Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress are the 3 most popular content management systems according to Alexa and most webmasters. They all have their own blend of features and options that allow for extremely powerful and well-built web sites. With such feature rich systems it is important to understand the different aspects of each one to help with making a better choice as to which CMS fits you.
It should be noted that this chart is written from a web developers perspective and I am fairly experienced with creating sites with a CMS or without. I have used all 3 systems for developing web sites, but strictly stick to Drupal now as it allows me to built the most powerful sites the easiest.
| Drupal | Joomla | Wordpress | |
| Homepage | http://www.drupal.org | http://www.joomla.com | http://www.wordpress.org |
| Example Sites | |||
| Installation | Fairly easy, but requires a bit of technical stuff (will be much easier with version 6) | Piece of cake | A walk in the park |
| Ease of use | Not for the casual user. Drupal is usually more oriented towards developers and webmasters, although it is becoming more and more user friendly with each new version. | Fairly easy and straightforward. | Very easy to use. Pretty much anybody can use this. |
| Administration | Lots of control, but a bit confusing for the newbie | Very graphical and intuitive! | Very easy to administer the site |
| Themes | Decent, but lacking when compared to Joomla and Wordpress | Good selection of themes | Excellent, large theme selection! |
| Comments | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| SEO |
|
|
Fantastic! - All content has a unique page with an SEO friendly Title and URL. |
| Users | Yes - Full user accounts and profiles can be set up. Users can log in and set preferences and settings. | Yes | Yes, can have multiple users |
| Blogs | A bit more cumbersome for blogging, but still has many blogging features and modules. Also, great for allowing more than 1 blog. | Yes, you can create blogs easily with Joomla | By far the best blogging software. Has support for many blogging features and plugins. |
| RSS Feeds | Yes, everything has a feed | Yes, made for RSS! | |
| Forums | Decent, functional forum, but it doesn't have a traditional type of forum look and feel. It requires heavy theming to get it to feel right | SimpleMachines integrates in very well. | Yes |
| Ecommerce | Contributed ecommerce modules that are dencent, but a bit cumbersome | Yes, as extensions Joomla offers ecommerce | Yes, with plugins |
| Video | Full support for conventional video (.mov, .avi, .mpg) and Flash video (.flv) conversion via FFMPEG. Users can upload videos. | No, unless embed YouTube videos | No, unless embed YouTube videos |
| Audio | Full audio support for uploading of MP3s by users with audio module. | Yes, with multimedia extensions | Yes |
| Photo Galleries | Decent looking photo galleries with the use of the Image module. | Gallery extensions allow for image galleries | Yes |
| Calendars | Decent events and calendars, although they could definitely be improved on. | Yes | |
| Web 2.0 | Yes! Pure! | No, it still has the older content driven aspects and less community focus. | Yes, very web 2.0! |
| Permissions | Yes, very granular permissions allow for precise control over certain features for each user | Lacking | Yes |
| Scalability | Great for adding new sections and elements to a site. It is very easy to build off the existing codebase. | Decent Scalabily | Limited scalabilty - much harder to add new sections and elements. |
| Multisite | Yes, full multisite integration out of the box! | No | Yes |
| Categorization | Complete control over categorization of content. Can sort and order content virtually any way. Super easy to create pages listing whatever you want. | Limiting, only allows for section/category/content structure. | Very good categorization via categories and tags |
| Documentation | Good documentation with lots of user submitted guides and tutorials. The forums are very friendly with helpful users. | Decent, but a bit sparse on certain topics. Large community with lots of active contributors. | Good documentation over all important aspects of the system. |
| SSL | Yes - SSL is all built in and pretty much transparent. | Yes, requires some programming | No |
| Standards | Yes sir! | Close, but not exactly | Full standards compliance |
| Learning Curve | By far the hardest learning curve. Easier to wrap your head around if you are a developer. | Pretty easy learning curve. Lots of features, but pretty easy to follow. | Fast and easy! |
| Speed | Very efficient, but page loads can take a bit longer as it can be common for many queries to happen with modules and features. | Very fast with rendering pages. Can also slow down when features are added. | Fast, pages render quickly and efficiently. |
| Theming | Complete control over all aspects of HTML. Hard to get used to, but fairly straight-forward once learned. | Control over most aspects of the theme, although certain parts are injected in that can not be themed or tweaked. Changes on certain parts of the site may break other parts of the site and theming in general is a lot more buggy. | Control over most aspects of HTML. |
| Anti-Spam Features | Lots of modules, features and captchas for removing and preventing spam | Extensions that help prevent spam | Lots of spam features |
| Features | Tons of features for blogging, communities, social networking, content management and everything you could ever want for a web site. | A lot of good features, but lacking in social and user oriented areas. | A lot of blogging features, but not many site features. |
| My opinion | My CMS of choice. Great for any type of website and very easy to build off. The Drupal community is very driven and has a great vision of where to take Drupal. | Very good for brochure type sites. I guess you could say it is less powerfull than Drupal, but more powerful than Wordpress. It doesn't offer complete control on things which I don't particularily like. It is also hard to build off and is kind of more of a web 1.0 system and not web 2.0. | If all I had was a blog and I wasn't too good at programming I would use this for sure. By far the best blogging software and still very good for smaller sites without a user base. |
| Stability | Rock solid, although be careful when adding modules, things can go downhill very quickly. Also avoid hacking core code. | Very stable. | Extremely stable. |
| Database |
|
MySQL | MySQL |
| Security | Great | Good | Great |
| Programming Language | PHP | PHP | PHP |
| WYSIWYG Editor | Yes, but not seamlessly integrated | Yes | Yes, great integration |
| Page Caching | Yes | Yes | |
| Integrated Statistics | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Download Size | 728kb | 878kb | 802kb |
| Sitewide Search | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Drupal | Joomla | Wordpress | |
| Pros | Scalable to support high-end comunities | Lots of features and little programming knowledge needed | Best blogging software with tons of themes and plugins |
| Cons |
|
Hard to control the theming and flow of certain parts | Not many! |
Overall they are all very great systems, but Drupal and Wordpress stand out to me as being at the top of their game. Wordpress is best if you are the only user and are mainly blogging or building a small site. Drupal is the best if you have multiple users and are looking to build out a full web community. Joomla kind of falls in between these as it has many features but is a bit less scalable and less customizable.
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5 Comments
I see many "No" regarding
I see many "No" regarding the features in Wordpress. Please study in depth before publishing such post. With Wordpress we can do anything that can be done with Drupal or Joomla, and with more ease.
Thanks for pointing this
Thanks for pointing this out. You are right. I have updated the page with more accurate information.
Great Advice
Thank you for the great comparison! I'm using Drupal on my first site now, but I am volunteering for a nonprofit that wants to upgrade their site, and this is very helpful in deciding which CMS to use!
Joomla Security Vulnerability
Hi,
Thank you for your helpful matrix. I have been attacked twice by a hacker at my Joomla site. Each time I have had to delete everything and start over. I starting to feel that I can't use Joomla unless I can pay big bucks to someone to constantly monitor (and defend against) security threats.
I was wondering if you would comment on this? Is it more likely that someone has just taken aim at my site? or might it have to do with Joomla not being as secure?
also, What do people do when their sites are attacked by people who turn them into virus pumping machines? I've had web sites for 3 years but have never encountered this until I started using Joomla.
I'm not really sure what to
I'm not really sure what to say, it could be a number of things. In general I think Joomla is pretty secure as it is open source and has a solid team continually updating it. I would think this would already be at least 10x more secure than something one would write from scratch.
The security problems may come into play when you start adding extra modules and custom stuff that isn't necessarily promoted by the core Joomla team. But it all depends on what the hack was. It could have not been on the application side at all and been at the server / OS level. And considering that it has happened twice I would almost think that something like this would be a more reasonable answer, but it all depends on what happened.
Were files deleted? Was the database tampered with? Were there errors? What did the logs say? etc, etc.
As far as I know Joomla is pretty secure.
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