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Joomla vs Drupal – Which CMS is better?

Jun 29, 2010

2 minute read

Content Management System (CMS) is a collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment. A CMS allows large number of people to contribute to and share stored data. Drupal and Joomla are the two top open source content management systems these days so a comparison between them is inevitable.

Comparison between Drupal and Joomla

Features	Drupal	Joomla
Content Construction	Drupal allows multilevel category.	Joomla has sections and single level of category.
	Drupal provides support for tagging the content.	Joomla lacks this feature.
	Drupal can create different content types.	Joomla has only one content type. But all above features can be extended through custom componet like jsebold , k2 ,sobi2 etc
Ease of Use	Drupal has text based admin panel that requires some time understanding the terminology.	Joomla has excellent GUI and is quite easy to understand.
Template/Themes	Very few commercial themes are available in Drupal.	Joomla has a wide selection of free and commercial designs
	Drupal has excellent overriding features.	Joomla has limited overide functions
	Drupal supports multiple themes.	Only a single template can be used with Joomla at one time.
Access Control List	In Drupal, user can create unlimited user level s, roles, users groups and set permissions.	Joomla has only 3 user levels and 7 user groups.
Performance	Page loading fast in Drupal.	Page loading slow in Joomla
SEO	Drupal has clean search engine friendly (SEF) urls and code is generally well-optimized.	Joomla requires a third party extension to have SEF urls.
Internationalization	Drupal has inbuilt support for multilingual sites.	Joomla requires third party extension e.g. joomfish.
Multisites	Drupal can create multisites and sub-sites and data can be shared between the sites.	Joomla does not have the multisite feature.
Development	Drupal does not follow the MVC structure, instead it uses limited OOPS concept.	Joomla follow MVC structure.
	Drupal can be extended through new module. Drupal provides hooks to extend system.	Joomla can be extended through new extension and module and provide plugins to extend system capability.
	Drupal provides template override to theme of every page	Joomla has limited template override features.
E-commerce	Drupal has ubercart for ecommerce	Joomla has virtuemart
Forums	Drupal has inbuilt forum support	Joomla requires Agora, Kunena
Document Management	Drupal lacks this	Joomla has docman
Photo Galleries & Event Calendars	Requires third party modules and extensions	Requires third party modules and extensions

Conclusion
Joomla is easy to use, simple and intuitive. Any novice user can use Joomla to build and run a good website. While Drupal has a bit complicated terminology which is not easy to use and requires high level of technical knowledge to understand and build successful websites.