• Sales: 1-800-961-2888
  • Support: 1-800-961-4454

CMS Comparison: Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress


If creating a website for your business is on the horizon, you may be wondering which content management system (CMS) is the best choice for you. Here’s a look at three of the most widely-used ones. All three are open-source software, each developed and maintained by a community of thousands. Not only are all three free to download and use, but the open-source format means that the platform is continuously being improved to support new Internet technologies. With all of these systems, basic functions can be enhanced ad infinitum with an ever-expanding array of add-ons, contributed from their respective communities.

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution here; it depends on your goals, technical expertise, budget and what you need your site to do. For a simple blog or brochure-type site, Wordpress could be the best choice (while very friendly for non-developers, it’s a flexible platform also capable of very complex sites). For a complex, highly customized site requiring scalability and complex content organization, Drupal might be the best choice. For something in between that has an easier learning curve, Joomla may be the answer.

When you have questions or need help, will you be able to find it easily? With all of these systems, the answer is yes. Each has passionate, dedicated developer and user communities, making it easy to find free support directly through their websites or through other online forums or even books. In addition, paid support is readily available from third-party sources, such as consultants, developers and designers. Each of these systems shows long-term sustainability and longevity; support for them will continue to be readily available for the foreseeable future. The more time and effort you are willing and able to invest into learning a system, the more it will be able to do for you. With both Wordpress and Joomla, you can order a wide range of services and options off the menu to suit your needs; with Drupal, you’ll be in the kitchen cooking up what you want for yourself, with all of the privileges of customization that entails.

See the comparison chart below for more insight into the differences in these top content management systems. Still not sure? Download each of the free platforms and do a trial run to help you decide.

  Drupal Joomla Wordpress
Homepage www.drupal.org www.joomla.org www.wordpress.org
About Drupal is a powerful, developer-friendly tool for building complex sites. Like most powerful tools, it requires some expertise and experience to operate.

Joomla offers middle ground between the developer-oriented, extensive capabilities of Drupal and user-friendly but more complex site development options than Wordpress offers.

Wordpress began as an innovative, easy-to-use blogging platform. With an ever-increasing repertoire of themes, plugins and widgets, this CMS is widely used for other website formats also.
Example Sites

Community Portal: Fast Company, Team Sugar

Social Networking: MTV Networks Quizilla

Education: Harvard University

Restaurant: IHOP

Social Networking: PlayStation Blog

News Publishing: CNN Political Ticker

Education/Research: NASA Ames Research Center

News Publishing:The New York Observer

Installation Drupal Installation Forum Joomla Installation Forum Wordpress Installation Forum
Ease of Use

Drupal requires the most technical expertise of the three CMSs. However, it also is capable of producing the most advanced sites. With each release, it is becoming easier to use. If you’re unable to commit to learning the software or can’t hire someone who knows it, it may not be the best choice.

Less complex than Drupal, more complex than Wordpress. Relatively uncomplicated installation and setup. With a relatively small investment of effort into understanding Joomla’s structure and terminology, you have the ability to create fairly complex sites.

Technical experience is not necessary; it’s intuitive and easy to get a simple site set up quickly. It’s easy to paste text from a Microsoft Word document into a Wordpress site, but not into Joomla and Drupal sites.
Features Known for its powerful taxonomy and ability to tag, categorize and organize complex content. Designed to perform as a community platform, with strong social networking features.

Ease of use is a key benefit for experts and novices alike. It’s powerful enough for web developers or designers to efficiently build sites for clients; then, with minimal instruction, clients can take over the site management. Known for an extensive selection of themes. Very user-friendly with great support and tutorials, making it great for non-technical users to quickly deploy fairly simple sites.

Caching Plug-ins Pressflow: This is a downloadable version of Drupal that comes bundled with popular enhancements in key areas, including performance and scalability.

JotCache offers page caching in the Joomla 1.5 search framework, resulting in fast page downloads. Also provides control over what content is cached and what is not. In addition, page caching is supported by the System Cache Plugin that comes with Joomla.

WP-SuperCache: The Super Cache plugin optimizes performance by generating static html files from database-driven content for faster load times.
Best Use Cases For complex, advanced and versatile sites; for sites that require complex data organization; for community platform sites with multiple users; for online stores

Joomla allows you to build a site with more content and structure flexibility than Wordpress offers, but still with fairly easy, intuitive usage. Supports E-commerce, social networking and more.

Ideal for fairly simple web sites, such as everyday blogging and news sites; and anyone looking for an easy-to-manage site. Add-ons make it easy to expand the functionality of the site.


© 2011-2013 Rackspace US, Inc.

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License


See license specifics and DISCLAIMER

81 Comments

<strong>Ease of Use</strong>
Drupal is capable of accepting copy-paste content from Word as long as you have one of the many (and almost always installed) WYSIWYG editors and have enabled the "Paste from Word" option that most offer. It even gives you the option in the TinyMCE editor as to how much of the Word styling to preserve.

<strong>Caching Plug-Ins</strong>
Pressflow is a fork of Drupal, not a plugin. It also provides integration with the Varnish reverse proxy (which BTW is incredibly fast if you have the memory to run it). Other cache mechanisms that can be enabled/integrated into Drupal off the top of my head are APC, memcached, and the Boost module.

Thanks for pointing those items out, Robert. It does look like this article needs to be updated, particularly with regard to the "paste from Word" feature that's pretty standard in any CMS than can use FCKEditor or TinyMCE (or others).

Drupal has an amazing framework that is very developer friendly. The community has created tons of applications that are way above and beyond anything that the other CMS's could fathom.

That said, Drupal 7 is screwing up big time.

They keep emphasizing cooperation and collaboration over competition. It has gone to extremes.

As an example, Drupal 7 desperately needs a module to take care of uploading multiple files and/or images. A couple of solutions have already been created, and they work well. Unfortunately, some self appointed gatekeepers think that an already official project based on Plupload should have it covered. Plupload has been out for over a year and still cannot do its job. The projects that work are considered 'duplicates' of the project that....get this....doesn't work.

This is one small example.

They have done the same thing with video player solutions, jquery plugins, meta tag modules, you tube modules....

And yet they continue to push the "media" module, which is supposed to do EVERYTHING whether you need it or not. And project media has proven itself to be one gigantic abortion.

Drupal is working really hard to destroy itself.

I have self developed three CMS from scratch for government with big demands to tell you my experience.

But honestly, people who wanna use a CMS just wanna USE THEM, they wanna have easy GUI, with easy ways to update plugins/modules and the core. They want easy ways to add new layout or create articles and more.

Drupal have a lot of weaknesses which many too often forgets, the development of the core doesn't go hand in hand with release development of 3rd party modules which many relies on. So always with new big releases it takes atleast six months before modules are starting to mature.

Same when you try to upgrade modules and core, it often ends up in broken site and you need to "fix" things manually.

Drupal developers and fans may brag about how many modules there are available, but most are available still for the older version 6 of Drupal and very many of those for version 7 are in dev or beta releases.

It's all a question about quality and easy to use, not always that the web site installer need to be a geek to be able performing that task.

I set up my website using firstly Front Page but then changed to Kompozer and now need to move it up to something more sophisticated, and am thinking of Drupal as my host supports it. But reading through these posts just thought I should point out, in case you are not aware, that Google has recently de-indexed thousands of WordPress sites.

Why has Google de-indexed these WordPres sites?

I haven't found any articles on mass de-indexing targeted at WordPress. I would guess that if anything like that happened it wouldn't be because of anything specific to WordPress sites. Google might de-index a site for violating some linking policies, or they might have found old blog entries where the comments aren't monitored and have filled with spam posts. A well-designed site shouldn't have any problems with Google, whatever the underlying software.

Google does NOT de-index sites simply because they use WordPress!
Google de-indexed WordPress sites that were spammy, had mainly duplicate content, otherwise of low content value or had malware/links to malware sites.
Consider the millions of WordPress sites around - thousands are junk... But that's not because they use WordPress - it's because of the content...
WordPress is a very good system - I run several of my own sites on WordPress and many customer sites too, which are well indexed and do very well in Google SERP.
Use WordPress without worry - as long as the CONTENT is GOOD, Google will index the site, and keep it indexed

I've used Joomla for 4 or 5 years now. While I find it easy to use, clients often get thrown by it and it requires considerable training. For that reason, I started leveraging WordPress for sites. With version 3 the custom post types really opened up the possibilities with it for rolling your own complex sites without requiring gobs of plugins. Now, though, I am seriously considering learning Drupal 7 -- seems odd to teach myself Drupal 6 at this juncture (right?).

You might start by looking at their modules to see if there are any you think you'd absolutely need that haven't got Drupal 7 versions yet. If so, stick to Drupal 6. If not, Drupal 7 would probably be a good version to start with.

At present I use WordPress, but for the purpose of self-development I would like to try Joomla and Drupal

Thanks for the article.
I'm having exactly this dilemma right now and drupal/Joomla are part of it.
I'm checking some Asp.net platforms as well.
I'll appreciate your advise.
On my new website, a side of an ecommerce site, I should implement a web service that should support 1000 hits a minute.
It's kind of validation service that use the configuration set by the users and return true/false.
By your experience and knowledge, which platform should I choose?
Thanks

Some people mentioned that Drupal can be pretty slower than wordpress. This is not very likely if you can combine Drupal with Varnish, Nginx and the Drupal Caching facility. I can handle about 1000 users/min in a 512MB RAM Server (I used another machine for DB server).

If you want performance/speed -> wordpress
If you want flexibility/extensibility and you can handle the configurations on your server-> drupal
If you want an easy to use/popular platform -> joomla

I have been working with Drupal since 4.7 when I had a instant install from a previous hosting site. It is complicated but has so many functions in the community contributed modules that it is my goto CMS. Joomla seems similiar to MoveableType with the plugins but very easy to add content and structure. Wordpress is one step away from a template site but with the added advantages of a strong SEO engine and is the number one used CMS and won't be going anywhere. Who knows they could all be replaced with Facebook!

Drupal is really very powerful and developer friendly framework. Drupal is also very flexible and we can extend it at any direction and for any purpose.

WordPress to me is only ideal for bloggers; great for newbie bloggers, especially those who are not web developers and not techies. It makes blogging easy for bloggers with the interface.

While on the other hand, Drupal and Joomla are great for businessmen who want to build professional, more expandable, neater, websites.

I administer Drupal and Joomla sites om my server but for my own development I go with Drupal because it seems to have the highest adherence to database theory and SQL. That's good for DB developers. In comparison, Wp and Jo are focusing on making it easy to non programmers with automation. It is not the main focus in Drupal but the high level of Drupal SQL centricity can make things simple: here is an example. http://drupal.org/node/157632

Centralpoint is crap

Robert:

I would like to ask you to watch this video on Centralpoint, by Oxcyon. We have been called the alternative to Sharepoint, offer source, and have been in business for 12 years, with over 320 clients. The biggest differentiators are: We integrate wtih LDAP/AD (out of the box), and support Audience, Taxonomy and Roles based filtration for each record (which no other CMS can claim), making us the most robust and universal platform out there today...

Centralpoint has been named amongst the TOP 10 CMS vendors, by Business Software.com, and can be proven via demo or trial download.

Centralpoint in Action
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qFx17dAlTQ&hd=1

Centralpoint Powerpoint overview
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucwjys47igI

Thank you
Mike

This is a comparison of free open source CMS! Stop advertising here you moron.

Mike, You may not be aware but Plone CMS/Portal at www.plone.org has all and more of the functionality of Centralpoint. It is used by hundreds, maybe thousands as a very diverse Web presence solutions, from US Central Intelligence and FBI government agencies, to worls nenowned universities like Oxford, Columbia Univ, Harvard, Penn State, Yale and Cambridge universities, as well as NASA, the entire government of Brazil and many divisions of other countries governments - as primary Web presence software.

One standout function of Plone that differentiates it from most others is the robust security model and framework. In OWASP, Cert.org reports and evaluations on security over past several years, Plone is amoung the one percent highest in security, and considerable better than the other 99 percent.

I have site in drupal 7. The site is very very slow. It consumes almost 100% CPU resources even if only one user is surfing the site.

The site has multiple content types. I have to migrate data from other site so I am using few modules for migrating data.

I am using few more modules like Image cropping, Autosave, Page title, Module for Meta tags etc

I dont think I am using any module which can slow down the site.

Pls help to figure the root cause of slowness and improve the performance of the site.

The first thing I'd check would be your memory allocation, Swati. If your server instance doesn't have enough memory available it could cause the web server/PHP to swap to disk a lot, which would dramatically slow things down. You can get more information on checking free memory on Linux with this article:

http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/memory-management-with-free

Drupal can be a very fast CMS if the server is optimized for Drupal. It allows many ways to integrate with cacheing various mechanisms. Its common to use a php opcode cache with Drupal. So something like APC will help. Also, memcached will also help. Searching the Internet you will also find many helpful pages about speeding up Drupal.

But probably the easiest is to look at the Drupal performance page and make sure CSS and JavaScript is aggregated, and the expires cache is set. Make sure the php memory is set to big enough for your website (64 MB is usually ok for D7 websites).

A very useful module for anonymous users is to enable the boost module which will help a lot.

There is more perfomance gains if you use the Pressflow version of Drupal. Use Varnish reverse proxy, Maria DB (MySQL replacement). Some people use Redis.

After years using all of them, I must say they all have pluses and minuses. But, I like to put them in a single category and compare them to custom php / mySQL programming. I believe, see and feel that custom programming is much better for performance, security and customization than any of them. For me, they were what I used before I was able to hand code php / mySQL applications.

I think preference really comes down to skill level and goals. I used to code in HTML and some CSS and Javascript, but was never really good at it. I'm just not someone who likes writing code. So it was a HUGE pain and way too much work for me to even approach having a website I actually liked. When I discovered WordPress, I was amazed at the simplicity, speed and ease of creating a blog site that looked pretty slick while having some decent functionality at the same time. I thought, "Man this is cool!" If you are an aspiring writer who wants to jam out articles, WordPress all the way. And it was open source! But because WordPress is really geared toward blogging, I quickly ran into limitations for what I wanted to do. I wanted to make "real" websites. Ones that have users, content management, templates, floating menus etc. I thought, "If there is a free CMS for blogs, do they have anything like that for more complicated web sites?". Then I discovered Joomla, and I was blown away. It's not perfect, and it has it's share of quirks and bugs, but for a person who can code a little (when they absolutely have to!) Joomla is amazing. If you learn it and work it correctly (not hard on either point) You can have really good looking and functional websites and if you use a 3rd party template editor like Artisteer, you can almost create an entire website without writing a LINE of code. It's obvious that the designers really wanted to make a powerful tool, usable by anyone who can work a control panel and use a WSYWIG editor. So Joomla is what I use, and for those reasons. Also, there are thousands of add-ons and templates. I have worked with many of them, and while they differ in quality and some cost money, there is some great functionality you can add to a Joomla site and the vast majority of them are free. But Joomla has some limitations in the way the site is structured, so if you want a lot of "flexibility" of the site "model" or structure, it's probably TOO "user oriented". But if you want "top of the line" functionality, President Obama's Whithouse.gov website uses Drupal. I haven't used Drupal myself, but I have been all over that website and it's very feature rich and very nicely laid out. I think that says a TON about Drupal's capabilities, but for me, it's just too much hands on code. But sounds quite nice for programmers. Just my two bits...

does any one know if Drupal is like Joomla in that the entire web site can be finished locally and then migrated to a server like Go Daddy or the many others. This would help me in my choice of CMS.

Yes, Tom, Drupal can be worked on locally and migrated to a live server exactly the same as WordPress or Joomla.

If you're not familiar with setting up a local Apache server, Acquia offer a very useful installation package which will setup a LAMP stack and Acquia Drupal 7.

See 'Dev Desktop': https://www.acquia.com/downloads

Joomla and WordPress both are good and better open source content management system. Many people think that WordPress can be used only for blogging, you can easily configure it for other work. Also, it is very easy to install on server. The people who have enough knowledge about coding also will build the website without any difficulties. Joomla on other hand is best CMS for designers and administrators. The choice of these website depends on the website purpose and knowledge of web development and design.

I think the fact that RackSpace's Knowledge Center runs on Drupal says enough...

Joomla's versioning cycle is quirky and auto-updating is still not stable as of this date. Fragments and neo-incompatibles left from previous versions; a pain to sort out (and delete). Some of the best add-ons get free-version-abandoned as the authors go for profit. So, where Joomla excels in featured add-ons, it loses that edge over time until the next cool add-on appears and diassapears for $$.

If you have several small sites to maintain, it becomes a time-waster keeping up with your favorite tools and features.

If you can keep your CMS installation and toolbox lean, you will have less headache and disappointment.

Open source, in my opinion, was to be a sandbox for a developer collective to build apps that would remain open and free. Instead, apps like Joomla become a core for commercialism. You get hooked on a freebee ... it becomes another $$ drain in the end.

After working with a Sybase (Advantage) file-based database for several years in the past, I find MySQL-based systems to be slow ... too much data in one nebulous shoebox. Backup to a development client becomes a two-step process, rather than just downloading files from the server. A diversified database made up of many files can lend itself to data re-use from established site to new site, or offer a central repository for reusable data shared with many CMS.

Just some thoughts ...

The update from 1.5 to anything higher is difficult. But from 1.6 on, I have moved multiple sites with a single click.

I created sites using templates with WordPress and Joomla. I downloaded and was playing around with Drupal. To me, Drupal seemed complicated to grasp and a bit quirky to use. I like using WordPress, but I really love to use Joomla.

I don't think that there's 'one-size-fits-all solution" too, but what I am sure of - you never know which is better before you really try. Since the platforms are free, I support the author here, just test each CMS and you'll see what fits you. I don't think you'll need to choose between all three, as they are rather different and the article makes it clear, but that's none of my business.

One last piece of advice, I recently found a guide on migrating the contents of a CMS to a new one, and it looks pretty easy to do, plus no cost http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up9QSD--Zu8

Drupal Best Because if you use joomla then we will have world worst Joomla JED Team.JED Team will screwed up your life
On the Otherhand Drupal Team has Strong Support.

Im currently writing a paper on drupal and want to reiterate some points already made about drupal caching, recommending pressflow as a faster alternative is not the best route out there at the moment, Pressflow is still using drupal 6 even though this is still supported by the drupal community more security issues are present than the current drupal 7 version.

Using a clean drupal 7 with APC cache, Boost, Memcache and Entity cache will hands down offer more speed than wordpress and wp-cache, if you coupled this with Cloudflare and the drupal 7 plugin you are on to a winning setup

Varnish was mentioned at top of the thread for increasing performance. Drupal 7 is Varnish-compatible without the need for Pressflow. Just install http://drupal.org/project/varnish in Drupal and on your server. Varnish installation on Ubuntu is painless - https://www.varnish-cache.org/installation/ubuntu. For most sites, Varnish installation offers the quickest path to seeing serious performance gains.

We wrote an article about this very thing... Here is an article detailing why we choose Joomla for many of our clients:
http://www.openpotion.com/blog/web-design/item/34-why-we-choose-joomla-over-drupal-and-wordpress

Here is an infographic showing cool stats about Joomla: http://www.openpotion.com/blog/web-design/item/62-joomla-infographic-joomla-2006-2012

In a nutshell Joomla can be setup to be as easy or easier to use than wordpress, but has a built in robust ACL system and nearly every addon has easy front-end submission for users. It is a nice midway point between the complexity of Drupal and the ease of Wordpress.

The module system is far superior to the sidebar system of wordpress, and Joomla is less theme/template dependant.

We build about half our sites in wordpress however, since we can do small brochure type sites quite quickly.

Hope this all helps!

hi, any body know about compare security in those are?is it safe for governmental website?

All three have had security problems here and there, so I can't say which is more secure at this time. Most security issues on these CMSes will come from third-party modules more often than the core CMS software.

On government sites, all three maintain lists of government sites using their CMS:

http://joomlagov.info/
http://groups.drupal.org/government-sites
http://wordpress.org/showcase/tag/government/

Of those, the one with the highest profile is probably the White House website, which runs Drupal.

If you're going by government sites, you might also look into Plone - their CMS is used by the CIA and FBI (though it's written in python, while the three in this article are written in PHP).

Interesting that this webpage is on Drupal 7. I guess if Rackspace is using Drupal it says something about Drupal.

From what I have read Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla are all very capable CMSs with their own huge communities.

I have used Drupal for years, I have found it to be very flexible and secure, and my clients are happy with it. I have never needed to use the other CMSs. I am guessing the same could be said by other developers who use other CMS systems.

I prefer wordpress because it is developer friendly cms. It makes blogging easy to use and develop a website fast..Great Comparison!

Thank you, I was wondering what to do with a new site that I'm working on...

Good work!

You're all forgetting the big picture. Your only commenting on the basic framework of the CMS. Its the plugins and how many there are that's the main thing you need to focus on.

It's the same with phones, you've got everyone arguing "iPhone is better" or "Android is better" but it's the apps that are available that make the phone what it is.

Its not about which has the better image or who's is more popular. It's about which does the things you want it too!

All my main sites run on Joomla, because it has all the plugins that I need and they work very well. Wordpress (no matter what version) has an issue with CPU usage when you install a certain amount of Plugins. I run all my blogs on Wordpress and I think its a brilliant system.

The problem with Drupal is its harder to code for and therefore has fewer modules and themes. For instance, I just searched for the following:

"Joomla photo gallery" - Google's first result was the Joomla extensions directory

"Wordpress photo gallery" - Google's first result was the Wordpress plugin directory

"Drupal photo gallery" - Google's first result was the Drupal support page (someone looking its possible to get a photo gallery for Drupal)

I did the same again with "(CMS name) Facebook comments"

Again, Joomla returned the most results with Wordpress coming second although the Drupal search did link to a module this time round instead of a support page.

Summary: If the plugins/modules are there for what you need, that's all that matters. Do a search for what you need first before developing a site in one CMS only to find you can't complete it due to missing plugins/modules.

Juan,

I searched the Google Index for "Drupal photo gallery" and got different results (titles listed).

1st (a good tutorial): Creating an image gallery in Drupal 7 | MegaDrupal
2nd (a discussion about Drupal Galleries): Drupal 7 Photo Gallery Solution? | Drupal Groups
3rd: Create an Awesome Photo Gallery in Drupal 6 | 3 Waves Media

etc... all good results well connected to the semantic meaning of the keyword phrase.

If you search for "Drupal photo gallery module" (modules in Drupal = plugins) you get more specific results.

Drupal has some very powerful modules (plugins) which if you know what you are doing (search for tutorials) can very easily/quickly produce custom photo galleries without the need to code. And yes there are many a gallery module for Drupal.


Drupal developers tend to combine features from various modules (plugins) into a single module (or modules) which offer the combined features (as apposed to creating competing modules/plugins). Therefore it could be there are less photo gallery modules (plugins) in Drupal but those that exist cover a wide range of use cases and tend to integrate well without code conflicts with other modules/plugins.

To me, Wordpress isn't actually a CMS. It can be shoe-horned into becoming one. But it's really a blogging engine. Drupal is designed for the enterprise. It's great, but it does almost nothing "out-the-box". Joomla is my happy medium, though personally, I'm leaning ever more towards Drupal as my php skills become more advanced (It's many, many years since I was a developer professionally, and even when I was it was on the Microsoft stack).

Which is the most powerful CMS in WEBGIS?

Why isn't security one of the criteria for comparison?

None of these CMS will do any good if they are compromised.

Drupal has a good reputation for security.

As far as I recall modules (plugins) are first security reviewed before released to on drupal.org. There is also a third party service which will review your Drupal based website so you don't have to only rely on your developers security knowledge. When drupal modules are found to have vulnerabilities it a notes as a security advisory - the module developer(s) are notified and they have a specific date by which the module needs ot be fixed else the module is flagged as a security risk on the modules URL on drupal.org.

There is also a module for security review.

Drupal's security team has 40 members. Not sure the number is important but it shows a strong commitment to security. Drupal.org approach to security is transparent so often there are advisories from the smallest low risk issues to higher risk issues.
Drupal.org has a regular security releases of Drupal core to enable users to take advantage of the more secure Drupal releases.

whitehouse.gov uses Drupal which I think says something about its security.

hi

i am french...

the france use drupal : http://www.france.fr/

france = PR8 , white house = PR9

says it all, drupal is very good séo and stability !!!!

Pages


Add new comment