Drupal vs WordPress vs Joomla: Which CMS Should You Choose?
Updated on |By QPSoftware
Drupal vs WordPress vs Joomla comes down to your project. WordPress is the easiest to use, and best for blogs, news sites and beginners. Joomla is more complex and suits e-commerce and social networking sites. Drupal is the most powerful and flexible, ideal for complex sites, but it has the steepest learning curve.
Key takeaways
- WordPress is the easiest CMS, best for blogs, news sites and beginners, but it is a favorite target of hackers.
- Joomla is more complex than WordPress, good for e-commerce and social networking sites, and hard for beginners without help.
- Drupal is the most powerful and customizable of the three, and tends to load faster, but its learning curve is steep.
- All three are open source, written mainly in PHP, support MySQL, and offer themes and plugins.
What’s the best content management system? Which one offers the best web design and web development experience? Thousands of blog posts and reviews have been written on the merits of the CMS tools available on the market, but choosing the right one for your particular project is not easy.
That’s because the right choice depends on many variables: the complexity of the website, your technical expertise, the projected growth of your company, your budget for design and custom website development, and so on. If you are a web design firm, the CMS you pick for a client will have a big impact on how well you meet their expectations.
When this comparison was first written in 2017, WordPress, Joomla and Drupal were the three most popular CMS platforms worldwide, and one of them is still likely to suit your needs. Let’s look at the pros and cons of WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, and at what each system is best suited for.
What Is Each CMS Best For?
WordPress: WordPress was born as a blogging platform, so it is no coincidence that the most famous bloggers use it, even as their sites have grown more complex over the years. The platform has evolved since its birth: you can now create more intricate websites with many features, including a shopping cart. Still, WordPress is best suited to blogs and news sites, and it is an excellent choice for beginners who want a site that is easy to manage.
Joomla: This CMS is more complex than WordPress, which makes it a strong candidate for e-commerce, social networking sites and more. If you are just building a blog, however, Joomla is not the recommended choice: it would be like buying a Ferrari to drive to your mailbox and back.
Drupal: This is the most powerful CMS of the three. It is amazingly versatile, so you can use it for nearly any kind of project, including online stores, community forums and other complex sites. With Drupal, there is almost no limit to your options in web design and web development.
Drupal vs WordPress vs Joomla at a Glance
| Criteria | WordPress | Joomla | Drupal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Blogs, news sites, beginners | E-commerce, social networking sites | Complex sites, online stores, forums |
| Ease of use | The most user-friendly | Fairly user-friendly, with a learning curve | Steep learning curve |
| Customization | Plugins; deep changes need code | Extensions for carts, tax, marketing | Almost unlimited |
| Speed | Slightly slower, especially with many plugins | Faster than WordPress | Tends to load faster |
| Main drawback | A favorite target of hackers | Hard for beginners without help | Costly to run without technical skills |
What WordPress, Joomla and Drupal Have in Common
Each CMS has its own policies on software usage, its own way of integrating themes and plugins, and its own security tools. But they share a few fundamental features:
- They are open-source software
- They support MySQL and MariaDB, as the official requirements of WordPress, Drupal and Joomla show (Drupal and Joomla also support PostgreSQL)
- They offer themes and plugins to enhance a site’s design and functionality
- They are primarily written in PHP
Pros and Cons of WordPress, Joomla and Drupal
Yes, they have a few similarities, but in the end, the distinct advantages and disadvantages of each platform will determine your choice. Figure out what you are aiming for with this web development project, then look at these pros and cons to see which CMS will best help you hit your target.
WordPress Pros and Cons
WordPress is by far the most popular content management system, and it owes its popularity to several appealing characteristics:
It’s user-friendly. WordPress is the most straightforward CMS, especially for inexperienced users. Building and running a website is relatively intuitive, and you don’t even need to know how to code to create something functional and attractive: WordPress offers plenty of easy-to-install plugins to enhance the design and add features to your site.
It’s SEO-friendly. WordPress has a number of website themes that are well designed for SEO. Plus, you can easily find SEO plugins to help you optimize your content and improve your keyword rankings.
It provides excellent support. Here is a big advantage of popularity: WordPress has millions of users around the globe and a huge support community. If you run into an issue, finding help is both easy and, best of all, free.
On the other hand, WordPress has some downsides worth considering:
Security. Here is a big disadvantage of popularity: as the world’s most-used CMS, WordPress is a favorite target of hackers. Some third-party plugins can also make your website vulnerable.
Customization. Plugins help a great deal in tweaking your web design, but in-depth customization requires a certain amount of coding knowledge.
Speed. WordPress websites tend to be slightly slower than Joomla and Drupal websites, especially if you go crazy with plugins.
Joomla Pros and Cons
Here are the main reasons people choose Joomla as their CMS:
It’s fairly user-friendly. Joomla may not be as easy as WordPress, but its user interface is still intuitive and simple to navigate. There is, however, a learning curve.
It’s great for e-commerce. If you want to develop an e-commerce site, Joomla is a great choice thanks to extensions for shopping carts, tax management, marketing and more. For online stores, also read our comparison of Magento vs Drupal vs PrestaShop for e-commerce.
It’s easy to update. Through the Maintenance menu, you can look for and install new updates without worrying about your site crashing: an update rarely has compatibility problems that cause a crash.
But Joomla has a major drawback:
Technicality. If you are a beginner, it will be difficult to build a Joomla website without technical assistance. As a result, Joomla websites are typically more expensive to run than WordPress sites.
Drupal Pros and Cons
Drupal is more powerful than Joomla and WordPress. Its main advantages:
It’s robust and powerful. As mentioned, Drupal is far more powerful than WordPress and Joomla. With Drupal, you can customize your web design and functionality without limits.
It performs better. Since Drupal is less resource-intensive than its competitors, Drupal web pages tend to load faster and have a quicker response time. However, as with WordPress, installing too many third-party plugins can affect site performance.
Even though Drupal is robust and offers you unlimited options for the design of your website, there is a major con to consider:
Steep learning curve. To use Drupal, you need at least a basic knowledge of HTML, PHP and other programming languages. If you cannot handle the technical part on your own, customizing and managing a Drupal website will cost considerably more than WordPress or Joomla.
Which CMS Should You Choose?
Choosing the right CMS is not easy, but you can make it easier with a clear idea of what you want to accomplish with your website, and an honest view of your technical skills and limitations.
Web design and development agencies, on the other hand, need to understand what works best for the client in order to offer the right CMS for their business.
QPSoftware specializes in WordPress and Drupal, for website development in China and for international projects. We believe these two tools let us give our clients functional, beautiful websites that are optimized for the best results. If you are building your website and need advice on the right content management system, you can contact us at any time.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Drupal better than WordPress?
It depends on the project. Drupal is more powerful and more customizable, and suits complex sites such as online stores and community forums. WordPress is easier to use and cheaper to run, which makes it the better choice for blogs, news sites and teams without developers. Drupal needs technical skills, or a development partner who has them.
What is the difference between Drupal and Joomla?
Both are open-source CMS written mainly in PHP. Joomla is easier to use than Drupal and works well for e-commerce and social networking sites, thanks to its extensions. Drupal is more powerful, tends to load faster and allows almost unlimited customization, but its learning curve is steeper, so it costs more to run without technical skills.
Which CMS is best for beginners?
WordPress. It is the most straightforward of the three: you can build and run a functional, attractive website without coding, thanks to easy-to-install plugins, and a huge community offers free help. Joomla has a learning curve and is hard for beginners without technical assistance, and Drupal requires at least basic knowledge of HTML and PHP.
