Comparison of Word Press, Drupal and Joomla

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WordPress

World’s favorite blogging software (68 million web sites worldwide) It’s an open source solution using PHP-MySQL and is beginner friendly.

Advantages

• ACL – (Access Control List) WP was written well to accommodate multiple bloggers.
• Large Plugin Library
• User Friendly
• SEO – Good with plugins and SEO expertise
• Easy Customization – Utilizing Themes

Disadvantages

• Security – Word Press has been the target of hackers for years. Base installation is not very secure. Using plugins it is possible to make it less vulnerable.
• Incompatibility – New versions of WP are constantly released to fix security issues. These updates are often incompatible with older plugins. Because so many plugins are necessary to make this blogging software a solution for enterprise business web presence, count on issues.
• Limited Design Options – WP is customizable but because it is a blogging software, design elements lend themselves to blogs. Recently, there have been more templates that are attempting to work around this.
• Limited Content Management Capabilities – designed as a blogging platform, its base installation is not well suited for high volume publishers.
• Word Press was not developed to manage membership functionality to access content. It is able to be added but is not in core code like Joomla.

Recommended Use – Small blogs and web site projects where development will not be needed and scalability is not necessary.

 

Drupal

Oldest of CMS systems, released in 2001. It’s an open source solution using PHP-MySQL. It is powerful & Developer Friendly
Advantages

• Flexible - whether small blog or thousands of pages
• Developer Friendly – base is bare bones, developers create the look
• SEO friendly
• Stable

Disadvantages

• Learning Curve
• Lack of Plugins
• Lack of Themes

Recommended Use – Enterprise CMS for large projects where stability, scalability and power are more important than ease of use and aesthetics

 

Joomla

An enterprise grade CMS. Recommended for large projects where stability, scalability and power are just as important as ease of use. It’s an open source solution using PHP-MySQL. It is developer and user friendly.

Advantages

• User Friendly – While not as dumbed down as WP, it’s still easy to use. The interface is polished, flexible and powerful enough for any level of user. With that power comes a small learning curve as with any powerful solution.
• Strong development community – Joomla has an extensive development community with an entire site dedicated to plugins that are often free
• Extension options – The base code was written to allow for multiple types of extensions and understanding the structure is more intuitive than the CMS competitors WP and DP. Joomla has 5 basic extension types. Components (mini-applications that allows you to change completely what Joomla is capable of based on your own needs), Modules (Smaller changes like dynamic content, RSS and search), Plugins (which allow interface changes within the content pages) and languages.
• Strong Content Management Capabilities – Originally designed for enterprise CMS. Can handle small to large volumes of content easily.
• SEO friendly – the core coding has SEO built in and with additional plugins and a little SEO expertise it is extremely SEO friendly
• Security – Like WP, Joomla is a target. However, because it was originally written as an enterprise CMS the architecture was geared towards security. Issues with security typically come from add-on components or plugins, but with Joomla’s plugin manager keeping up with plugin versions has become simple as the program itself alerts you.
• ACL – (Access Control List) the latest version of Joomla has enhanced ACL and Joomla has always had strong membership functionality in it's core code. Plugins and components can enhance these further if needed.

Disadvantages

• Learning Involved – Joomla can be edited directly from the public front end (after logging in) with a “Word” like interface, which serves the beginner well for editing. But to exploit the true power of Joomla you edit from the admin panel. There’s a slight learning curve in the admin, but it’s like tying your shoes. It’s simple once you’ve dug in.

Recommended Use – Small to large enterprise projects where development may be needed and scalability is necessary.

 

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Note: Above are the opinions of our developers and other writers on the web at the time of this writing. Software is constantly being updated so the opinions stated above may or may not be entirely accurate and we look forward to adding advantages and removing disadvantages. We're completly open to hearing your opinion and updating this blog opinon at any time.

Each of these content managment systems has advantages and we recommend each, or other solutions based on our customers needs.