Drupal vs Joomla

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Our analysts compared Drupal vs Joomla based on data from our 400+ point analysis of CMS Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

Drupal Software Tool
Joomla Software Tool

Product Basics

Drupal is a free to use, open-source solution to manage website content through authoring, customization and automated workflows. Its WYSIWYG editor comes with an intuitive interface to customize text, images and layouts without needing developer support. Multiple users can create content in a central repository and share it on any channel, backed by a modern content delivery network (CDN) provider.

It enables marketing automation with advanced email reporting for specific audiences, streamlined processes, real-time sales alerts and bulk data management. Its data security protocol includes database encryption, user access control and security reports. Backed by a strong online developer community, its coding standards and strict code review processes help mitigate internet vulnerabilities
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Joomla is a free, open-source solution to manage and publish content online and design websites. Built on a model-view-controller (MVC) framework, it enables building a variety of websites like blogs, business websites, intranet, community forums and more. It comes with built-in templates with the option to change colors, fonts, layouts and features without the need to code. With a variety of publishing tools and a WYSIWYG editor, it includes content versioning and article management through a media manager.

Users can choose from more than 8,000 third-party extensions to set up reviews, run contests, allow post liking and additional functionality on their websites. It provides out-of-the-box SEO optimization with metadata and keywords, including support for SEF URLs. Available in more than 70 languages, it is maintained by a volunteer community of developers, support personnel and IT professionals.
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Product Insights

  • Scalability: Drupal effortlessly scales with your business growth, handling traffic spikes and expanding content without compromising performance, making it ideal for businesses aiming for growth.
  • Security: With a dedicated security team and a robust coding standard, Drupal provides enterprise-level security, making it a trusted platform for government agencies and large corporations.
  • Customization: Drupal offers unparalleled customization options through modules and themes, allowing businesses to tailor their websites to their unique needs and brand identity.
  • Content Management Flexibility: Drupal excels in managing complex content structures and hierarchies, enabling businesses to deliver rich, multimedia content experiences.
  • Community Support: Drupal benefits from a large, active community of developers who contribute modules, themes, and fixes, ensuring the platform stays innovative and secure.
  • SEO-Friendly: With its advanced SEO modules, Drupal helps businesses improve their search engine visibility, driving more organic traffic to their websites.
  • Accessibility: Drupal adheres to web accessibility standards, ensuring websites are usable for people with disabilities, which expands audience reach and complies with legal requirements.
  • Multi-language Support: Drupal provides built-in multilingual support, allowing businesses to create websites in multiple languages, catering to a global audience.
  • Integration Capabilities: Drupal can integrate with a wide array of marketing, sales, and analytics tools, enabling businesses to create a cohesive digital ecosystem.
  • Mobile-First Approach: With responsive design and mobile-first themes, Drupal ensures websites look great and function well on all devices, enhancing user experience.
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  • Flexible Content Management: Joomla allows users to easily create, edit, and manage content without needing extensive technical knowledge, making it ideal for businesses aiming to maintain dynamic websites.
  • Extensive Customization Options: With thousands of templates and extensions available, Joomla offers unparalleled customization, enabling businesses to tailor their websites to their unique branding and functionality requirements.
  • Robust User Management: Joomla provides a comprehensive user management system, allowing for detailed control over user roles, permissions, and access levels, ensuring secure and efficient management of website contributors and content.
  • SEO Friendly: Joomla is designed with SEO in mind, featuring options for meta tags, keywords, and SEF URLs, helping businesses improve their search engine rankings and online visibility.
  • Multilingual Support: Offering support for over 75 languages, Joomla enables businesses to create multilingual websites, reaching a broader audience and catering to global markets.
  • Strong Community Support: Joomla boasts a large, active community of developers and users who provide extensive support, tutorials, and forums, making it easier for businesses to find help and resources.
  • Highly Secure: With regular security updates and built-in features like two-factor authentication and CAPTCHA, Joomla prioritizes website security, protecting businesses from potential threats and vulnerabilities.
  • E-commerce Ready: Joomla supports a wide range of e-commerce extensions, allowing businesses to easily set up and manage online stores, complete with product catalogs, shopping carts, and secure payment systems.
  • Responsive Design: Joomla templates are generally designed to be responsive, ensuring that websites look great and function well on all devices, from desktops to smartphones, enhancing user experience and engagement.
  • Powerful Extensions: With over 8,000 extensions available, Joomla extends its core functionalities to include social networking, forums, galleries, and more, enabling businesses to add complex features without heavy custom coding.
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  • Content Authoring: Publish and deploy content across multiple platforms from one place. Connect marketing tools such as marketing automation, CRM, analytics and more to build and manage sites, build multichannel digital experiences and customize mobile web browsers and apps. 
  • Security: Keep data secure with access controls, database encryption, Denial of Service (DoS) and more. Prevent security failures with its strong coding standards and community code review process, continuously monitored by a team of security experts. Prevent malicious data entry, resolve issues before exploitation and share information via security reports. 
  • Performance: Ensure websites keep up with high traffic volumes by working with an advanced CDN provider, guaranteeing uptime without server outages. Run over a million performance checks per day and implement technology that scales across server clusters, providing customers with quick availability. 
  • Multilingual: Automated translation for over 100 languages makes every aspect of content accessible to viewers across the globe. Detect a site visitor’s preferred language based on information such as IP address, browser settings and more. 
  • Accessibility: Allow customers with disabilities to create, access and consume content, following the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) guidelines. Utilize structured metadata that is intelligible by screen readers and provide editorial tools to apply accessible content creation capabilities.  
  • Marketing Automation: Integrate marketing automation platforms to assign rules for tasks such as sending prospects email offers, assigning them to particular lists or using AI such as chat bots to deliver information. Refine marketing processes with no licensing costs by streamlining workflows, creating real-time sales alerts, managing data in bulk and more. 
  • Personalization: Deliver a personalized customer experience by analyzing site visitor’s clicks and decisions at each data point to create a profile for them. Leverage information such as geolocation, browser history, device type and behaviors to deliver tailored marketing messages, recommended products and more. 
  • Content as a Service: Manage and deploy content for a variety of websites and services from one location in a preconfigured development environment. Design reusable content, deliver content in various layouts, scale regardless of size and more using the platform’s unbarred infrastructure and APIs. 
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  • Extensions: Choose from over 80,000 extensions to personalize sites and create unlimited menus and menu items while maintaining site speed with caching capabilities.
  • Access Controls: Produce business sites, blogs, community websites and more with the free-to-use platform.Have full management capabilities over what customers can view and do with an access control list (ACL).
  • Multilingual: Create sites in over 70 different languages.
  • Web Design: Build custom designs and templates to control the website’s look and feel through customizable attributes such as color scheme, images and effects, fonts and more. Choose from external template frameworks and add them to the designated pages. Provide HTML from objects and an array of data. Produce responsive designs with LESS CSS and Bootstrap.
  • Content Editing and Publishing: Create content with a WYSIWYG editor tool, edit while browsing sites and add to content with one click. Manage articles, choose publishing start and finish dates and create new versions of the content every time a change is made while preserving the old ones. Drag and drop images directly from a computer and use the media management tool to upload and consolidate images and files.
  • Core Website Functionality: Enhance websites with banners and ads, contacts and departments, including contact forms and external news feeds.
  • Tags: Attach tags to various content types and create up to 15 custom fields to keep content, users and contacts organized for customer search.
  • Messaging: Communicate with administrators via private messaging on the site’s back-end.
  • Backend Management: Update core software and extensions with one click and install extensions and plug-ins from the site’s back end. Permit visitors to register and access additional resources on the site.
  • Development Tools: Access developer documentation and secure coding guidelines for assistance. Integrate microdata into extensions and sites, write web and command line applications and utilize Model-View-Controller design patterns. Runs on PHP support.
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Product Ranking

#13

among all
CMS Software

#21

among all
CMS Software

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User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 1237 reviews
Great User Sentiment 1429 reviews
81%
of users recommend this product

Drupal has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 81% when considering 1237 user reviews from 6 recognized software review sites.

81%
of users recommend this product

Joomla has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 81% when considering 1429 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

4.9 (14)
4.3 (14)
3.8 (339)
3.9 (321)
4.23 (376)
4.14 (516)
4.2 (339)
4.1 (453)
4.3 (7)
n/a
3.6 (162)
3.9 (125)

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Highly Customizable: Drupal is known for its flexibility, allowing users to create highly customized websites without extensive coding knowledge. The availability of numerous modules and themes empowers users to tailor their sites to specific needs and preferences.
Scalability: Drupal's architecture is designed to handle websites of all sizes, from small personal blogs to large enterprise applications. Its ability to scale efficiently makes it a suitable choice for projects with growth potential.
Strong Security: Drupal has a reputation for robust security features and a dedicated security team. Regular updates and security patches help protect websites from vulnerabilities and potential threats.
Active Community: Drupal boasts a large and active community of developers and users who contribute to its development, provide support, and share knowledge. This vibrant community fosters collaboration and innovation within the Drupal ecosystem.
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Extensive Extensions: A vast library of extensions is available to expand Joomla's core functionality, catering to diverse needs such as e-commerce, social networking, and SEO optimization.
Multilingual Capabilities: Joomla's built-in multilingual support simplifies website creation and management in multiple languages, eliminating the need for extensions or complex workarounds.
Active Community: A large and active community of users and developers provides support, resources, and extensions, fostering collaboration and knowledge sharing.
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Steep Learning Curve: Drupal's robust features and flexibility come at the cost of complexity, making it challenging for beginners to grasp. The learning curve can be daunting for users accustomed to more intuitive content management systems.
Module Dependency Issues: Drupal's modular architecture, while offering extensive customization, can lead to compatibility issues between modules. Resolving these conflicts often requires technical expertise, causing frustration for users seeking a seamless experience.
Performance Overhead: Drupal's feature-rich nature can impact website performance, especially on shared hosting environments or with numerous modules enabled. Optimization may be necessary to ensure smooth operation and fast loading times.
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Extensions Can Be Pricey: While Joomla offers a wide array of extensions, many of the most useful ones require a financial investment, which can be a deterrent for budget-conscious users or those just starting out.
Learning Curve: Joomla has a steeper learning curve compared to some other content management systems, especially for users without prior experience. The interface can feel overwhelming at first, and understanding the extension ecosystem takes time.
SEO Challenges: Optimizing a Joomla website for search engines can be more complex than with other platforms. Achieving good SEO often requires additional extensions and a deeper understanding of technical SEO principles.
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Don't "drupal" the ball when it comes to choosing the right content management system (CMS) for your needs. Drupal has been around for over two decades and has garnered a reputation for being a powerful and flexible platform, but it's not without its quirks. User reviews from the past year paint a picture of a CMS that's a bit of a mixed bag, with some folks singing its praises and others scratching their heads in frustration. Drupal's biggest strength is its flexibility. It's like a chameleon, able to adapt to a wide range of website needs, from simple blogs to complex e-commerce platforms. This is largely thanks to its extensive library of modules and themes, which allow users to add all sorts of bells and whistles to their sites. However, this flexibility comes at a cost: complexity. Drupal has a steeper learning curve than some other CMS options like WordPress, and it can be a bit overwhelming for beginners. It's like trying to assemble a piece of furniture from IKEA without the instructions – doable, but definitely not a walk in the park. So, who is Drupal best suited for? It's a great choice for organizations with complex website needs and the technical know-how to navigate its intricacies. If you're looking for a CMS that you can truly make your own and are willing to put in the time to learn the ropes, Drupal could be your perfect match. However, if you're a beginner or need a quick and easy solution, you might want to consider a more user-friendly option. Remember, the CMS landscape is constantly evolving, so it's always a good idea to check out the latest reviews and comparisons before making a decision.

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Joomla's open-source CMS platform has been making waves in the web development world, but what are users saying about it? Let's dive into the nitty-gritty of Joomla's strengths, weaknesses, and unique features based on recent user feedback. Joomla shines with its user-friendly interface and extensive customization options. Users appreciate the intuitive layout and ease of navigation, making it a great choice for beginners and experienced developers alike. The platform's flexibility allows for creating diverse websites, from simple blogs to complex e-commerce platforms, thanks to its vast library of extensions and templates. Joomla's multilingual capabilities also make it a popular choice for international audiences. However, some users find the abundance of options overwhelming and the learning curve steeper compared to simpler CMS platforms like Wix or Squarespace. One of Joomla's key strengths is its active and supportive community. Users can access numerous forums, tutorials, and documentation, making troubleshooting and learning a breeze. Additionally, Joomla's open-source nature fosters continuous development and improvement, ensuring the platform stays up-to-date with the latest web technologies. However, some users express concerns about security vulnerabilities and the need for regular updates to maintain a secure website. Compared to WordPress, Joomla offers more built-in features, reducing the reliance on third-party extensions, which can be a double-edged sword as it limits the platform's extensibility to some degree. So, who is Joomla best suited for? Joomla is an excellent choice for users who value flexibility, customization, and a supportive community. It's perfect for small to medium-sized businesses, non-profit organizations, and individuals who want to create professional-looking websites without extensive coding knowledge. However, for users seeking a simple drag-and-drop website builder or those with limited technical skills, simpler platforms might be a better fit. Ultimately, Joomla's versatility and powerful features make it a compelling option for those who want to take their web development game to the next level.

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