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09 Mar 2018 JB Team

Joomla vs. Drupal vs. Wordpress

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The CMS Advantage

There is a long discussion going on about which one of the three leading open-source web content management systems (CMS) is better: Joomla, Drupal or Wordpress. Here is our view on the topic.

This discussion resembles a debate on which car is better: Ferrari, Lamborghini or Alfa Romeo. Close your eyes, take a pick - you won’t regret your choice.

It is so wonderful to have open-source content management systems. All three – Joomla, Drupal, and Wordpress – are great CMSs. There are, of course, differences between them. We will try and summarize those differences in as short as format as possible.

WordPress

WordPress was originally designed for blogging only. And it has developed to be a fantastic platform for blog-type websites, those with the main focus on text and images and targetting end users who are not very software-savvy. There is next-to-nothing learning curve to set up a blog and start blogging using WordPress.

Over the years, expansions and improvements have been done to this platform, but due to the original design, some of them cannot be overcome. On eof the main limitation of WordPress is quality of the available add-on modules, plugins and components. There are thousands of add-on components available, but their quality leaves much to be desired.

Furthermore, WordPress updates require changes to its core, so previously installed components often break. And upgrades need to be conducted very often, with a lot of manual intervention. And in the end, the total cost of ownership (TOC) of a WordPress site that does more than simple blogging ends up being higher than all other CMSs, because of this extended manual tweaking and correctrion that is always required. No wonder so many web dsigners love WordPress and recommend it to their clients.

But that's not all. What's really annoying is that WordPress is easy to learn, but when you start using it for more than simple blogging, the blogging features are always on the way, and if your site grows in complexity, the interface ceases to be intuitive and becomes quite confusing. Rach new version of WordPress carries new improvements, but in our view, it would take a while before WordPress catches up with Joomla or Drupal in terms of design flexibility and scalability.

Overall, kudos to the marketing team and leadership of WordPress - they have done fantastic work!

Drupal

Drupal was originally designed for scalable websites with dynamic features. Drupal is said to be more flexible than WordPress or even Joomla, but it requires a deeper programming knowledge and generally more programming time.

The learning curve for end-users is also considerably steeper than that of Joomla or Wordpress. The number and quality of website templates developed for Drupal is much lower, so you will most likely need a custom-designed template for your front-end interface, which will add a significant amount to your overall cost. There are fewer Drupal developers and they labour is more expensive than Joomla.

Overall, the total cost of ownership of Drupal website will be higher than Joomla and more project management will be required to get the site up and running. It will be harder to learn how to use it to. It will require more support and maintetance time.

Joomla

Joomla was originally designed for scalable websites. It is 13 years old, stable and mature. In terms of its suitability, in our view, Joomla is a great fit for 90% of websites, i.e. those websites that require various dynamic functionalities, i.e. a job board, real-estate board, e-commerce, all of them together, etc.etc. The type of websites Joomla is not recommended (as well as any open-source CMS for that matter) are websites like eBay or Facebook or Amazon. For those type of websites you would want to hire a team of developers and design a proprietory CMS.

Joomla's GUI interface is quite intuitive and easy to learn. The learning curve for the end-user is a bit steeper than that on WordPress, but only a little bit. All of our clients, even those who identified themselves as “digitally challenged”, were able to learn how to add and modify content on their new Joomla website within one-two hours. If you know how to use Yahoo or Gmail, you will learn how to use Joomla very quickly.

Joomla has a very large number of mature components, modules and plugins ( i.e. extensions) available on a plug-and-play basis. These extensions are of high quality, they are granular and rich in features. Joomla extensions allow for in-depth customization with minimum manual coding. Joomla also has the largest design and support community, so as a result, there is a larger number of website templates available for Joomla and they are generally of very good quality.

Furthermore, Joomla developers are cheaper by 15-20% than Drupal developers, for example; and if compared to WordPress, considerably fewer hours are required to customize popular Joomla extensions than those of WordPress. So in the end, the total cost of ownership of Joomla is the lowest, after all factors have been considered.

Summary

If your website is largely text-driven and you are unlikely to add dynamic functionalities to it in the future, plus if you are mostly interested in social interaction on your website – WordPress is good to use.

If you need a very specific and potentially very complex web application and none of the folks on your end-user team are “digitally challenged”, and if you have a large budget for custom programming - then Drupal is your best choice.

If, however, you would like to have the best of both worlds – Joomla is your best choice. In our view, Joomla has it all: ease of use, flexibility, and incredibly large pool of quality add-on extensions. Custom programming solutions can be implemented on Joomla with remarkable ease and at a minimum cost. What's also very important is that website templates developed for Joomla are of very high quality and there is an ocean of them, so you can save additional costs on not developing an interface from scratch. And any future functionality - be it social networking, blog, content rating, job board, quizzes, financial reporting, dynamic locations, what have you - can be added with ease and without compromising any previously set features.

And with each new release, Joomla is getting better and better. As of 2013, Joomla has surpassed Drupal in security and speed specifications.

If you would like to do additional research, here is a great list of CMSs. This can be a good starting point.