailed input and for adding your expert opinion! I totally agree that if you are experienced with different tools, you can use them well for different purposes. I also like your approach for client education.
Personally, I prefer WordPress but I have worked with both Joomla and Drupal (as well as Typo3) before. WP was easiest to wrap my head around and so far has always been able to do what I wanted it to.
However, I appreciate you pointing out to our readers that there are other things they may want to consider when choosing their CMS.
Thanks again!
cindy
Hi,
Thank you very much for your posts. It definitely gives a little bit idea about what CMS to choose.
I am new to building a website, however, I have an idea about the website that I wanted to create, which might need some customizations, which I am not very sure if wordpress could provide (I haven’t give it a try yet, but I will soon).
Can we actually transfer things we build in wordpress to other cms? Thank you
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Hi Cindy,
Every CMS is unique so there’s no way to reliably transfer an entire site to another platform. If you’re unsure about whether WordPress can do something then feel free to use the contact form to tell me what you’re looking to do and I could maybe point you in the right direction
Bernard
Great comparison, leaning a little towards WP. I don’t know WP very well, but I do know Joomla well, and you did point out some of it’s advantages and disadvantages. I have coded a large league software based on Joomla, with a relational database structuref (of the custom data) and lots of custom queries. For something like this Joomla seems to be well suited.
Besides that, the discussion seems to me a lot like comparing Microsoft to Apple computers. Both have their strength, both have their followers, and while Microsoft has a far higher market share, try to convince an Apple user of many years that Microsoft is better, or vice versa.
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Hi Bernard, great analogy! There’s always going to be fans of one platform defending it to the death no matter what the facts are, while in reality there’s advantages and disadvantages to everything. It’s good to try out new platforms when you have the opportunity, never know what you may find 🙂
Alan N
Well done WebsiteSetup Editorial, this is one of the better comparison’s I’ve seen and it’s good that it’s been updated unlike others out there.
I’d like to emphasise on security. I’ve had a WordPress and a Joomla site hacked – both via outdated plugins. On one the plugin wasn’t even in use, had simply been used for testing and disabled a long time back. Both CMS platforms were up to date.
My top tip here is always keep both platform and plugins up to date. If you install plugins and don’t use them – uninstall them. It’s all about housekeeping! A gripe I have with WordPress is that their auto updates sound like a good idea but for sites using plugins an auto update can break a site through compatibility issues and you might not know about it straight away at which point you’re loosing visitors that might not come back. Good Plugin Developers are normally ready for platform updates but not always. I prefer the control to be able to back up, test then update.
My preference? I’ve not used Drupal so can’t compare but, in my opinion, for a scaleable site that allows you to put content where you want, on what pages you want it and when you want to see it, I’m with Joomla – Loud and Proud!
Nick Schäferhoff
Thanks for the tips, Alan! We also mention the importance of keeping your site up to date here: https://websitesetup.org/wordpress-security/
Richard Johnson
Drupal requires bunches more technical expertise (or expense, see below) than the other two. WP and Joomla can be upgraded easily and switch themes and add components just as easily. Drupal requires you to really know what you are doing to upgrade and switch things out. I suspect that is why it is used mostly by the big sites. For those of us who can’t afford to keep a Drupal expert on staff (much less several) you end up paying for an off-site service.
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Definitely! Drupal is powerful but tricky to use, making WordPress or Joomla much better choices for beginners. Thanks for your input, Richard!
Lui
Awesome article! It was a very good comparison between the three CMS. I’ve already used Joomla in the past, I’m going to try WordPress.
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Awesome, glad you found it helpful!
Charles Newman
I just read your page and it gives me all the information I need to get started. I currently use Serif, which is not bad and no coding is required, but I have to use the computer it is installed on to update it. Also, it has been discontinued and no longer suported. It also needs you to almost duplicate the site to make it mobile friendly. So, I’m going to go for WordPress to build a basic site and Joomla for my business since I eventually want to have it talk with my POS system and ecommerce. Thanks for this information, it got right to the point without a bunch of “fence riding.”
Simon Saidi
@Charles Newman, I thought WP could handle a robust e-commerce shop? The only concern I have, concern raised by a few, is weaker WP website security when compared say to Joomla or Drupal. How can you strengthen/harden security for a website built on WP platform?
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Hi Simon,
It’s not necessarily that WP has weaker security, it’s just that since it’s the most popular platform it gets targeted more than others. That being said, there’s a great article here on what you can do to keep your WP site secure: https://www.wpbeginner.com/wordpress-security/
William
Weirdly, I find WordPress to be the hardest one to use, followed by Drupal. I started building a WP powered site but gave up and went back to Drupal and Joomla… It’s a very powerful CMS but sadly I just couldn’t understand it!
Sahalu
Excellent article WebsiteSetup Editorial. I have some knowledge of all three CMS systems, for security and extensibility reasons I am biased toward Joomla or Drupal. For none-complex CMS sites that do not store financial or user identifiable information, WordPress makes sense.
Julia CP
Great feedback and very useful information. Thanks! The best comparison I’ve read. I am a user of WordPress and I love it. Now evaluating Joomla and your report has given me better clues. It would be nice to see a demo of the CMS. I’m worried about how easy Joomla will be to update information for a non-techie user!
Rupesh Kumar
Awesome article on differentiating WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. I personally like WordPress as it is easy and quick. Also, there are so many big companies websites running on WordPress like Airbnb, etc. There is no doubt that any beginner should go with WordPress.
Bayu
I just started learning drupal. Read the concept behind it, pretty much a developer mindset.
Like what you have explained, wordpress and joomla are built for specific purpose in mind. Therefore, both won’t be as flexible as Drupal. For non-technical user that just want to start writing a story right away after installation, wordpress is the choice (as I remember 5 years ago). I think this is the most influential factor why wordpress is so popular. Because most of CMS user are personal blogger or something like that.
Drupal is powerful CMS to develop a custom web or even application with endless possibility. But I don’t know for this kind of generic CMS, whether it’s good to build a high-performance web application with a very complex database schema. Because of course, the relationship between data inside its database won’t be a straightforward relationship. Not like specific application which built from scratch.
I think the limitation of drupal is because it is generic, at some point, you will end up busy optimizing the drupal system itself rather than the logic behind the application itself. That’s why most of big application with big resource and team would likely to create their application with specific purpose from scratch. But yeah I’m still learning Drupal, so my view might change in the future.
Abdul
I am beginner, and have no knowledge of HTML CSS or PHP whatsoever. But driven to set up my website. Read all that you written up here and wanting start off with WordPress as you suggested. Let’s see what will come up. Wish me luck!
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Good luck, Abdul 🙂
Fred
I used Joomla since V1.0, but it became outdated and no longer supported (PhP, MySQL) versions) by my web host provider.
I then decided to try WordPress and had started a bunch of different forums, and not even a day
later a robot took them ALL over and put a ton of ads on each forum. In all due fairness, this was
four years ago.
How do you get around this?
I am tempted to try WordPress again, but I don’t want the same issues, so I am leaning again to
Joomla and just skipping having ‘forums’ (which are not important to me anyway, they would have
just been fun to have).
David Obert
I’m new but the website I’m planning would have a significant message board component. I want to build an interactive experience versus one way static page communication.
From what I’ve read Joomla is the correct option. Does it have strong plug-ins like MBB for message board functionality and integrated log-in capability? Guessing a book on Joomla is in my future :-/.
rich
Hi, this goes for comments as well: Are you talking about wordpress.com or wordpress.org…they seem very different regarding what control you have on the finished website..thanks
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Hey Rich,
We’re talking about WordPress.org here 🙂
WordPress.com is too limited service to name as “CMS”.
David Hanson
Dear WebsiteSetup Editorial
Have enjoyed yours and visitors comments. I am looking to an e commerce page to sell a tool item. And I am tending towards Joomla.
Regards
David
Millo lailang
I have been using wordpress for around 4 years and I think it is pretty awesome.
The worst think I dont like about it though is the default wp_cron system.
But I still prefer wordpress. Im planning to try out drupal locally. It seems interesting
Justin Thompson
Just came across this comparison article, which I found to be a helpful first stop in my search for a new CMS. I am part of a team that runs a City government website, which is currently self-hosted using a proprietary CMS. We are thinking of making the switch to one of these open source CMS solutions, and have heard the names above tossed around for awhile. Considering we are not a small company, but a “large” organization, with web pages in the thousands, and file assets in the tens of thousands, which option do you think is a better fit? I’m still personally hoping to find a solution that offers the ease and friendliness of WordPress, which I’ve dabbled in outside of work, even though we need something powerful and customizable. I can write HTML/CSS with relative ease, and our IT department can probably handle the PHP and JS, but the most important thing for us is the UX for our CMS userbase, who are typically familiar with only word processing software and social media site UI.
Just a web designer..
Unfortunately wordpress security is all the time under fire. Since v3.9 it’s not that big hassle, as WP by default has an enabled automatic update function. The problem stays with hundreds of WP websites based on older versions, which won’t be updated in the near future. Second thing are vulnerable extensions. Just by using a prepared URL, getting the content of config files through a hole in popular extensions might become a nightmare.
We’ve host for quite some WordPress websites can say, that there’s never too many security steps. Just by using additional extension, bloggers might raise their website security by filtering many popular, automated attacks.
Mike
I have until relatively recently only used WordPress. WordPress is great for simple content websites, think blogs and / or articles. If you want to customise or specialise to a reasonable degree, then WordPress is not great. That’s not WordPress’ fault, it’s just that it’s designed for basic sites (and indeed, like you said, that’s what it excels at).
I agree with Marcus Neto that for beginners, WordPress is the best. But remember there are two versions of WordPress. WordPress.com is even better for beginners than WordPress.org. WordPress.org is less secure than WordPress.com, mostly because all the updates are automated (i.e. plugins are updated for you, as is WordPress). I recently had one of my sites hacked (only a minor hack, with a slight text change), this was because I had a 2 month old version of WordPress, that I hadn’t got around to updating. If you’re busy, and your website get out of date, they can be easily hacked. This won’t happen with WordPress.com. It is possible to set up automatic updates for WordPress.org, however automatic updates can go wrong… your website can go down due to a damaged database etc. I feel WordPress.org needs a lot of babysitting… if you’re designing a website for someone, you would need to charge them for maintenance, gone are the days where you can just create a website and leave it alone!
I’ve recently started using Drupal. I’ve been amazed by how easy it is to customise it. So for example a property website could easily have a search tool created… doing this in WordPress.org felt like a hack.
Advantages of all systems, is the amount of themes and plugins that are available, but again in WordPress.org, I found writing plugins far harder, than writing Drupal plugins, even though Drupal is allegedly more difficult.
So security and maintenance are huge issues, as are backups of web files and databases. Also what about SEO? WordPress is good for that pretty much out of the box and has SEO plugins. I haven’t learned about Drupal SEO yet.
Ian
I’m surprised magento is not mentioned, whilst obviously an e-commerce platform it can be used in a different way, and with a few mods can run WordPress alongside fairly well! I have worked mainly with WordPress and find it easy to use, and I am not a developer! With online tutorials adding widget areas and even simple plugin creation is possible, after reading this I am tempted to try the others!
jeroen
WordPress shouts it’s the best.
Joomla is the best!
I’ve made sites with Joomla and WordPress. WordPress needs a lot of plugins to become functional. From that moment WordPress isn’t simple anymore. It lacks configuration options you simple need for a website. And a lot of plugins aren’t updated anymore.
Joomla gives out-of-the-box the most power to create any site you want.
Nicole
Thank you for your time and generosity!! You’ve sold me on WordPress. I have had two websites on ieasysite for years (using Webeasy). It was cumbersome and I have avoided updating my site, for years. It is TOTALLY out of date!! You have me motivated! I am going to take the wordpress plunge and create a new website based on your guide! So…here I go!! Thank you!! Nicole : )
Phillip Parcheminer
I am looking to start as a writer, but, I am at the very early stages. I have been working on writing a book for several months, now. However, I am thinking now of how to get myself out there as a writer. I spoke to my mentor from college, and, he mentioned blogging. I am not sure what the difference is between a blog and a website are, they both, seem the same to me. Also, I have heard more of websites and it is easier to get info for this. Any advice between the two? I think creating a website is as good as a blog, but, for the purposes of writing, am not sure.
Daniel Pegues
If you’re just going to write and are not technical, go with WordPress. You won’t regret it. Joomla and Drupal require more of a technically inclined person to set up. Don’t waste your time with that.
Vladimir
Thank you. Very clear and helpful, even if I have not decided yet which one to use- between Joomla and WP.
Andy Parker
I find the term “user friendly” to be a bit misleading. I know when people use it, they basically mean “easy to learn” however, after coming up the Joomla learning curve to a point where I know it very well, I find it gives me a lot more configuration choices than WordPress. As a user, I want that power, and therefore Joomla is ultimately more “user friendly” by my definition. I admit however, not everyone needs all that power.
Dale A
I have tried all 3 CMS’s and WP is definitely the most user-friendly of the 3. For me, Drupal (7x) is a nightmare. A person shouldn’t have to spend a day trying to figure out how to make a slider work on the front page without having to code one into the theme but I have. I installed a slider module which required other modules and libraries to be installed and then I spent some time adjusting the views setting and am yet trying to figure out where to upload and place the image files. It’s a nightmare! On a static web page or through WP I’d have this done within minutes. I’m a web developer of 18+ years – I work with PHP, CSS, HTML, XML, ASP.NET (VB & C#), Python, Java, MySQL, Rails, PERL, JavaScript and many of its frameworks and libraries so I’m not in the least bit dumb when it comes to web technologies, but I have to admit that Drupal did a fine job of making me look stupid. First of all, I find “Views” to be totally unnecessary. Every module and extension should be a simple plug-n-play and have its own configuration page like those we see for WP. Second, a lot of modules, themes, and extensions are out-of-date and not maintained by their authors leaving them broken or useless to current updated versions of Drupal. WP has its share of inactive developers as well but not as many as those for Drupal. Plus you’re likely to find more than one plug-in of the same type for WP whereas the mods for Drupal are limited.
I’m not quite sure why people think Drupal is a more powerful system than WP. WP is extremely flexible as both a CMS and blogging system and as indicated in this article, it is the most popular of the 3 which indicates that it is the first choice of professional developers and beginners alike. Most business clients don’t want to wait a month before their website goes online. WP makes it possible to get the website up and running and full of content much sooner than a month. If you’re going to spend time creating a website, that time should be spent adding content and not so much for configuring the website, its theme, and its modules.
I recently installed Drupal for my company website but now I’ve changed my mind. I’m going to remove Drupal and go with WP. I’ve tried Drupal a few times in the past but kept replacing the installations with either static HTML/PHP/.NET based websites or with WP. I have no patience for trying to figure out how to get certain mods working in Drupal.
Jason
This is a good and fair post. I have used all three, but do most of my development in Joomla. I find the core function of Joomla to be more flexible than WordPress, particularly with modules. You need a plugin for WordPress in order to restrict widgets from certain pages. The issue is not that you cannot gain the function, but that you need a third-party plugin to do so. If the creator of that plugin stops development, you have a vulnerability, whereas with the core continues to be developed. So even though there are 30000+ WP plugins many stopped development years ago and are a liability.
Which leads me to another point, the WP plugin directory cannot be filtered by compatible version. I only want plugins that have been developed for a longer time and are continuing to be updated. I have to search through pages in order to get to the right plugin if one even exists. In Joomla ED, the ability to filter and sort are much better. Even the “new” directory for WP gives no better function.
You also cannot create a hierarchy in WP pages and posts as you can in Joomla. I have sites that have several hundred pages, the categories and nested categories in Joomla make the management easier.
I agree, if you don’t know what you are doing and just pay $50 to get a nice WP template and slap some content up there, WP is all good. But for custom development, it’s a real drag, way more time intensive than custom development for Joomla, maybe even more than Drupal because of the lack of flexibility.
MichaelC
Hi WebsiteSetup Editorial,
After using Joomla for about 3 years, I’ve decided to give WordPress a try. But I have a question for you: We have a Company Manual wuth 500 individual documents (mostly PDFs) and I was wondering ifvyou had any suggestions how to approach this in WP. Any special plug-ins to consider? Any special strategies?
Thanks!
Suevicious
I’ve been a WordPress user for quite a long time now, having done 3 websites using this CMS.
However, I am forced to try different CMS. Reason? It’s extremely easy for hackers to access the files and infect them. I have been fighting constant hacker attacks for a few months now and I am tired of it. I’ve tried everything, followed all the WP guides etc. I’ve literally spent days trying to tighten the security systems to protect my web. But none of these work, they keep leaving Backdoor and I am unable to stop it. Each time the site has been cleaned, it came with double power. I really hope that switching to Joomla will help, although that means I need to make the website from the scratch again.
However, as I said I have other webs with WP and they’ve never been attacked. It’s hard to say whether I recommend WP or not – if it wasn’t for the attacks, I would probably never leave WP as I am not a pro user, just maintaining my own business.
Just remember, WP is an easy and user-friendly system and so it is easy to attack.
Daniel Pegues
WordPress is notorious for bot attacks. To stop these attacks from happening you have to lock down your site considerably. If your site is for US viewers only, I’d consider even blocking whole countries, blocking proxies from accessing your site, blacklisting known bot threats, protect against some DDOS, brute force, etc. You can also configure the site to block failed login attempts, change the wp-login to another url, and any attempt at hitting the wp-login page will blacklist the IP of the attemptee immediately. You can try WP Security, WordFence, and a ton of other plugins to handle these features for you. You should also add recaptcha and a honeypot to your site for all forms, both default and custom forms. Security for WP out of the box is horrible. If a stream of bots get a hold of your site, you cannot stop them unless you set up security for the above as well as get a host that can filter some of the issues for you. wpengine.com is good at this as well as many other services, but they are very expensive.
I’ve done WP security hardening for many of my clients, but is a separate fee I always charge in addition to the full development life cycle (prototyping, design and development) and hosting setup. WP security, if done right will work great. But it is not something that can be done quickly and then you’re done with it.
Sorry to hear of your troubles with WP security. You aren’t alone.
Joomla would treat you better, but there are injection flaws in Joomla depending on the type of extensions you install. But the hacks are far less with Joomla because it is much better with security out of the box. And if you go the route of Joomla, check our RSJoomla Firewall. Works wonders at security hardening.
I’ve developed Joomla sites that are 5-8 years old, high profile, and have never been hacked despite many thousands of attempts over the years.
Victor
Hi! Thanks for the article.
I’ve built two eShops and one photo site on WordPress. It took me about two hours to set up last one.
Now I’m curious enough to build a landing page on Joomla.
WordPress is the best for beginners, no questions!
Cheers. Vic
Aleata
Thank you, thank you and thank you. I went to multiple sites trying to find a simple explanation of the differences between Joomla and WordPress. Ugh….they were either sales pitches or so wordy that I left the site more confused than when I started. Great article!!!
Mike
Came across the article and like the content. I have been doing things the hard way for some time using things like bootstrap now. For me, every time I tried WordPress or Joomla, frustration led to a quick install. My difficulty less in not being able to make the fine adjustments that i like. By working the code myself,it may take a few hours or a few days but the outcome is perfect for me. I usually use Brackets for the live preview to speed things along. Im going to give Drupal a try after reading this article. I only hope it goes better.
skyline
Great Overview and non bias about each CMS. I have used all 3 and Joomla is by far my favorite. As an app framework it is insanely powerful and can do so many things. If you are building a portal that needs functionality Joomla is a great place to start. WordPress is definitely easier to empower a laymen user for making content and self managing a site. Joomla is OK at this but most people prefer WordPress.
Dee Holzman
Interesting comparison, I would have to argue that while WordPress is definitely good for beginners and has an easy UI and short learning curve, it also is technically advanced, giving users the ability to completely change a theme’s appearance and functionality.
Technical users can totally customize the look and feel of a site by altering a child themes css or creating a completely custom theme on their own. Developers can also create custom-coded page templates that can perform any functionality giving technically advanced users total flexibility with CSS, HTML, PHP, Javascript, etc.
Sergio
Hi,
This is a very useful review and comparison between the biggest CMS available in the market.
Personally I prefer Joomla! I think it is right in the middle for ease of use and complexity to build something great.
Bart
If you care about site security and backups, all the way Joomla.
Nitesh Kumar
Hi WebsiteSetup Editorial!
Thanks for the detailed comparison and very informative article. I have only worked on WordPress and need to dive into Joomla just to get my hands dirty.
Thanks for your research. You saved me a lot of time bro.
Byron Gates Jr
Thanx WebsiteSetup Editorial…clean, clear and concise advice that I easily understood. I’ll start with WordPress and go from there. I appreciate your efforts…b
Mark Atherstone
You claim that WordPress is the easiest of the 3 but I find WordPress more difficult to use than both Joomla and Drupal, I just really can’t wrap my head around it. There are too many buttons, links etc on the side bar and I think that’s the problem. Just like Windows 8 with its BIG buttons it thinks we are all babies and haven’t a clue what we are doing!
skyline
I agree with you Mark but the rest of the world does not agree with us. Somehow people think WordPress is easy but I always get confused. I am not claiming Joomla or Drupal are easy either – they have their nuances for sure.
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Hey Mark,
In some parts I have to agree with you. But in reality, WordPress is by far the easiest for beginners. Most folks aren’t able to install Drupal/Joomla properly, while installing WordPress is just super-simple.
Pramod
Thank you very very much for the wonderful article with great presentation. I would go with WordPress for now and eager to switch to Drupal once I got enough knowledge.
Olly
Thanks for great comparison. When I started to pick up MVC framework between WordPress and Joomla to build a demo site a few years back, I landed on Joomla as it seemed super easy, and there were tons of modules ready to use. After so many years, the site has grown up to 10M users. I’m glad to choose Joomla since first day.
Jonathan
Hi WebsiteSetup Editorial.
Thank you for the detailed post, and for answering almost every comment. It is very nice of you, and much appreciated.
Since no one addressed the elephant in the room, I’m going to do it: security.
WordPress users seems to deal with hacked websites as a sore thumb. Slightly painful, a nuisance, but nothing serious. Clean it, disinfect, put a bandaid, explain that it was an accident, and wait for the next one.
Dealing with security in WP is like a devilish game of whack-a-mole. Each plugin is a new hole in the website, and its practically impossible to run a WP website without a dozen plugins.
The careless way WP users say “just search for a plugin with your magical keywords” worries me. And its “ease of use” attracts the lazy type of devs, who will jury-rig something in place and hope for the best.
Sucuri, a security company, have a very active cadre of researchers, and a fantastic blog. Take a look at the blog, and you’ll see the astounding amount of WP vulnerabilities uncovered each month, a good part already in use in the wild.
And last but not less important, take a look at “WordPress VIP” to see what is the true cost of WP security (hint: from 5000/mo).
So, WP can be very powerful for content heavy and SEO optimized websites (albeit a server glutton), but it is not for the faint of heart, or wallet, and it definitely is not for beginners, unless a hacked website is of no consequence to the image of your business.
Cheers.
Sahalu
Excellent point Jonathan. If you run an ecommerce site or any site that stores financial or user identifiable information, you should think seriously about security. There are liability and credibility issues involved. Personally I am going debating Joomla or Drupal for a large CMS site.
Wendy A Kincade
Great information! Thanks. I’m getting my website back up and running (after a year-long hiatus) and needed to know what was out there and what folks were using. I’m going to go with WordPress for now, but may try Drupal if I get frustrated with WordPress’ limitations.
Juan Canals
The best explanation I read. Some time ago I chose WordPress and have no regrets.
Jonathan E.
An excellent article, which has essentially confirmed my own experience. I started with Mambo not long before it was ported to Joomla. I continued with Joomla as my CMS of choice for myself and clients. In 2003 when WordPress was first released (by that name) I started using it for basic blog only sites, and Joomla for all other CMS sites. Fast-forward to 2016…
Pretty much every client I work with, we end up running with WordPress. I ditched Joomla around 2008 when I got totally fed up with the massively time-consuming and convoluted manual process for updating modules and plug-ins. WP already had updating of plug-ins built in. No need to manually compare version numbers with the repository website, then download, and upload any discovered updates. I’ve not looked back, until now. I thought I’d see what was available for out-of-the-box open source e-commerce solutions for Drupal and Joomla. That’s when I found this article, where you (the developers you quoted) have totally confirmed my views on the this comparison.
Looking forward… I can see I’ll be sticking with WordPress (and WooCommerce, when e-com is needed) for the bulk of my clients. Magento is occasionally tempting (have done a few e-com sites with it) but the simplicity and low-cost extend-ability of the WooCommerce -WP duo seems to come out tops in most usage scenarios clients bring my way.
Jerry Chan
Hi WebsiteSetup Editorial –
Thanks for your comparison, I have been administrating a small Joomla site for one of my clients. Joomla was my first CMS and I am starting to get into WordPress. Coming from Joomla, I find WordPress lacking in customization features, but that could be due to my inexperience with WordPress. I think your analysis of WordPress and Joomla is spot-on (I have no experience with Drupal).
An FYI, you mention in your article that Drupal and Joomla are both second behind WordPress, just wanted to bring that to your attention.
Happy writing! Look forward to reading more of your articles!
Victor S.
I’ve been developing using WordPress for only 4 months, and I must say I am impressed. At the moment I am also adding Drupal to the list, but it seems that Drupal is quite far from WordPress in its simplicity.
Also, because i CAN code myself, I see no reason at the moment why anyone in a similar position to mine would ever want to switch to a different CMS. Maybe in the future I will think differently.
Thanks for the info!
Mark Whitted
WebsiteSetup Editorial,
Great comparison! I’m new at this, and I really didn’t know anything about Joomla or Drupal except that they were WordPress competitors. I found your post while doing research for a prospective client whose current site is on Joomla. I’m planning on recreating the site on WordPress with what I hope they will agree are updates and improvements. If they were to agree to my redesign, what are the options for migrating the content from Joomla to WordPress? They don’t have a huge amount of content, but it would still be nice to migrate as much as possible.
Thanks for your support!
Mark
Jennifer
You are freaking awesome for posting this! Seriously. You’re a kind soul.
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Haha, thanks 🙂
Vladimir
I have worked with all three and my final choice is Joomla:
– It has the best template system in this group and setting frontend for high performance is easiest here
– It has large enough community with plenty of trully free plugins
– best built in features that come with vanilla installation
WordPress takes second place just beacuse of it popularity and huge community. It would be my best choice if plugins for this cms aren’t that damn expensive. You have to pay for everything here. Big minus for this CMS is that it doesn’t have built in multilingual features and that you have to pay, again, for plugin that enables it. WP is also slowest CMS in this group.
Drupal. I have worked once with it and in the end I didn’t like it. Maybe because I am frontend developer / web designer and I got spoiled by Joomla’s features. This CMS is clearly made for backend developers. It is fastest in this group and it was made to work great with Git.
Final words:
If you are beginner – choose WordPress
If you are web designer / frontend developer – choose Joomla
If you are backend developer – choose Drupal
All best,
Vladimir Jovanovic
@vlasterx
Patrick
Vladimir, your sentence “it doesn’t have built in multilingual features” about WordPress answers the main question that I still had about that CMS. If that’s not built-in, then definitely it’s a major drawback which should have been mentioned in the review. Unlike for the main product, I can imagine that the quality of plug-ins (intrinsic, longer-term evolution, support…) is difficult to assess/predict. As a beginner who needs creating a multilingual site, would it then make sense to use WordPress and pay for some plugin (which one?) right away or is it worth the effort to go for the slightly less-easy-to-learn Joomla instead?
Jackie
Thanks for putting in the time to research and write about this (and being objective). This was exactly the information I needed.
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Glad you liked it 🙂
Emily
Hi, I want to incorporate advertising spaces (banner, sides etc – images, not text or Adsense etc) into my blog/site, from what I can gather WordPress doesn’t allow this in its free version, is that correct? Does Joomla make this possible? Thanks for your help ?
WebsiteSetup Editorial
You’re probably right. But why don’t you set up a self-hosted WordPress blog/site?
Here’s my guide: https://websitesetup.org
Doesn’t matter if it’s Joomla, Drupal or WordPress. If it’s self-hosted you can add affiliate links, ads etc.
Hope this helps.
Mick Marrs
Thank you WebsiteSetup Editorial for the information, it is really helpful and so are all the comments from the posters. I was asked to come up with a tool to help our internal tech support team to manage their communications to the users of our software and to host our knowledge base and documents. Being a .NET development shop I first tried Umbraco, but steep learning curve. Then a developer suggested MediaWiki and you have to be a sys admin just to get it to work. Since I’m a Rackspace customer I found they already had rapidly deployable instances for WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. So I did some research on your site and others and did some personal reflection and admitted I am a beginner and so have chosen WordPress. For others out there, just because a tool is the “best” doesn’t mean you should select it if you don’t have the skills to use it. Start with baby steps.
Jeremy Macey
Thank you for the concise, well-informed and -written article. Even though I found what I came for (WP seems best for me), I’ll now read your other articles!
Tauqir Hussain
Hey, WebsiteSetup Editorial. Thanks for sharing such a detailed and informative article.
WordPress is my choice of CMS. Drupal which is a framework and a CMS both can help you build some serious website and Joomla can help make you create a social networking website that can do wonders for you.
The choice for selecting WordPress is that it is the easiest to use and community is huge. It is just a users perspective that what CMS to choose from. I will say all three are very good in their own way. Cheers!
Lewis Elborn
Alhough I have 6 + years experience with font end development, I have very little experience with back-end development. My mentor always taught me to hardcode what I needed, and to try not to “re-invent the wheel” so to speak.
Lately I’m starting to become more aware of my lack of skills regarding back end development, which in turn has lead me into researching a CMS system that I can take with me as my skills grow. I’m not the most technically minded but I never turn down from a challenge. More than likely I’ll probably end up going with Drupal but WordPress has got me curious about it’s so called ‘ease of use’.
That being said, typically the more easier something is to use, the more draw backs you will run into down the line which is why I’m being steered towards Drupal.
For someone that has no experience with CMS systems, but has a strong will to learn what would be your suggestion? My objective whilst asking this question is to avoid any drawbacks I may run into in the future; for example with, e-commerce stores, blogs, personal portfolios, media plugins, mobile/app development etc.
Any advice is greatly appreciated, I look foward to your responses.
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Hi Lewis,
I think your best bet would be WordPress. It has the biggest market share, it is the most popular and my clients absolutely love it. During my web developer career I’ve built sites with HTML, CSS & PHP. I’ve tried Joomla and Drupal. But nothing has ever come close to the flexibility that WordPress offers…
Randy Garcia
Eh, so basically Drupal is the hardest of them all! I was wondering what these platforms really mean’t since I’m only a WordPress user. Thanks for sharing though, it helped a lot.
Paweł
Harvard is on Drupal7, check the source code 😉
Sarnath
Thanks.. Actually, I did not know anything about CMS so far and it was a revelation that we can get a website up and running in a few hours time. Thanks for putting out all the options available.. I am going to browse around and then come back to your site again. Thanks for this great help!
Clare
My website is currently in Joomla but a very old version (1.5), my website designer says I really should upgrade because this old version is technically vulnerable to hacking. I would like to know if this is true. Also although he does websites in Joomla and WordPress he says Joomla is much better for organic SEO do you agree with this? My website is relatively small but I want to start linking it to my newsletter, write more articles, link to social media etc and generally give it an overhaul so I need to decide whether to stick to Joomla – but just upgrade or whether to change to WordPress, any advice?
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Hey Claire,
#1 Yes, it’s wise to keep your CMS updated all the time. Doesn’t matter if it’s built on WordPress, Drupal or Joomla. Everything should be regularly updated. As far as I know, updating Joomla is quite easy – https://docs.joomla.org/J3.x:Updating_from_an_existing_version (Make sure you backup your site before)
#2 SEO – I could be wrong, but each platform has its own cons and pros. WordPress code might be slightly hectic for great SEO, but they do have those handy SEO plugins that make your life much easier. I’m sure Drupal and Joomla are better ‘code wise’, but at the end it doesn’t matter that much (based on my experience).
#3 It’s up to you. If you’re not satisfied with your current site, I’d wise you to try WordPress (it’s pretty easy to add social buttons, newsletters, blog posts etc.)
Let me know if that helps.
Dana Kichen
WebsiteSetup Editorial, thank you for this informative article. We are in the process of a new start-up service business and have been getting quotes on someone building us a site. This article helps provide us with the understanding of why there may have been such a disparity in cost. That being said, I have not only heard MANY stories but have also experienced issues with website developers. Will you recommend the best way to find a reputable company to build a customer brochure website? Thanks you!
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Hi Dana,
‘Brochure Website’ seems like a fairly easy thing to do. If you want to hire someone, I think you can find legitimate freelancers from codeable.io & peopleperhour.com. Give it a go and let me know how it goes 🙂
May Elwany
I just wanted to simply thank you for such a comprehensive and enriching, yet simple to understand for a beginner such as myself.
From all the comments and readings I went through, I see that WordPress can be the right choice, however since i am going into eCommerce and social networking, i would also take your word for it and go towards Joomla as many more also recommended, but to be honest i was very stressed and indecisive , untill i was luck enough to read what you had to say.
Thank you tons 🙂
Jean
I have been using WordPress since 2012 and have always been curious to use either joomla or drupal, reading further onto the post, I realized how much I’ve learned using the templates and customizing everything around. I’m no expert but I can sure get my way around some coding if I really had to. Still it’s difficult to switch ?
Thanks for the read.
Bob
Very nice article!
I’ve done fairly extensive PHP coding, and I’m wondering if any/all of these CMSs allow the user to insert his or her own PHP in pages?
John
This is where Joomla shines; Look into Joomla overrides, they can be applied to components, modules and templates without touching a single Joomla core file. This in itself, is the reason we build 95% of our client websites in Joomla.
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Yep. You’d need to edit core .php files which can be done via FTP or WP Dashboard editor.
Andy
I think one thing about Joomla that get’s overlooked in these comparisons is the ability to do frontend editing. Yes, I know you can log in to WordPress, you the admin menu is displayed atop the page, but when a user edits the page/post and clicks update, they remain in the admin section of WordPress. Regardless of which CMS a user is on, the backend is terrifying to basic users who just want to make updates/changes. With Joomla’s frontend editor, any user can log in on the frontend and make edits to the page they are currently viewing. Clicking the save button simply directs the user back to the page they just edited. Newer Joomla versions even allow users (with permissions) to edit modules, all without ever having to navigate the Joomla Administrator section, which, in my experience with users, is the most overwhelming aspect of content management.
Don’t get me wrong, I recommend WordPress to my clients as well, but only if the project is simply enough for it. Anything that begins to require additional functionality/complexity, I generally find myself going to Joomla.
Another constant concern with me for WordPress is the amount of plugins available and sometimes required to make a site function. If WP updates and plugin does not, there is now a security hole a users website. The more plugins installed, the more potential for security exploits.
As long as the user manages their CMS and keeps it updated, it’s hard to go wrong with either.
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Hi Andy,
Thanks for chiming in. I think you’re right about the vulnerabilities, but if you keep WP plugins/themes up-to-date, you don’t need to worry about it. Also, WordPress has an FrontEnd editor, too – WPBakery Visual Composer.
Mark Webb
Reading your article, WordPress seems to win out, however I have gone for Drupal 8, my website will be a purely personal project, so no timescale, I actually want to learn a lot more of the technical side so I’m hoping Drupal will fit the purpose, I also expect my site eventually to be a bit more complex than the average brochure site, I certainly want the potential flexibility and speed.
Are there limits to how many pages you can have? I can see my site hitting 4,000 very quickly, I also want 2-3 databases running, one will contain 58,000 entries, this will be a research based site.
Mark
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Hi Mark,
Joomla is pretty flexible, I don’t think you’ll run into troubles when you are having 10-50k pages. Good luck with your site and let me know how it goes.
Felix
Hi WebsiteSetup Editorial,
Thanks for publishing this post. I’m a wordpress developer for more than 3 years now and I can say it’s user-friendly and flexible. I come to this article because I also want to try and learn coding with Drupal.
Maleli
Thanks for a very helpful comparison between the 3 CMS.
I have been working with Joomla for over 10 years and I’m definitely biased. But I have worked on a couple of projects with WordPress, mainly to see what all the fuss is about. While working on my most recent project in WP, I came upon this article while searching “why would anyone prefer WordPress over Joomla” .
This is what I have found much better in Joomla compared to WordPress:
– Language management is very intuitive, even part of it is built in. There are also overrides that the user (my client) can manage from the admin side. In WordPress I just learned that if a template isn’t language ready, you need to look for all the possible variables in the code and then compile a language file. In Joomla each component has their own language file right in PHP, which is friendlier to modify by the developer or the overrides I mentioned before.
– The plugins, templates (themes), and modules have always been installed from the admin. In WP you can now install some of those, I guess, so I’d have to fully try that part out to compare it.
– Multiple templates (themes) for different pages
– Customizing modules per page is very intuitive. Some people don’t like the menu logic that Joomla is based on, but it ends up being very helpful when you want to customize a site more in depth.
– WP is more abstract. Even with some visual tools where you can hack a few things, but it’s not as organized as in Joomla. Joomla modules are a very organized way to visualize those chunks of content.
I’ll keep working a few more projects with WP, but it seems to me like it is built to use as is, because customization is not very friendly or intuitive even for someone who has some PHP and CSS knowledge. Maybe I’m missing something? I’ll let you know what I find out…
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Hi Maleli,
Thanks for chiming in. I guess that Joomla has some advantages over WordPress in some parts of it, but for beginners I still think it has a bit too big learning curve. I’ve used WordPress for quite some time and adding new blocks, changing the layout etc is pretty simple by tweaking the CSS & HTML. But then again, when I started out – it wasn’t so easy. I’m not saying that WordPress beats Joomla – that’s not true. But from a starting point of view, I think that WP would be better choice.
Anind
Hi WebsiteSetup Editorial,
Thank you for sharing this content – I am on the brink of starting to setup a website for an e-commerce store but was going back and forth between WordPress and Joomla.
The main reason for this indecisiveness was that at this point, when we are just starting up the store, we just don’t know what pace it will grow at and whether we will need to make a switch from an easy-to-use CMS to a more robust / e-commerce friendly CMS.
After reading your article, I am swaying a little more towards wordpress. Once again, thanks for sharing.
Danny (DA)
Thanks WebsiteSetup Editorial for the great information and advice. I’m a musician and somewhat of a savvy computer guy that has been shying away from building my own website because of the potential learning. However, your article/site has motivated me to at least begin here WP. As I go….I can grow, but this appears to be a great start for beginners such as myself. Thanks!
Kristin
Excellent information in this balanced comparison. I also love your generosity in the comments section in responding to specific inquiries. I’ll now add one of my own. 🙂
I’m biased towards WordPress for the size of the ecosystem and usability of the backend. However, performance has been an issue on some sites (I’ll consider upgrading the hosting plan) and think this might get worse when increasing traffic and, perhaps especially, adding multi-lingual/localization support. I’d love to stay with WordPress, but do I need to admit that I may have outgrown it (and consider Joomla)?
Raul
Hi
I use both Joomla and WordPress.
I’ve noticed that the administrator menu in WordPress got bigger and bigger. I Can understand why some plugins are located under tools, other under adjust, and other get its own menu in the left sidebar. In joomla you don’t have that kind of caos.
Sherry
Thats a good article. After reading this i have decided to give it a try and create one for trial purposes. I hope to have fun, increase ability to create websites and succeed when created.
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Which platform did you use to get started :)?
Catie
I am surprised at how relevant this article continues to be, from 2014 to 2016. I was a journalism student and learned things like blogger and wordpress. In fact, my experience with myspace helped me understand wordpress. Then I got a job working on Joomla! You’re right — wordpress is far easier for a beginner or someone who only knows a little about web design. Luckily, I bought the Joomla! 3 book, which was helpful. I was also able to use a free month of support. Between that and my remote web developer, I got most of my questions answered. I wouldn’t recommend Joomla for SEO, though, unless your website is up to date and you have the right plugins!
Oratile
WebsiteSetup Editorial, this is a very nice article.
I’m currently using WordPress to try and create a site for our church, it is a good platform indeed. Before WP I ran Joomla, got it to be somehow complicated, I’m happy with WP, will be trying Drupal soon.
Zed Pi
It took me a few months before I made a decision of my own. I am a developer, I do understand codes well, so I could see what is “beneath the hood” of these CMSs. WordPress used procedural language too much and that was the main reason I was leaving it aside. Joomla and Drupal are much more OOP, so they seemed to me as much bettter options. However, the things have changed (among else, I started to look at procedural PHP more positively) and now I opt for WordPress. The main reason was availability of sources for development – in terms of books, articles, video-tutorials, etc. The book I’m using as WordPress development source is 450+ pages thick. A number of top tutorial sites offer a vast amount of videos that teach you virtually everything you need to know. Drupal is doing fine here as well (but not that fine as WordPress), while Joomla is, unfortunately, left way behind (and now I’m migrating one of my sites from Joomla to WordPress). All these CMS’s are based upon PHP – so the question of security, actually, equally addresses all of them. At last, yes, users like much more the CMS that offers them an intuitive way of dealing with things. However, as a developer, I like when I am offered to maintain the site’s content as well – if they pay for that. 🙂
duane
This is a really great article and made it clear for me what CMS is right for our organisation. Thanks a lot for taking the time to put this all together. Much appreciated.
David Brick
Lot’s of useful information here. Thanks very much for a very helpful article.
I am working at updating a commercial website originally created by a different developer in Joomla. I was wondering if I should think about converting it over to WordPress or Drupal. Based on your article, because of the sales orientation and the fact it’s already in Joomla, I think I’ll stick with Joomla.
Kelli
I spent hundreds of hours coding my first site and finally started getting the hang of it. Then I needed to build a WP site, and even though it went much, much faster, it was still a bit confusing to me simply because it was so different.
Now I’m building a site (only my third) for a charity organization. It will need a space for donations, mobile flexibility, some kind of integration with social networking, and some way to have it in two languages (yikes).
Any thoughts on which would be best?
I dread needing to learn another way to build a site, but if needed, I’ll force myself to learn Joomla or Drupal.
Thank you for your helpful site!
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Hi Kelli,
Seems like a big project 🙂 I’d go with WordPress, though. Probably because it has tons of free themes to choose from. They are mobile responsive, too. Adding a donation button shouldn’t be a problem, either.
Paul W
I’m planning to choose a web development career and I don’t know which stuff to learn & execute. Joomla, WP or Drupal? Which one has more potential clients?
WebsiteSetup Editorial
WordPress has the biggest market share, thus you’d get more clients by going with the WordPress route.
Jon Davies
Very helpful article. I am considering switching from WordPress to Drupal for a couple of sites. Has anyone any experience of how difficult this would be?
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Hi Jon,
I’ve done few migrations from Drupal to WordPress, but from my experience – it’s pretty hard. You’d be better off by hiring someone legitimate to do the migration for you. However, it’s doable 🙂
Amanda
I’m a beginning programmer and I’m wanting a site that will allow me to host my own codes and eventually customize the site myself, but I keep running into sites that build the website for you and don’t let you modify much. Would any of these eventually allow me to have an entire site that is self-coded?
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Hi Amanda,
I guess you were talking about so called “Website Builders” – which are indeed, VERY basic and limited. If go with WordPress, Drupal or Joomla – you can truly edit, design and build the sites from scratch. You can tweak the code and customize pretty much anything.
Curtis James
Great article! Glad I found this site as it’s helped answer many of my questions.
How do the three CMSs compare in terms of
1) SEO and ability to tap into organic search traffic
2) building mobile responsive sites
3) integration with Google Ads
Thanks
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Hi Curtis,
Great questions, I’ll keep it short, though:
1) Best for SEO? I’d say WordPress as it has a free plugin named Yoast which does pretty much everything to make your site super seo-friendly. However, the RAW code which is being used on WP makes it a little less search engine friendly, though it’s highly compensated by the free Yoast plugin.
2) WordPress – without a doubt.
3) WordPress – You just need to copy your Adsense code and paste it inside the page/post.
Tunde
For this particularly particular website of yours, did you get the theme for free? Or you customised it.
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Hey Tunde. I customized it a bit 🙂
Dave
Great article. Very helpful. I’m a newbie and was headed down the Drupal path however after reading this I think WP is definitely my best bet. In a scenario where a website grows substantially with a lot of organic traffic (i.e. 1M UV per month), can WP handle this kind of traffic? Are there special considerations to take when configuring WP at the start to ensure it can handle this kind of high volume more easily?
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Hi Dave,
1 Millions visitors / month is a pretty large number, but I’ve built sites with WordPress that have more than 5M UV per month and it’s nothing “too much” for WordPress. The only thing you’d need to do is opt in for more advanced and expensive hosting (Dedicated or Cloud) – which should be able to handle the high volume of visitors and traffic :).
Mark Wilston
Drupal is more secured than WordPress or Joomla. It is much popular for its security features. Moreover the security updates make a Drupal websites less penetrable by the hackers.
WebsiteSetup Editorial
This is true, but if you keep your WordPress and Joomla up-to-date, then you shouldn’t have any problems with hackers. WordPress usually updates itself automatically – which is pretty awesome feature.
Carrie
Hi WebsiteSetup Editorial,
I am the designer/webmaster of our corporate website which now needs to be redesigned to be responsive. The current site was done in Dreamweaver using CSS and is approx 140 pages. The home page is unique while the rest of the pages follow one of a few different layouts. The majority of the pages consist of large amounts of text, small photos with links to hi-res images, and links to PDFs. There are a couple of pages that have nothing but links (one in particular has hundreds of links to all the other pages, the documentation, and hi-res images). Some pages have tables for comparing the features of a product line.
After reading a little about Drupal vs WordPress, I am under the assumption that a site of 140 pages probably is too large for WordPress (everything I’ve read said larger sites tend to slow down quite a bit in WP). However, I really am not excited about the learning curve required for Drupal. I can stumble my way through troubleshooting any problems I have with CSS, but that’s about the limit of my coding capabilities.
We’ve thought about outsourcing the initial redesign but due to the number of edits we do to the site, it would have to be maintained by us (me). So again, it can’t be created with something only a developer can use.
Any thoughts on which would be a better choice?
Many thanks!
WebsiteSetup Editorial
140 pages for WordPress? That’s not much. I know sites that are built on WordPress and have 3000+ pages…
If I were you, I’d go with WordPress – especially when you say that you need something that can’t be created with something only a developer can use…
Wayne E. Stiefvater
I am building a genealogy website and have found a good program to display all of the typical genealogy templates, and it will be linked from my website. But the website will also contain a large number of databases of the information and photographs I have collected, that will all be searchable.
Your excellent comparison didn’t mention which CMS would be best for a website containing a large number of databases, but I believe one of the commenters said that WordPress didn’t handle databases well.
One other thing, can multiple templates be used in one website, e.g. one for the home page and others for different linked pages, each with tweaks in the CSS?
Many thanks!
Wayne
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Hi Wayne,
Sorry for late reply – somehow missed it. Anyways, better late than never :).
May I ask how many databases of information does it include? I think WordPress IS powerful enough to manage it, but you could also look for Drupal & Joomla.
And yes, you can use multiple templates on one website, for different pages. I’ve been doing the same thing and I haven’t encountered any problems so far.
Cheers,
WebsiteSetup Editorial
jovis
I’m thinking of making a website and I’m a musician/artist. At some point in the near future I’d like to be able to sell my music and my art on the site. Is wordpress a good choice for that? I’d also mention I’m a complete beginner, but would like to make the site myself so I can maintain and update it regularly.
Thanks
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Hi Jovis,
Great question, but a simple answer to you would be WordPress. Especially if you want to maintain/add content by yourself.
R.
Gloria
Hello,
I would like to have a website for a small-town newspaper. It doesn’t have to be complicated–I don’t want to be CNN or The New York Times, but I would like to be able to post daily articles, photos, and videos (such as events, interviews, etc.).
I’ve read the article and a bunch of the comments and it sounds like I could use WordPress. I’ve tried working with Joomla but I just found the learning curve to be pretty high even though I have been around computers for 30+ years (anyone remember bulletin board service? Amber screens? yeah!). I have never worked with WordPress but I’m willing to try. Is there any way to tell what platform a site is using? Does anyone know of newspapers which are using WordPress or Joomla or Drupal, etc.??
appreciate any feedback.
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Hey Gloria,
I’d use WordPress for small newspaper. It makes editing/adding content pretty easy and there’s not a big learning curve like Joomla.
You can also add comments section, social sharing buttons etc – everything should be rather easy. There’s also free “magazine” themes for WordPress.
Kevin Fraser
Thanks for a very balanced comparison between the three CMS platforms. I have been searching for a new income stream after the corporation I worked for closed it’s doors in November 2014. I’ve battled to find suitable employment and WP sounds just the ticket to go independent. My background is in graphic design/pre-press field, although I’m not a graphic designer, I worked closely with a team. I have also edited the backend of a couple corporate sites but I was not the author of these sites.
I would like to know if it is possible to have, on a small WP site, one page that is for “members only” but the rest of the site is public?
I may take up your offer when I get stuck on my site. (Lastly, although system spell checkers are getting better, they do not correct errors like the incorrect spelling of “too” as in “too many”. If one mistypes “to” instead of “too”, spell checker will not correct this. My apologies for any spelling errors in my response, it was typed on a mobile device.)
Thanks again for the balanced comparison.
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Hi Kevin,
Creating a membership site on WordPress is doable (some content is available, some are strictly for paid members). Just search for “membership WordPress plugin” on Google.
Maxwell
Why waste your time with Joomla and Drupal when you can build any kind of website with WordPress – it has thousands of plugins out there. I’ve played with all the platforms, but I always use WP when I want to do create something more serious. However, I suggest everyone to learn HTML and CSS too.
Linda
Stumbled across this when doing a search for WordPress vs. Joomla. I currently have a movie review website which has become a pain to maintain in Joomla, with the updates, security issues, sometimes hard to manage modules, etc. where I usually end up hiring someone to do the updates and fixing hacks.
Question: Is there anything on the user end that requires them to update the WordPress back-end when a new version is released (like Joomla does)? How is the security of WordPress for malware, hacks, etc.? Also, in a perfect world, if all of my site’s reviews and blog posts were live and happy, it would probably be around 4,000 pages. Is that too much for WordPress?
Reading comments here make me want to throw in the towel on my Joomla site, which has become a monster.
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Hi Linda,
Great questions. I’ve built some sites with WordPress that currently have 5000+ active pages. So managing a “review site” with WordPress shouldn’t be a problem.
About security – just make sure your themes and plugins are always up-to-date, in that way there shouldn’t be anything to be worried about.
Updates – WordPress lets you know when new update comes, so ideally you’d just need to press one button “Update WordPress” at the WP dashboard and it’ll take usually 30 seconds to fully update.
Hope this helps,
Cara
Hi WebsiteSetup Editorial,
Great article! I’m still confused which of the 3 platforms to use though. XD
I am planning to create a website where users can buy and/or sell stuff online. Can I use WordPress or is it better to use either Joomla or Drupal? I will try and play around these platforms over the weekend to help me decide but I’d like to hear your opinion too.
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Sorry for late response, but go with WordPress. If it’s too complicated, then you can try Shopify as well. Both of them are great.
Majji
Great Article WebsiteSetup Editorial, appreciate your help. I learned Angular.js, Bootstrap and D3.js. I would like to build website for a start-up. Can I integrate these languages with any of these platforms (WP, Drupal, Joomla). If I cant use any of these platforms, what is your best suggestions to build a food-delivery service business. Thank you!
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Majji,
You can add different languages to WordPress – that shouldn’t be an issue.
Matej
Hi WebsiteSetup Editorial
I have previous experience with WP with blogging and I’ve also used a template to modify to m needs but what I’m currently looking into is more of a non blog functionality of the site which would just use sub-pages. What bothers me is that I plan to use this page for business if it happens in the future and am not sure weather WP can provide something like that. I don’t mind coding but I’m not exactly too experienced with it. I’m wondering if you have any experience with migrating from one platform to another. What is the process there if it’s needed in the future?
Rio Lukito
My first website is using WordPress, it’s very easy for a beginner. Joomla is more difficult to understand. For some people maybe need to be taught to understand Joomla system. I haven’t tried Drupal, though.
Fiona Cooper
Hi, I’m a seasoned WordPress user and have used it to build a number of sites over the years. I’ve just taken on a contract working on content for a site which someone (in their wisdom) has chosen to write in Joomla. He’s not a coder and the site looks dreadful, the content management is a nightmare (though I’m sure it’s possible to make this easier for the user, the interface is confusing and nothing like as easy as WP). I’m currently trying to persuade them to migrate the whole thing for WP….. luckily there’s not much content on there atm! So far I hate Joomla and love WP 😉 F
David S
If you are a seasoned user of either CMS system when you look at another, it is bound to be difficult and confusing as you have no knowledge or experience of it.
I could easily say the same thing about WP as I have used Joomla for 8 years and know my way around it but WP is an unknown to me.
Jojo Colinares
Hi WebsiteSetup Editorial!
Great job in comparing the 3. I stumbled upon your post using “WordPress vs Joomla” keyword. I’ve created a new blog to guide beginners and intermediate alike and I’m actually thinking of doing some kind of video animation using the topic but since you’ve got a great comparison here, can I ask a favor? Can I make this post as one of my bright sources in doing the animation? I’m talking about this kind of animation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw64myUo4MY but will focus on the WordPress vs. Joomla (and probably vs. Drupal). I’d be willing to share it to you once done.
Thanks!
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Hi Jojo,
This is a great idea. Let me know once it’s finished – I might add it to the post 🙂
Cheers
Jonah
Hi WebsiteSetup Editorial,
Your evaluation of the site really puts me in the right track. I appreciate your time and effort. I am using Joomla before and switched to WordPress for the ease of use. I am a noob on web development and started learning html and css 2 years ago. At this stage of my journey to web development. I havent read anything like your article that puts a non-bias evaluation for the 3 CMS. As of this moment, I am trying to completely redesign a website which I’m carefully planning. With these evaluation. It helps a lot on how I will plan things. I may still go with WordPress for wide community support.
Thank you!
Kyrosh
Hi WebsiteSetup Editorial.
Thanks for the great comparison. Do you have any information about Social Engine and how that compares with the big three? Like what is it that SocialEngine allows you to do but none of the others can and vise versa?
Kyrosh
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Hi Kyrosh,
I haven’t personally tried Social Engine, but I might test it at some point and write a review about it. Is that something you’d be interested in?
Chip
Hi! Great post! Right to the point!
I am researching providing a CMS to a foundation with members and event ticket sales and donations. It needs to be easy to use for the small staff of the foundation. One thing I haven’t really found in any of the reviews I have read of WP, Joomla and Drupal as how it handled that kind of site. As far as I can tell, WP has no real database functionality, so Joomla and Drupal would be better I think.
I have been developing sites with HTML/CSS for years and just started working with WP and am making a commitment to that platform for general site development(although I have to admit I am having a hard time with the blog-centric platform)
What are you thoughts? Joomla or Drupal? I have zero experience with either.
Cheers!
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Hi Chip,
The site you are describing seems a bit complex, thus I’m suggest you to use Drupal for this project.
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Mari Kane
Great post WebsiteSetup Editorial! Thanks for telling me about it. I will indeed lift the infographic for my blog.
Cheers!
Isabel
Great article! I first tried WordPress, but I like Drupal more. Drupal is indeed more difficult to use, but more my cup of tea.
DrupalArt
Yes, Drupal is much more difficult than WP or Joomla, but… it has endless posibilities. There is no limit with this CMS.
Steve
Glad I found this site – it helps. I have a question. Between WordPress and Joomla, which would be the best choice for me to create an initial site and then easily clone it to other sites to give the same look and feel but different branding, as completely different sites and domains?
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Hi Steve,
It’s probably much easier to clone WordPress than Joomla, but both are doable.
Hope that helps
Rinaldo
Can’t agree more … WordPress is the best (so far). Even my own blog is running on WordPress.
Maybe because I played WordPress since I was still at Junior High School..
Peter
Great article but somehow at the end you turned out to be WordPress biased 🙂
Stratos
Great article, thanks to the author and all people posting their experience here.
An important fact to consider is the site’s manager. So even if i prefer joomla as a developer, I mostly suggest WordPress just because I know the client will be able to manage his website easier later on.
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Stratos, great point!
With WordPress you do have the ability to leave all the management to the client as it’s just so user-friendly.
Tamuno
I’m planning to start a real estate review site which basically helps people decide on which location in the city suits them best to buy / rent a house. I’m currently still trying to decide on which platform to use in building the site. I intend the review pages to look something like Wikipedia pages, and then the property listing pages to look something like regular real estate pages.
I have a clear picture of exactly how i want the site to look, and am also good with HTML, CSS and javascript/jquery but don’t know anything on PHP. I would like you to please advice me on which platform to use as i currently can’t find a wordpress template that suits my intended look.
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Hi Tamuno,
It seems like really solid business plan you have. Have you checked themeforest.net yet? There’s plenty of review type of premium themes that could help you to put up something really solid. Another way is to hire someone from peopleperhour.com
Third option is to start learning WordPress development – editing themes isn’t very difficult, but requires some research – https://themeshaper.com/modify-wordpress-themes/
Alexander R
This is by far the best information I’ve read about CMS, this helped me so much . Thank You
Darman
I found a good comparison in this post. I have been using WordPress since 2009 and I have tried Joomla and Drupal as well. It seems that most of the internet marketers are using WordPress too.
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Darman, WordPress is indeed one of the most famous website platforms among many professional internet marketers. I think it’s probably a lot more easier to manage than Drupal/Joomla.
Thanks for your thoughts,
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Chetan Dhiman
websitesetup.org is running on WordPress 🙂
Nick
That’s right 🙂
Amanda
When I went to school I learned HTML/CSS and became educated with Adobe suite. Once I started doing websites on the side for clients, I learned quickly HTML/CSS wasn’t going to cut it alone.
That being said, I enjoy using WordPress. My first client, I’m redoing her website (it’s all HTML/CSS/JS) in WordPress. Why? Because the accessiblity for my client’s to login to their website and change or edit information as needed.
What does this mean for me? I’m not receiving emails or phone calls to change minor textual details on their website. While there’s the chance they will learn WordPress well enough to not need me, the overall value comes from giving them the freedom of their website. Which is my end goal — aiding small business owners to make an online presence for themselves and be able to CONTROL that presence.
As I go, I’ve heard a lot of things about Drupal…and I’m curious. Maybe after I finish this batch of projects I’ll give Drupal a shot. Thank you for the fantastic information!
David
“Of course, WordPress isn’t perfect in every way. Some common complaints about WordPress are that if the site grows to large, it can require significant server resources to keep up.”
I run a 2,500 page site on WP with very few problems. I converted it from Joomla due to the battle of upgrading every time a new version appeared. I do not have those problems with WP. Migration from one version to the next is easy.
I use a plugin to clean the site regularly, the database under WP will grow very large unless it is correctly managed and cleaned. I have no problems with speed providing I properly maintain the site.
WP for me every time unless it is a small site when i use good old HTML.
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Thanks for chiming in, David.
I completely get you. I’ve also couple of sites that have 2000+ pages and they run perfectly well on WordPress. Though, sometimes you may need a bit more robust server for hosting such a big site.
curios
I’m a beginner, starting to learn the ropes of a WordPress.
Great tutorial, thank you!
Dimitris
The biggest part of the decision is if the entire ecosystem of the CMS fits your needs.
WordPress has ALL you need in its core. So you can start working on it from day ONE.
Joomla is somewhat more abstract in its philosophy, making it a bit more hard to follow for the new user. Especially the way it uses menu items to make things work, which is rather counter intuitive. Things should be content oriented and not revolve around some abstract element.
Drupal seems a bit more straightforward in that it allows you to organize abstract pieces of information in classes, and use them however you like. It lacks however the core elements to allow you to start using it day one (No wysiwyg, no file uploading and so on) and you have to do lots of homework to find what modules you actually need.
Personally I am using Joomla most of the time. I am using it since before it was called Joomla (Mambo anyone?) and have learned to work with it quite well. One issue is that they switch major versions often, making upgrading a chore for long living sites and modules/plugins/components/templates.
For WordPress, I have no extensive experience, but I like the SEO and article centric approach. I would not use it for non-article sites though.
For Drupal, once you find a setup that works for you it is very nice, but you need to spend some time actually designing your needs, which tends to make non-technical people and people on a tight schedule bored.
Alex
This is a great succinct comparison. The fact that Drupal “allows you to organize abstract pieces of information in classes, and use them however you like” is a key property of Drupal that many comparisons don’t mention. In Drupal’s terminology, this is accomplished through Content Types with Fields (classes), and Views (queries).
Daniel Pegues
I agree with you Dimitris, the one thing that has irritated me for the longest time with Joomla is how it is menu-centric, and as such has lead developers to create ‘hidden menus’ to assign extensions to pages. Many extensions have addressed this problem over time, but is a shame that the core has always remained centered around the menu structure. If it wasn’t for this flaw, I would vote Joomla ahead of all other platforms 100% of the time. It’s not difficult to work around this issue, but is something that should not have to be ‘mended’ when setting up a site.
Perhaps Joomla 4 will address this.
Don
Those that prefer Joomla… you have obviously never worked on a magazine type site for a big publisher, that has an enormous amount of content. With multiple addons to make half of it work. We are about to do a complete overhaul for a company that has content dating back to 2002. Joomla couldn’t even hang with WordPress today, and that is bad.
Jon
True
Carl
Well, the funniest things starts when you need to sort/filter/search/calculate tons of data. Return deserialized content that you found by id, when useragent ask for it, isn’t big deal. 🙂 I really don’t like way how wp saves data to database. Magazine websites often have very simple conception, that could be build with raw php in few hours.
Timothy
Nice info. Thanks 😀
I absoulutely love WordPress 🙂
Don
When I was learning web development, I started with WordPress too. It was very easy to learn it because it has super easy one-click-install, easy to customize, to get technical support, to get themes, etc.
Meli
I have been playing with Joomla over the last 2 years and am quite advanced there but wanted to give WordPress a go.. though not a beginner really anymore. I have been reading a gazillion of these types of articles to compare these three and unlock the advantages to get a good overview. Thanks for explaining, this is probably the first article I have read that added real value, liked the practical advice from design studios too. Thanks. Maybe upon reading this, I’ll stick with Joomla 😉
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Thanks for the kind words, Meli.
Web Dux
Very good article! I’m using Drupal and it’s pretty good, but I am thinking that WordPress is much more better for a Beginner.
Arafin Shaon
WordPress is best pick for beginners, no doubt about it. It’s easy to use and learn. I’ve heard a lot about Joomla -planning to give it a try as well.
WebsiteSetup Editorial
WordPress is indeed the best for beginners. You can try Joomla too – it has a bit steep learning curve, but if you know how to manage WordPress, Joomla shouldn’t be a problem either…
Paul
I started coding HTML back in the 1990s, got lazy when I discovered Dreamweaver and got even lazier when I discovered PHP nuke, followed by Mambo and then Joomla. I only ever tried Drupal once and decided it was too much to learn yet another one.
WordPress in those days was hopelessly inadequate, which gave it a bit of a bad reputation as a CMS, but nowadays it’s all I use. As a developer it’s not about the purity of the coding, it’s about the end result – something I can teach to my clients without causing them a headache, and something that I know will get supported by the wider open source community.
I still code my own HTML, PHP and CSS, but why make extra work for myself when the job is already half done?
My advice to anyone new is to get off the free templates and go hunting for some of the incredibly flexible paid stuff… that’s where the customisation fun really gets interesting.
Tammy
Thanks Paul. Your story matches mine to a T. I’m considering putting a very large informational website, that has been growing for more then 20 years into CMS. I took the same path as you and have used WordPress for years now. I am a little concerned about the size and amount of visitors, and if WordPress can handle it the traffic. I think, after reading this comparison and your comments that I will stick with WordPress and maybe look into buying a template, I’ve always used free templates, and maybe trying out a well suited paid one is what’s really going to make the difference here. Thank you Tammy
Michael Sessums
Like Paul, I have coded for many years and the only experience I had with WordPress was basic blogging many years ago. Seeing the new features I think I’m going to try WordPress again and build an ecommerce sight with it this time. And thanks, WebsiteSetup Editorial for the great CMS comparisons and advice. If I need something more, I can always transition over to Joomla later.
Don Hamp
I really enjoyed using Joomla on specific project. It sounds like you went from Joomla “down/back” to WordPress. Why was that?
WebsiteSetup Editorial
I love Joomla – it’s a great platform to build sites with. WordPress, however, is much more user-friendly and has a bigger community around them. This means more designers, developers to work with + the client would be more happier with a WP site than with a Joomla site.
Ikira
I don’t agree with this “ease of use argument against Joomla”. WordPress is inferior to Joomla in all aspects.
Joshua
What platform did you use to build this website, WebsiteSetup Editorial?
WebsiteSetup Editorial
websitesetup.org is built on WordPress.
Nick
Paul.
Awesome advice. Couldn’t agree more.
Jaco
I’ve been using Joomla for 5 years to build small to medium sized websites. I started building sites with WordPress since in December, 2013. I find WordPress a lot easier since content is more page-by-page. I do however miss the benefit of module positions above and below content areas in WordPress. Seems to me you need to know a good deal of PHP to build custom page layouts.
Roshan
You can also place widgets anywhere you want to, it doesn’t have to be in header, footer or sidebar.
Aşkın
I’m somewhat newbie at web development and I just came across this site on Google while search on how to build a website. It’s pretty cool that there are those content management systems available like WordPress. Glad I don’t need to code everything from scratch 🙂
Lance
Great comparison. I’ve used WordPress and Joomla in the past – both are awesome. Now I’m going to try Drupal as well.
John
It’s been over two years. Please let us know how it has gone. 🙂
WebsiteSetup Editorial
Lance, thanks for the kind words. Let me know how it goes 🙂