CMS Comparison: Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress

by Ashleigh Davis on 27 March 2011 | 7 Comments

Article Id: 1641 | | Article

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 News Publishing:The New York Observer	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
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.

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Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 07/20/2011 - 13:43

A couple notes on Drupal

Comment:

Ease of Use 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.

Caching Plug-Ins 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.

Submitted by jered.heeschen on Wed, 07/20/2011 - 13:57

Re: Drupal

Comment:

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).

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 07/28/2011 - 05:05

Drupal's Biggest Problem

Comment:

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.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 08/29/2011 - 07:51

Re

Comment:

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

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue, 08/30/2011 - 14:29

drupal/joomla/Asp.net platform

Comment:

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

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 12/01/2011 - 00:28

Drupal Fan

Comment:

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!

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sat, 05/05/2012 - 21:59

Drupal is the Best!!

Comment:

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.