© 2020 Copyright WinningWP™ (privacy policy & disclosure). According to W3Techs, here’s how they rank as of April 2020: There’s also another trend to pay attention to here: WordPress is growing in market share, while both Joomla and Drupal are declining. Here’s how the overall usage of all three platforms has changed since 2013: All of this information also comes from W3Techs. In 2019, WordPress users accounted for 94% of infected websites in Sucuri’s customer base. Akismet - Stops Comment Spam in its Tracks, Yoast SEO (free) - Search Engine Optimization for the Millions. By the numbers, these are the most popular open-source content management systems (CMS) out there, and all three can help you to build a custom website to meet your needs. Hre are the versions we used: WP 2.9-3.0, Drupal 6.19, Joomla! For example, Joomla still has visual drag-and-drop page builders, just like WordPress, which means you can create custom designs without needing to be a developer. Limited marketplace for extensions compared to Drupal and WordPress. Basically, if you don’t have any development knowledge or the budget to hire a developer, you should probably steer clear of Drupal. SiteGround vs WP Engine – Which Offers the Best WordPress Hosting? Joomla, on the other hand, has a comparatively smaller security team to handle security breaches. Because WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are all free open-source software projects, they all have the same basic costs. However, it’s important to note that all three platforms are secure if you set them up properly. But here are where I think the differences are…. I see Joomla as a kind of middle ground between WordPress and Drupal, which is why I chose to save it for last. It offers a perfect balance between ease of use and complexity of functionality. Joomla is a model-view-controller (MVC) based web application framework. All comments are held for moderation. *This isn’t necessarily a representative example of all websites, but it’s still useful. Whereas, Joomla offers the least amount of security based on statistics and the least amount of people working for their in-house security team. Overall Winner: WordPressWe hope this article helped you compare WordPress vs Joomla vs Drupal, to find out the best CMS for your site. Drupal is written in PHP. Drupal is extremely powerful and developer-friendly, which has made it a popular choice for feature rich, data-intensive websites like Whitehouse.gov and Data.gov.uk. It offers unlimited features to boost your rank. Together, they occupy the majority (up to 75%) of the market’s share of platforms used to develop and build a website. WordPress is in active development, and its patches are released regularly. However, I hope that by hitting the high-level differences in approach, costs, and so on, you’ll have a better understanding of which is the best CMS for your needs. Requires a hosting service and domain name as it doesn't offer to hosted service like WordPress and Joomla. I’ll break this into five sections: Then, at the end, I’ll give some recommendations on who should choose each tool. First off, Joomla, like Drupal, has a better out-of-the-box user access permission system. Largest community helps you to find the right themes and plugins. Unlike other CMS, it is not developer-oriented. Our commenting form also supports the use of Markdown. It also allows you to edit root files using a variety of plugins. 1. Virtuemart for managing products and content. Joomla is another popular CMS which allows you to build a website and various types of business-oriented online application. While I don’t have any evidence of a causal relationship, this change suspiciously coincides with big market share growth in both Squarespace and Wix. WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal all three CMS software were introduced in the early first decade of the 21 st century. From big institutions to individuals and celebrities; from simple blogs to business websites and eCommerce stores — WordPress is used in so many ways that it’s hard to limit it to just a few examples. First, all three are content management systems. Comparison table 10. While Joomla is a bit more complex than WordPress, it’s also still a lot simpler than Drupal, and something that even a non-developer can handle. Here, are Pros/Advantages for using Joomla. For example, if you need to display and organize tens or hundreds of thousands of disparate content items, that could be a situation where Drupal could be a better option. It’s not even close. But I do think popularity should play a role in your decision, because popularity becomes a positive feedback loop at a certain point. iThemes - Themes, Plugins and Heaps More... ThemeTrust - Beautiful, Easy-to-Use Themes. Relatively weak core code. Top 7 Free and Premium Contact Form Plugins for WordPress, Where to Buy Top-Quality WordPress Themes, Flywheel’s Managed WordPress Hosting – Reviewed, Top 15 Most Popular Multi-Purpose WordPress Themes for 2020, Gravity Forms vs Ninja Forms – Two Leading WordPress Form Plugins Compared, Divi Builder Review: A Brand New Drag-&-Drop Page Builder Plugin by Elegant Themes. WordPress is an excellent CMS for beginners and is fast to set up, easy to customize with available in millions of different templates. Top 3 CMS comparison of the world WordPress vs Joomla vs Drupal. Final words Advantages of Using Drupal Google Trends WordPress vs. Joomla vs. Drupal. Needs a high level of technical knowledge. Because it’s so popular, you can find a wealth of WordPress examples. WordPress Vs. Drupal. WP core requires a frequent update which may break your existing plugins. Joomla web development continues to be thought of a decent possibility for making governmental websites. To finish things off, let’s look at some examples of real WordPress, Joomla and Drupal websites to drive home these points. Because of its strengths, Drupal is used by a lot of large institutions and governments. Creative Market - Themes for Creatives... TeslaThemes - Beautiful, Modern WP Themes. Hosting — you need this to run the software. But you’ll generally see similar pricing when it comes to those extensions as well. Overall, I don’t think popularity should affect your decision by itself, but if, for example, you think both WordPress and Joomla can achieve what you need, picking WordPress could be a better decision because it’s a growing platform whereas Joomla isn’t. A big part of this is that the WordPress platform itself is simpler. Beyond hosting and a domain name, you may also need to purchase some premium extensions, depending on the features and design you want. What Is a Web Platform? In this article, let’s have a head-to-head comparison between WordPress vs. Joomla vs. Drupal. So choose between Drupal vs Joomla wisely and get your first website done! Joomla has combined the power and flexibility Drupal, while retaining the intuitive, user-friendliness that WordPress excels at. In general, WordPress has the cheapest developers out of the three platforms by a good bit, as summed up by this Tweet from Ryan Sullivan: Interesting. Joomla! The official WordPress.org showcase also has a good collection. Drupal vs WordPress vs Joomla is hot debate among businesses & developers in 2020. Finally, there are potential costs if you can’t find an off-the-rack extension and need to hire a developer. Overall, Drupal offers the system with the most focus on security and the dedicated team of volunteers have done well to keep vulnerabilities statistics low in recent times. Nintendo (some EU regional sites — not the main Nintendo site). Tom McFarlin has an interesting post on why this may be. Recommended Article. What is Drupal? WordPress vs Joomla vs Drupal: Which One is the most SEO Successful in 2020? However, it’s important to note that all three platforms are secure if you set them up properly.For example, the official Whitehouse.gov website uses WordPress, as do many other organizations where security is essential. However, for non-technical users, I think this type of back-end interface can be a little confusing: Similarly, the content editor, while totally functional, isn’t the most user-friendly tool for casual users, as it’s a very stripped-down editor: If you want to test drive the dashboard experience of all three platforms, there’s a neat site called OpenSourceCMS.com that lets you try out all of the platforms without installing the software. When it comes to the respective popularity of these three platforms, there’s really no competition: WordPress is the most popular CMS by a huge margin. The great news is, the 3 CMS that we're about to compare i.e. For example, if you have a complex site with different content types where different users need to be able to control different types of content (and not be able to access other types of content). However, it is getting better every year. Joomla developers are more towards Drupal prices than WordPress prices, though. For example, you should use WordPress for: If you want to create these types of websites, we have some useful WordPress-based tutorials for you: We also have a general tutorial on how to make a WordPress website. It just means that, if you want to use Drupal or Joomla, you should be able to articulate the specific reason(s) why you’re choosing those platforms over WordPress. Drupal vs Joomla vs WordPress; Bernard Kohan is a mobile app and web application development and technology analyst expert. Today, WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal are the three most popular Content Management Systems or CMSs. What’s behind the sudden drop-off of both Joomla and Drupal from 2019 to 2020? Multilingual sites 9. Offers very less customizable options for features and functionality. However, you’ll see the same pricing similarities hold true even for themes not sold at ThemeForest. Drupal is the most powerful system but only suited to experienced internet users and programmers. Joomla offers very easy to use admin panel to manage large amounts of information. Before I get into the differences, I think it’s first useful to talk about what’s the same across all three of these platforms. A website developed using Drupal CMS is more secure as compared to other CMS. You can also use WordPress to create custom content sites, such as real estate directories, forums, job boards, and so on. Joomla was released in 2005, and to date, it boasts over 30 million downloads. Overall, Drupal comes off as the most security-focused system and has managed to successfully keep vulnerabilities at bay. Conversely, Drupal developers are the most expensive of the three, with Joomla sitting in between WordPress and Drupal. However, WordPress beats them with its ease of use, huge global community, plugins and themes. It uses a block-based approach, which makes it easy to include columns, buttons and more: I don’t find Joomla to be quite as easy to use as WordPress, but I think it’s still something that a non-developer could use to build a good-looking website. MyThemeShop - Smart Themes for Every Site, ThemeForest - The Leading Theme Marketplace. I also think that WordPress is the best choice for most situations. - Stacks of Additional Functionality in One Official Plugin! Your email address will not be published. Drupal was first released in 2001 by Dries Buytaert while WordPress and Joomla were released in the year 2003 and 2005 by Matt Mullenweg and Mambo team respectively. WordPress is an ideal option for CMS that's simple and quick to install. Access to thousands of modules and themes, The ability to customize every aspect of your experience. Use for building Online Forums, Extensive Product Catalogues. This blogspot software offers great plugin architecture. Drupal vs WordPress vs Joomla: What is the best CMS to power a digital business? If you’re not a technical user and/or you’ve never built a website before, I think you’ll struggle to effectively use Drupal. Again, you’ll find it easier to control what each user can do, which can make it a good option for websites where lots of users will need access to different parts. In contrast, Joomla was used by 2.5% of sites and Drupal by just 1.28%. Themes and Plugins 5. As with Drupal, a lot of people also prefer Joomla for sites that rely on custom content types. A domain name — this is your site’s permanent address. In terms of ease of use, I’d rank these three in this order, from easiest to use to least easy to use (comparatively — that doesn’t mean necessarily any of them are overly difficult): WordPress is something anyone can effectively use — that is, you don’t need to be a developer or technical user to create a website with it. A WordPress developer will tell you to always use WordPress, a Drupal developer will tell you to always use Drupal, and so on. Here's how the three platforms compare for various features. And that’s not all. WordPress developers are cheaper than Drupal and Joomla developers (if you do need custom development). WordPress and Tumblr; WordPress vs Drupal MySQL, SQLServer, SQLAzure, PostgreSQL, SQLite. 1.5. This will also give me a chance to touch on some other important differences between each CMS. Installation process: WordPress & Drupal single click installs, no stupid questions asked. Drupal is a better option for agencies and freelancers who are developing sites for clients — it’s not a great option for a person who’s just looking to get online with their own website. Fast development cycle. Your email address will not be published. Some excellent developers are available for hire. Joomla, Drupal or WordPress – Which Is The Best CMS? Pricing. *Note: We’re talking about the open-source WordPress software at WordPress.org, which is different from WordPress.com. it has the largest library of free themes and plugins, many sites won’t require any custom development work. This blogspot software offers easy to understand and clean core code. There are hundreds of articles on the Internet about this subject, but unfortunately, they are written for the benefit of web developers and experienced webmasters. Handles lower traffic well. A website developed using Drupal CMS is more secure as compared to other CMS. The average salary for any professional Drupal Developer is $96,067 per year in the United States. Here, are Pros/Advantages for using WordPress, Here, are Cons/Disadvantages for using WordPress. In case you have decided to create a website and you are … Drupal is an open-source web development platform for creating an online content management system and user communities. Here we also discuss the key differences with infographics, and comparison table. The platform is quite complicated to learn as compared to WordPress or Joomla. Add “WordPress” to almost any development job search and watch the salary magically drop 30%. Helps you to manage complex, multi-domain management. To compare the numbers of extensions, I’ll use numbers from each platform’s official directory. Drupal also has a better out-of-the-box user access permission system. Drupal is the granddaddy of CMS systems on this list – it was first released in early 2001. However, there … For example, many hosts offer features to help you to both install and update WordPress. Support 7. it’d be robust for Joomla to contend with WordPress, however it will provides a rough time to Drupal.Joomla,if it positions itself neatly, will tackle that as its management and joomla web development is much easier than Drupal. Lack of built-in flexibility for more significant, sophisticated sites. On the other hand, you won’t really find someone using Drupal for a regular blog. Hosted by Flywheel. Combining the strengths above helps to explain why a lot of government agencies and large institutions (such as universities) use Drupal. Read in 3 minutes Needless to say that in the continuously evolving world of web technologies to run a competitive business, your site should be on the top 10 list in most of the search engines. This isn’t a perfect comparison because you can also find add-ons from third-party sources and marketplaces, but it should give you an idea of how they stack up: Basically, it means you’ll probably have an easier time finding an extension that can do what you want it to if you use WordPress. In the past, websites were made by creating each web page separately using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. However, Drupal is not nearly as friendly to non-developers. E.g. 5. Required fields are marked *. It runs smoothly on the most web serves without any issues because it is easy to use and highly extensive free to use CMS tool. The choice for both Drupal and Joomla is much smaller. We'll only publish comments that are on topic and adhere to our Commenting Policy. All three platforms also have a wealth of free options when it comes to extensions. Drupal can be a good option for sites that will use a lot of custom content types and taxonomies (called vocabularies in Drupal). In WordPress, there is this famous Yoast SEO plugin. You can add your content on the back end using a simple editor and the CMS will handle properly displaying it to visitors according to your settings. Drupal vs Joomla vs WordPress Open Source CMS Comparison. That being said, the SEO capabilities of these softwares are not apparent unless we dive into the plugins and extensions. Joomla vs Drupal: Two Top Content Management Systems Compared. Round Two: Joomla vs. WordPress SEO. developers who want to contribute to the core software, developers who build extensions and themes for the WordPress platform. Last fall we were working with Joomla, Drupal and WordPress at the same time. To start a successful website, you’ll need more than a solid game plan. We feel that most non-developer users would find it much easier to build with WordPress than Joomla or Drupal. Few plugins might not work when the platform is updated. Every year, Sucuri, a popular website security service, publishes its hacked website report, which details the CMS breakdown of Sucuri users who have been infected*. To gauge the price of each platform’s themes (or templates, in Joomla’s case), I looked at the best-selling theme list for each platform at ThemeForest: Part of the similarity is because Envato pushed this price for a long time. Trying to choose between Joomla vs Drupal vs WordPress to create your website? While it’s possible to migrate between these tools if you change your mind in the future, it’s a messy and imperfect process, so you’ll want to avoid it if at all possible. In a nutshell, WordPress has more than doubled in popularity since 2013, while Joomla and Drupal are both sitting lower than they were in 2013. In the examples below, you’ll see how Drupal excels when it comes to managing multiple content types (and just lots of content in general). That said, the paid themes do look good and offer a good variety of design and functionality. WordPress also attracts more focus from hackers because it offers a bigger ROI (. If you do want to see more, you can check out our collection of big brands using WordPress. Loads more quickly with faster response times. Simplicity 4. Joomla takes a slight edge if we compare the SEO of both the platforms. Think of university sites. This has a been a guide to the top differences between Drupal vs Joomla. We’re talking in the range of hundreds compared to thousands for WordPress. 1# Advantages of Joomla. 2. This is a tough section to write because everyone has a different opinion. Now, WordPress being popular doesn’t automatically mean it’s the best CMS. I personally love the ease of its interface and the power it has to support multiple authors, plugins, and themes. You should have basic knowledge of HTML and other web coding languages. So, why would you use Joomla over WordPress, then? 1. Joomla is often described as having the user-friendliness of WordPress combined with the strong development capabilities of Drupal. Detailed guide to know which CMS is right for your website or blog. The WordPress dashboard is pretty easy to grasp, and doesn’t include an overwhelming number of settings: As of WordPress 5.0, the content editor is also a lot easier for non-technical users to create complex designs and layouts. Compared with WordPress and Drupal, I wasn’t able to find as many examples of large brands or institutions using Joomla. Drupal, Joomla and WordPress are all fantastic content management systems. I consider myself fairly technical for a non-developer and I’d still struggle to set up a polished website with Drupal, while I can create custom WordPress sites quite easily. Getting Started With WordPress (A Beginner's Guide), Recommended ‘Shared’ WordPress Hosting. Additionally, WordPress has a larger team working behind the scenes and so is more likely to keep all website aspects up-to-date, therefore, keeping it as speedy as possible. Built-in performance is very sluggish/clunky. Bernard can be reached at It started as just blogging platform, but now it has added feature significantly over the years. Wordpress Vs. Joomla Vs. Drupal. After configuring database access only admin email was requested. For example, WordPress’s popularity brings benefits such as: On the other hand, because Joomla and Drupal are declining in popularity, we may start to see the opposite happen for those platforms. Basically, choosing the best CMS for your website is a big decision, so you’ll want to spend time weighing the pros and cons of each platform before you make your choice. Most of the available useful plugins are paid. He is available to discuss any issues or questions you have about web development and the best choices for your company or project. CSSIgniter - Beautiful, Simple Designs... ThemeIsle - An Island of WordPress Themes. With those tools, the service handles everything for you — you never need to interact with the underlying code (nor do you have the ability to). Powered by WordPress. Second, all three are self-hosted tools*, which means you’ll take the software and install it on your own web hosting. Drupal vs Joomla Comparison 2020; Drupal vs Joomla: Drupal Joomla; Overview: Drupal is a free and open-source CMS powering millions of sites and applications. Security 8. In 2019, WordPress users accounted for 94% of infected websites in Sucuri’s customer base.In contrast, Joomla was used by 2.5% of sites and Drupal by just 1.28%. A web platform is a system that you use to create and manage your website. There’s just way fewer of them vs WordPress. WordPress vs Joomla vs Drupal are made for end-users; not programmers. Here, are Cons/Disadvantages for using Joomla: Here, are Pros/Advantages for using Drupal: Here, are three platforms used in different situation which clear when to use which CMS. The average salary for any professional WordPress Developer is $61,225 per year in the United States, The average salary for professional Joomla Developer is approximately $76,903 per. The setup process is very time-consuming and lengthy if you're using a lot of modules. And now, it's time to put them all to the test. Needs tweaking to avoid quick resource consumption. That means what the name suggests — they help you to manage your content without needing to work directly with code. Here, are Pros/Advantages for using Drupal: Webpage creation like Panels, Views, and Web forms are made simple and highly secured; Drupal offers modules with attractive options for customizations. When it comes down to Joomla vs WordPress vs Drupal, collectively, WordPress is the expert’s choice. WordPress is the most widely used content management system written in the PHP and uses the MySQL database, but there is no need to learn to code for building your website using this CMS.