Drupal vs Joomla – Which CMS Is the Best for Your Website?

Choosing a Content Management System (CMS) is an important decision that can significantly affect the performance of your website. Hence, it is important to choose a good CMS for your website. However, there are plenty of Content Management Systems that are available today and each of them has its advantages and disadvantages. With that being said, there are two CMS that shines among the rest of the competition: Drupal & Joomla. Let’s have a closer look at what these Content Management Systems can offer and we will also dive straight into both of their major pros and cons that will ultimately help you make better decisions before you invest in a CMS.

Drupal

Drupal is a popular open-source CMS that is used by millions of organizations around the world for building and managing their websites. Drupal is also a good CMS for building highly advanced sites that require complex features and functionality. Since it is open-source, you will also get additional benefits such as increased flexibility, scalability, security, and cost benefits that other proprietary CMS cannot offer. Being an open-source software also gives you the ability to download it for free. This helps developers around the world to contribute by monitoring its source code for bugs & fixing those rapidly. Although Drupal is quite easy for experienced developers, it can be pretty much hard for a novice. Here are some major pros and cons of Drupal that you must be aware of.

Pros of Drupal

#1 Security

As we said above, one of the key strengths of Drupal is the security it offers. The security updates of Drupal are thorough and its security team is working 24X7 to deploy patches and fixes. Hence, no other CMS that is currently available in our market can match the security offered by Drupal. Due to the high security that Drupal offers, it is highly popular among government organizations. Drupal may be your go-to CMS If you are planning to build a highly complex site that hosts thousands of contents and advanced functionality that doesn’t compromise security.

#2 Huge Community Support

Another benefit that you get out of Drupal is its community support. When compared to other content management systems, Drupal currently has one of the most helpful communities of developers. Because of its strong community support, you can pretty much solve any Drupal-related query that you may encounter during your Drupal Development. All you have to do is a quick Google search.

#3 Scalability

Apart from being highly secure and flexible, Drupal is also scalable. Drupal enables you to easily scale up your website to accommodate complex features and functionalities by using its vast amount of modules that it offers. Drupal modules can easily integrate with Drupal core and can also efficiently connect with other modules no matter how different they are. Customizing your website is a lot easier with Drupal as it allows you to build a completely new module if there are no existing modules available that match your requirements. You can always hire Drupal developer from a Drupal development company if you don’t have enough technical knowledge to build one for your website.

Cons of Drupal

#1 Learning Curve

One of the major cons that are associated with Drupal is its higher learning curve. Only knowing PHP just won’t cut it when it comes to Drupal development. Hiring a novice PHP developer who doesn’t have a lot of experience with Drupal can delay your web development as he/she will take more time to learn about this CMS and get on track. Hence you have to only hire developers who have good knowledge and experience working with Drupal.

Joomla

Joomla is one of the popular and widely used Content Management Systems. It is a highly powerful & fully customizable content management system actively used by millions of individuals, and enterprises around the world. Joomla powers over two million active websites and is estimated that it is downloaded over 100 million times. You can choose from thousands of extensions that Joomla delivers. Having that said, let’s dive into some major pros and cons of Joomla.

Pros of Joomla

#1 Great For SEO

When compared to Drupal, Joomla has enhanced SEO capabilities and tools that enable search engine crawlers to easily index the page. This will help your website to come on top of the search engine results page when coupled with SEO optimized web content. Joomla’s frontend supports semantic HTML markup and this contributes more to its SEO performance.

#2 Great Collection of Premium Templates

The collection of templates that are available on Joomla are one of the best when compared with its main rival Drupal. In Joomla, you can choose from thousands of premium templates for your niche. These premium templates come with pre-packed premium extensions and page builders out of the box, which means you can further enhance the functionality of your website. This is good news for millions of website owners and Joomla developers as they can modify these themes to suit their specific business requirements. Moreover, Joomla provides premium themes for pretty much all types of business verticals that range from manufacturing to healthcare.

#3 Caching & Performance Mechanisms

For the success of any website, performance is one of the most important aspects that you should give more priority to. Luckily, Joomla is on top when we consider the performance management and website optimization capabilities. Joomla comes with hundreds of tools and features out of the box that boosts the performance of your website. When compared to Drupal, Joomla has got nice built-in caching mechanisms that come with complex caching tools. This will help you to easily manage caching mechanisms for both the admin side and front-end areas of your site.

Cons of Joomla

#1 Limited Technical Customization

More experienced developers can run into problems while writing in the Joomla Script. Joomla doesn’t always deliver you with premium customization effects. However, you can easily get those effects if you are using Drupal for your website.

Drupal vs Joomla – Who Wins the Final Battle?

To sum up, Drupal is more flexible, secure, scalable, and customizable than Joomla. It offers you more security when compared with any other CMS that is out there in the market. Whereas Joomla on the other hand offers you better performance management, SEO, and website optimization capabilities. However, in the battle between Drupal vs Joomla, there can only be one winner and the victory is for Drupal. Drupal beats out Joomla when it comes to security, scalability, content management, and community support. However, you must always consult with your software development company before making any final decisions about your CMS.