Drupal vs Joomla: Which CMS is Best?

You might as well compare BMW and Mercedes, which one is the best?
Or apples and oranges, which one do you prefer? Your mom or your dad?
There are so many factors that comparison will be biaised somehow, you can't be 'scientific' about it imho.
In the end it will depend of the company/client experience rather then the CMS used. Anyway, nice try and nice figures (the full PDF does bring a little shade of light on some aspects).
And let's not forget, this is published May 2009. You can't say what will happen in future (say 6 months, a year?) :-D

Both are great and that is good, best part of your survey is the conclusion (that you already knew ;-)

Well, it wasn't our survey, we're just reporting on it. :) But as much as bragging rights are fun, “best” is far too subjective of an answer in comparing complex tools, definitely!

I don't currently use either but I have been thinking about try out either Typo3, Drupal or Joomla or maybe Wordpress since I have a lot of experience with that… I do website design on the site for fun and sometimes people come to me asking me to setup a site for them. Well the best option is probably some kind of CMS, so I went to http://php.opensourcecms.com/ and tried out their demos for those three CMSes. My initial experience is that Joomla is much more user friendly and looks like its quite a bit easier to setup. After seeing the interface to typo3 I don't know if I even want to try it, but then it is still supposed to be very good. Its a very difficult choice, but it would be made easier if Drupal had a better interface.

Well this is my experience with both. First I decided to use Drupal, I read it was more powerful so I started reding documentations trying to find where to start etc. I noticed that the documentation was nowhere near Joomla documentation, there is too much information usually for the older version, it is not tidy, you get lost, you start reading one thing it jumps to another within minutes I got lost, I tried this for few days at the end I gave up and tried Joomla. After a day I could setup my Joomla site and after a week I was a very good Joomla user. Another thing with Drupal, most of the plugins were for version 5 incompatible with 6, or alpha. Joomla's plugin system is much better when you visit Joomla's plugin pages you can easily find what you are after and there is a really nice user rating system for each plugin. Overall Joomla site and plugins are much more tidy, cleaner, better documentation, easier to find what you need mostly for the latest version, more uptodate. I still want to learn Drupal but I know it will take much longer to master it. I cant compare the two systems because I never used Drupal, this was my experienece as a begginer or a starter. If Drupal could improve the above points, I believe it would me more popular than it is now.

What's going to be even more interesting over time is how the mySQL forks will affect all CMS apps that only support mySQL

http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/mysql-forked-beyond-repair-262?source=IFWNLE_nlt_daily_2009-05-21

i use joomla for 2 years now. i love it and when i compare to wp with joomla, joomla certainly has its perks and cons too. but seriously speaking, i do enjoy using joomla a lot

For what it's worth, Drupal 6 and after consider PostgreSQL a fully supported DB…

Was hoping to learn more from this article. Joomla is a great CMS for developers and businesses. I have not used Drupal ever but in my opinion you cannot go wrong with Joomla as you can pretty much make anything out of it.

Personally I like Wordpress better, but I've heard that Drupal is more for the advanced.

We are using Joomla for last 3 years and have moved lot of out cliets on Joomla. We have moved from Joomla 1.x to Joomla 1.5 smoothly with some minor datatransfer issues. Current version 1.5 is technicaly superior and developer can also use Joomla as a PHP framework just like Rails for Ruby. I want to user Drupal which is also a good frame work but do not have proper documentation and moving to next version is also difficult.

False. As a programmer i can tell you that drupal has not a nice structure, upon you can build further other applications. Joomla can be further developed keeping the costs down in comparison to Drupal were the time investemtn is much more, so also the money, for the same result. Comming strong from behind, i would recommand Silverstripe!

… please, tell IBM immediately to stop using DRUPAL: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/library/i-osource1/index.html. Or Amnesty International … or Greenpeace … or Barack Obama … or Harvard … or the Firefox Foundation … or SUN … or me … or, or, or … are we/they all wrong?

By the way: Could one call this huge, extensive, overloaded Joomla-Backend-Browserinterface-thing really userfriendly?

And another thing to mention: Are other Websystems/CMS's/CMF's as semantic and Web 3.0 ready as Drupal (incl. RDFa, SPARQL, Open Calais). Just think about SEO in a few months! Semantic SEO has already started!!!

Schaffner,

Harvard also uses Joomla, not just drupal:

http://www.thebestofjoomla.com/sections/showcase/298-10-companies-using-joomla

btw, your ibm link gives 404, go drupal!! :D

I cant judge either because I haven't used drupal. But I like joomla so far for web site development. I've done 2 using Joomla and Im impressed. But Im confident that drupal also has its advantages.

Joomla and Drupal have their own advantages and disadvantages, they are so competitive and both are so useful.

Drupal is better for security reason. :) but I like Joomla too.. :D

I love Joomla more. Though Joomla has weak user and ACL management in Joomla 1.5.x version, these will be improved a lot in Joomla 1.6.x, which will be released in June 22nd, 2009 ( alpha version).

I am sure when Joomla 2.0 comes, Drupal can't be its competitor.

Squiz.net MySource Matrix is soooo much better than both Drupal and Joomla

This has been hotly debated before and will continue, that I'm sure of. We tested several CMS's like Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, XOOPS (I was one of the original devs on that team), etc. and eventually settled in on Joomla to build our business on.

Why Joomla? Three reasons.

1. The commercial Joomla theme market was big and has grown enormously and outpaces all the other CMS's.

2. The Joomla extensions directory (JED) has almost 4.500 addons so it's hard not to find something that does what you need without having to code it up.

3. Time savings due to 1 and 2 above. We can deploy Joomla sites within minutes now with our toolset and it will look great with the broad template selections. Why spend time slinging code or developing custom templates for either when you can buy them and get the site up quickly and cheaper than the competition.

The inherent problem with all the CMS's is patching and updates when bugs or security vulnerabilities arise. Neither is cheap to manage from that standpoint since you have to (usually) manually roll out updates to all your client sites sometimes.

We were going to develop a custom product to handle this then we ran across Jentla for Joomla. This product moves Joomla in direct competition with the big boys http://www.jentla.com/.

So, unless there is something with better templating, better addons and better maintenance tools, we're sticking with Joomla and moving forward.

Regards,
Eric

Both are great, both widely used, both have strengths and weaknesses. I am trying both on a small site to see what I find.

While doing my research on this topic I came across a lot of good articles and a survey from Webology. I then did some additional analysis on the Webology survey. The bottom line was that Drupal seem to come out on top at the moment, but Joomla is ahead in certain areas such as Templates and ease of Use. The full ad-free article is at http://owenmcnamara.com/2009/08/08/comparison-of-drupal-and-joomla/

Hope it helps others make the same decisions I am making.

There is no one tool to do it all. I think in some cases Wordpress is perfect in other cases Drupal and in other cases perhaps for different developers, Joomla is best. I know that if I already knew Drupal well that I would use that. The only thing making me look at Joomla as well is the learning curve and templates available.

Thanks for the article

Owen

Well, I gotta say that they're both very good. It mostly will come down to user preference. But I will say this: There's really no doubt, even in the proof, that Drupal is by far a much more powerful and expandable CMS than Joomla. After spending a long time exploring the code and core, it's also obvious that Drupal is a much better written CMS and it's core is more stable, professional and just makes more sense when altering. And after years with both, it's very, very obvious that the majority of modules created for Drupal are done so in a more professional, more proper manner. Seems the creators for Drupal mods are just better overall. For social networking, multimedia and interactive content, Drupal is far superior. Oh yeah, and as for adding content with ease and quickness, Drupal destroys Joomla: The content adding is more logical, the trees and menus make more sense and links are deeper. I can create a content page in Drupal three times as fast as with Joomla. Speed: Very close, but when cache is turned on and CSS and Java optimized, Drupal runs circles around Joomla.

Joomla does have it's nice points, like a wider array of themes, better documentation, etc. But honestly, where it matters, Drupal is hands-down a better CMS.

Do I prefer Drupal? Obviously so. But I'm basing this on years of using both. The power of Drupal is one big thing that really makes a world of difference between the two. Stability is another thing I look at. Never had a Drupal site crash or get corrupt… but have had several issues with Joomla. The core and backbone of Drupal is just superior.

In the end, both are very good. I'd advise someone to try both. But one thing: Try them and really get to the point of using it and understanding how to use it. Drupal has a steep learning curve, but to compare it fairly, you need to learn it. Once you get past that initial curve, Drupal really becomes quite easy to use.

I am really confused. though i use Joomla but i heard lots about drupal.
So dont know which is better.

I need power, stability and performance not just a good looking so i choose Drupal. Drupal is for the Geeks.

I became interested in CMS's. I started with Drupal and found the learning curve difficult. Switched to Joomla which I got up and running quickly and I liked it alot. After a while I was looking in integrate CiviCRM and found that Drupal was the better choice to run CiviCRM. A gave Drupal a second chance and took the training on Lynda.com. I 'm glad I did. I think Drupal will make a clear jump ahead of Joomla when 7 is ready, especially for more serious or commercial users. The addition of Acquia is a big deal for smaller sites that want a real support option.

Both are great, both widely used, both have strengths and weaknesses.

I personally like Drupal. Although its for more advanced developers the CMS is descent.

I personally like wordpress, but drupal is 2nd on my list. What one thing has the other might not so it just depends on what your personal preference is.

Good news is, we're training on all three, PLUS we'll be doing live comparative analysis sessions at our CMS Expo event, May 3, 4, 5, 2010 in Evanston, IL.

It's all about the right tool for the job. We'll be looking at what's right for enterprise, education, municipalities and government, small business and more.

(published earlier on topnotchthemes.com)

We changed from cms dev about 3 years ago from Joomla! to Drupal, for a lot of reasons, that's why we know both systems.

I think both systems are best used for it's purposes. Joomla! for small companies, small administrator groups, no need for extensive content organisation, multi-site or acl. There's a lot of coding (3rd party) for Joomla! that fills these needs, but most of them build their own frames upon Joomla-cms, it doesn't use a uniform Node Based System (NBS). This makes this 3rd-party coding less flexible when it comes to migration to major updates. And it makes them less transparant.
Here is a 'frank' list of features that Drupal has on board, but we really miss in Joomla! core.

- ACL: needed for configuring user access control
- Taxonomy: needed for content organization
- Multi site: needed to build easy-maintainable and managable multi-site platform
- Multi-langual
- Node Based System (NBS): needed for a uniform and consistent way of object defining and cms building
- Hook system
- Override system: needed for creating W3C valid and SEO sites. Also for creating custom designs/html.
- Content types and fields (with help of CCK): Needed for creating business objects (content types), management of these types and isolating data in database with help of fields. This isolating is especially needed for making content presentation consistent, ie: theming. With help of fields and content types, your cms users can only manage content you want them to manage, and the input of content can't go wrong, users just fill in the fields and that's it! The theming system will do the correct presentation. (if you dont use, or very restricted, WYSIWYG)
- Content management workflow: example: user1 creates content item, user2 checks it, user3 publishes it.
- Version control
- Core comments
- Core Download system
- Extensive Logs en error-reporting
- Core Poll
As said: it's very important to do a very good project discovery and choose the correct cms for your needs. The book “Leveraging Drupal” gives a good insight on how to do a good project discovery. But off course there are a lot of other projects methods to do so.

Joomla have a lot of themes and plugins,drupal don't.

What about the duplicate content issue with Joomla?

Does this still exist?

We made the mistake of having our website upgraded from Dreamweaver to Drupal. Supposedly Drupal was going to be much easier to use from a content management end. It was supposed to be user friendly for staff who were not webdesigners or who didn't have high-end tech skills. I am the one who has to manage the website. I am not high end tech wise but I am no slouch either. I find Drupal extremely user unfriendly, difficult to use, very, very unintuitive. Frankly I don't see it being any easer to use than Frontpage or Dreamweaver. What is worse, is there are no accessible guides for content users and managers as opposed to webdevelopers. The resources I have seen out there are mainly for webdevelopers. We end up having to use a paid consultant every time we want to do even a modest change to our website. I would never recomend Drupal based on my experience. Perhaps for developers it is a user friendly program.

I ditto the previous comment. My experience with Dupal has been less then satisfactory. Joomla on the other hand I find powerful and userfriendly. It's supported by a large community of talented developers and the latest version is very reliable.

As a small company I find Joomla is fine - I haven't much experienc ewith Drupal though so I can't comment about that

While I am not a PHP coder, I have build 2 sites with Joomla before switching to Drupal. Joomla isn't customizable as Drupal, but the most thing bothered me was their culture. It reminded me Micro$haft business model, like IIS and .NET dev community. You need a help, you have to pay for it. Drupal made me feel much more OpenSource community. I hope I am not too controversial here :-)

I like joomla. I've never tryed drupal but after reading this I may give it a try.

We spent a bit of time comparing Drupal and Joomla and in the end went with Joomla because it looked to be easier and we found a Joomla developer to join the team. I hope we're making the correct choice.

As a 10-year CMS implementer I think the question is not which system is better but which one solves the better purpose for what you are trying to achieve. From our experience neither Drupal, nor Joomla suffice for large Enterprise platforms due their lack of consistent and smart architectural decisions. We did a quite complete analysis on these on our site (check it out, if you are interested).

The essence from my point of view:

Joomla: Quick and fast for easy-to-use out of the box solutions, not suitable for online application development and large scale sites. Security!

Drupal: Great for anything thats social but unsuitable for classical top-down content management with large workflows and enterprise needs.

TYPO3: Great for all enterprise efforts and online application efforts, too complex for smaller projects and not an out-of-the-box solution.

Wordpress: Great for blogging. Fullstop.

I started using Drupal 6 months ago with no web development experience whatsoever (check my site if you like). Here's a summary of my experience:

1) It's quite hard to get going, but I generally put this down to poor documentation, or should I say, documentation which isn't organised very well. This is Drupal's biggest failing. There needs to be a step-by-step startup guide.

2) Once you get going it's great. In terms of general content management the process is quite simple and flexible at the same time.

3) Contrary to popular belief you don't have to know php to use it. If you want to customize with php you can, but if you don't need / want to then don't. Plus, most customizations in my case have been small tweaks which I've lifted from code suggestions etc.

4) It's customizable. Similar to the above point. If you do want to customize then the possibilities are virtually endless (I've heard that Joomla gets infuriating at this point). The organization of core files is particularly impressive. The Zen theme provides a great starting point for creating your own theme if you're not happy with any of the free themes.

5) Out of the box themes. The themes which are pre-packed with Drupal are pretty poor. There is a reasonable list of free themes which can be download from the drupal.org website.

6) Community. Okay, but rather technical. Many of my questions have remained unanswered when posted. For help I've used a tutorial site called www.learnbythedrop.com which has been very helpful.

7) Modules. Drupal really shines here. Lots of quality modules which can be used to add functionality. However, you do spend the first couple of days adding modules which should probably be part of the basic install. Within no time you can get a site going which has slide shows etc by installing a few modules.

8) Views / CCK / taxonomy - three modules which when combined provide a very powerful means of creating custom 'displays' of content — e.g., previews of particular types of content which have a common subject matter on the same page. Drupal really has the upper hand over Joomla when it comes to this stuff.

On the whole my experience with Drupal has been a positive one. I've always been infuriated with the the approach to documentation which has been taken. It's almost as if people have made a conscious effort to make the whole thing seem more complicated than it is.

Drupal is really not that difficult to get the hang of, but when the documentation immediately starts going on about customization etc with php it naturally scares people off. This is an organization which has made a particularly bad job of portraying what is an excellent product.

People often say that they've tried Drupal and have found it too hard. My view is that just about anybody can get a basic site going with Drupal without getting too technical. You just have to be prepared to do a bit of reading / learning.

Drupal 7 is on the way soon. It will be interesting to see if this really tips the balance in the great Joomla / Drupal debate. I'm glad I went for Drupal. I took a look at Joomla but it seemed rather restrictive — it kind of reminded me of Wordpress a little too much, which is great for blogging. Still, I can only really comment on Drupal's strengths, of which there are many.

Hope that helped.

See a direct comparision:

http://www.cmsmatch.com/compare/content-management-systems/11+9

I really don't find it surprising that people voted for what they use and are used to. You get used to something and tend to stick with it.

I've used both joomla and drupal. I've used none extensibly, however I use both professionally (I get paid to provide client solutions). With that background out of the way, I'd like to say: on any day of the week, Drupal knocks joomla on it's back side and keeps joomla in a choke hold until it either cries uncle or passes out, lol.

Ultimately it comes down to how rich the user experience can be, not how hard it was for the developer to implement something (no one ever cares about that (except other developers)). So with that said, Drupal offers a wealth of extension by way of modules and blocks, plus, what doesn't already exist, can be added. Drupal is not just a cms, it's also a cms framework. With that said, it can pretty much do anything (or at least i haven't hit it's limitation as yet).

The only positive note that i can say for joomla is that it's learning curve isn't as steep as Drupal's. But then again, joomla isn't doing half the cool things that Drupal is, so of course it'll take more time to learn a more feature rich app.

I gave Drupal a try after using Wordpress for a while. I found that there was a pretty large paradigm shift in the way things are organized. I got the hang of it after a while, but I really needed to rely on a few book from the library to get me over the initial hurdle.

With the comments above about a easier learning curvy with Joomla, I might just give it a go.

I was at this cross roads a few weeks ago. It's tough to wade through all the information out there and so I ended up choosing Drupal from a friends recommendation. I think I made a mistake however because I'm finding Drupal a little bit difficult to modify. I wish Wordpress had the functionality I'm looking for but unfortunately it does not :(

Agreed, Drupal has a steep learning curve, but to compare it fairly, you need to learn it. Once you get past that initial curve, Drupal really becomes quite easy to use.

There is no one tool to do it all. I think in some cases Wordpress is perfect in other cases Drupal and in other cases perhaps for different developers, Joomla is best. I know that if I already knew Drupal well that I would use that. The only thing making me look at Joomla as well is the learning curve and templates available.

Thanks for the article

An even better comparison:

http://www.cmsmatch.com/compare/content-management-systems/11+9+844

It may pay to think outside PHP.

It is hard to say. Both have edge on each other in different features. Drupal is easy to use whereas Joomla has better GUI.

I personally prefer Drupal over Joomla. Although Drupal has a steep learning curve for new users, it's flexibility is truly amazing and can be used for just about any function.

Drupal for bigger and more complex sites. Keep in mind Drupal is now winning today's open source cms awards (http://www.packtpub.com/award). A lot of people say learning Drupal is hard to learn, the only truth is its only harder than Joomla. As long as you stick to the best practices of Drupal, ull do fine! Its not as hard as other people say, once you get it! ull love it!

I personally like Drupal better. I would use it anytime over any other CMS, for PHP projects. But in .NET world, I would recommend Umbraco.

Interesting debate. I would have to go with Drupal from previous experiences, but there is great case to support both here.

I have what I think is a simple question: What about scalability? I have 71 schools. I need a CMS that will allow them all to “do their thing”, but still play nicely together.

Can anyone share an example of where this has been done with either Joomla or Drupal?

Wow nice post. I find myself kinda flowing between both. Although I would have to totally agree with you about Joomla its real user friendly. That is the one I first started with. Thanks for the article.

Oh my. I got separated also in two. Who's gonna tell me what is the best to use.

The key is it depends on you enterprise ECM strategic requirement. If there is no strategic procedure, you can with either. And it depends on you want capture/create content, how you want to store/secure/workflow you content, how the end users(customers,partners,public users,etc) want to consume the content. It is also important that which tool will best integrate with existing EMC infrastructure/legacy webapplications,etc.

Drupal is good if you do not want more coding and your team/organization is thinking more towards strategic ECM approach. Because ECM is not an application it is more an initiative; ECM makes content portal and available to all valid users.

None of them is required if your business demands can be met with mashups.