CMS Comparison: WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla

Published

May 14, 2015

4 Comments

If you’re thinking about starting a website, then you’ve likely wondered which content management system will best fit your needs. Fortunately, the top three open-source platforms–WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal—are all maintained and supported by thousands of great developers, and are continuously being improved upon to leverage new technologies, SEO, and social media concepts, and add-on features. You really can’t go wrong with any of the platforms in terms of pure performance.

CMS Comparison Guide

Instead of inundating you with technical jargon and minutia, I’ve developed a wonderful graphic to demonstrate the pros and cons of the different CMS platforms. The following comparison chart can help guide beginners in choosing the best platform for their needs.

Final Word: The Best CMS

As you can see, there is no clear one-size-fits-all solution, and ultimately, your decision should also include an honest assessment of your technical abilities. WordPress is a great option for all types of businesses and bloggers, amateur or professional. If you’re looking for extensive features for a site that needs to be very scalable, then Drupal might be ideal. Finally, Joomla can provide strong social media features or a balance between the other platforms.

Overall, for maximum flexibility and user-friendliness, we highly recommend using WordPress for your next blog or website. As the chart indicates, there is clearly a reason the blogging software commands a 60.7% market share.

There are 4 comments

June 8, 2015 #

Poindexter

Wow… what an off balance review.

WordPress indeed has many plugins, themes but many are not maintained and out of date.

You dont cite anyplace using Drupal, Amazon.com does as does eBay. Drupal is probably the most powerful of all three mentioned and it can be scaled as it was part of its design.

Joomla is also more powerful than WordPress. With Joomla for example one can put modules anyplace in themes. Modules are small programs that can draw data off components. Components are like applications. A webmaster can make a much more granular access site and much more flexible site with Joomla than WordPress.

Both Drupal and Joomla are more difficult to use that is true.

WordPress base install for example does not even allow for proper dashboard administration of posts or pages. You cant even select post or pages by category. If you have 500 pages then your going to have to search for them .vs. drilling down by selecting categories you want edit posts in.

If the people at Joomla would re-invent the webmaster user experience and provide a true drag and drop interface making it simple to administrate they could take the market. But, they are too busy doing whatever they do apparently.
July 21, 2015 #

Ryuhei Yokokawa

Node.js is really starting to catch up to the Major 3 PHP based CMSes.
Here’s an article I wrote on comparing a few Node.js CMSes against PHP CMS Criterias: http://y-designs.com/blog/node-cms-comparison-2015/
July 22, 2015 #

Julia Nimchynska

A very nice article, though I think that it is thousand times better just to try to migrate via all the mentioned platforms and then to decide each for himself. That’s what I’ve actually done with the help of CMS2CMS conversion service. You can use the same tool as I did, or any other that you like. Wht I particularly enjoyed in CMS2CMS is that you can try the migration for free there. And only then to deside for yourself to switch the platform or not.
July 31, 2015 #

Lessus Agency

Great comparision. As an Agency we strongly recommend Drupal.

CMS Comparison Guide

Final Word: The Best CMS

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