Comparing Drupal and Joomla

The question how to choose your Content Management System (CMS) is very difficult. Particularly at the beginning. You have the idea, what kind of knowledge you want to share with the world, you just don't know how and with what to do it. In one of our previous blog posts, we showed you the comparison between Drupal and Wordpress. This time we will look at Joomla and compare it with Drupal and yet again express our opinion about, which is preferred on what particular time.

It's not difficult to guess, where we will start. That's of course the installation. It's fair to say that both installations are not as easy as in Wodpress. At first glance, everything looks scary, especially for the beginners, so it difficult to tell installations apart. Since both are free open source softwares, you don't have to bother with the expenses.

Joomla vs Drupal

Both have, of course, other things in common as well. Both are written in PHP, both support a variety of database management systems, both are available in multiple languages and both use a wide spectre of themes and templates for visual appearance of the sites. Both communities are large and very helpful, so you can get all the help you need. It difficult to tell, which is more popular though, with Joomla having nearly 50 million downloads (question of the actual usage remain mystery) and Drupal hosting more than a million web sites.

Differences between Joomla and Drupal

But the choice, of which one to use, will come from differences not similarities. To remind you, Drupal was built by developers for developers, so it is more difficult to use, especially for beginners. You have to have a lot of knowledge in coding. Joomla is on the other hand more easy to use than Drupal. You don't need PHP, CSS or HTML knowledge. But pages do load a bit slower than on Drupal, which has that advantage because of its defaulting caching features.

Joomla is better for e-commercial sites and creating your own social networking website, compared to Drupal, who is the best for major web sites (of the big corporations), regardless of the fact that on Drupal you can cover pretty much any website, web-application, intranet you have in mind. Drupal is therefore the most advanced content management system with the best flexibility and its ability to handle large amounts of content and data.

Joomla SEO

Drupal is more secure than Joomla and has more advanced SEO capabilities. In Joomla many SEO capabilities are possible, but you have to create custom features yourself. Drupal also requires less server resources. However, resources are the main factor in hiring a developer or an expert for development, troubleshooting or assistance. In general it will cost you more on Drupal than on Joomla. Moreover, on Joomla several thousands of modules and plugins are available for increased functionality and interaction of the site. However, some have to be bought in contrast to Drupal, where everything is free.

All in all, Drupal and Joomla both have its advantages and disadvantages. There is no general consensus, which one is better. But something is for sure. Everyone have to decide by themselves which one to use. For the beginners, Joomla is definitely better, but if you want more, Drupal is there to fulfil your needs.