Drupal vs Joomla

Many people don’t know what’s the best CMS for their website: is it Joomla or is it Drupal? Every CMS has it advantages and disadvantages, it’s not like Drupal is better than Joomla or the other way around. It all depends on what you want to use your CMS for, here’s a Drupal vs Joomla (or Joomla vs Drupal) overview of features of both CMS scripts.

We are of course a Drupal themes website, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be objective in this Drupal vs Joomla comparison. Drupal has its lacks, Joomla has its weak points. We’ll go over some of the features of both CMS systems, feel free to comment with some additions that are useful to other users.

SEO

Drupal: Nice, simple and good for SEO URLs, very good search engine optimalisation with every standard install.
Joomla: A standard install doesn’t have any good SEO features. You can get OpenSEF or SEF Advance to improve the SEO of your Joomla site.

Difficulty of using

Drupal: Drupal also has a separate admin area with a nice graphical interface that changes when you install another Drupal theme.
Joomla: Joomla features a very clean and easy to use graphical admin panel in a separate admin area.

Managing your content

Drupal: The option to add categories and optional subcategories, also possibility to have cross-categorization.
Joomla: Not really a cross-categorization, category management could have been better.

Learning curve

Drupal: Drupal is a tad more hardcore than Joomla, but it’s still very easy to install Drupal and manage it on your site.
Joomla: Very easy to use and install, a great community is watiing to answer your questions about the Joomla CMS.

Multiple sites support

Drupal: All Drupal installs have standard multisites support.
Joomla: Unfortunately, Joomla doesn’t support multiple sites on one Joomla install.

Blog support

Drupal: Although WordPress is still the king of blog CMS systems, Drupal does a good job in offering some blogging options.
Joomla: Again, WordPress is the lord of blogging scripts, but Joomla has some nice standard blogging options as well as extra blogging extensions.

Themes and Templates support

Drupal: Drupal didn’t have that many theme and template developers in the past, but we’re seeing a very nice improvement since Drupal 6. More and more developers port popular themes from other CMS systems such as WordPress and Joomla to Drupal, and more commercial theme developers are also doing nice efforts to bring more paid themes to the Drupal platform.
Joomla: Joomla has had a very strong developers community since the beginning. It has a wide range of both free and commercial Joomla templates.

Shoping cart options

Drupal: Since a couple of months, Drupal has Ubercart. It’s still in its early phases, but it’s developing very fast.
Joomla: You can integrate OSCommerce in Joomla, or you can get Virtuemart.

Multimedia features

Drupal: Drupal has various features that support podcasts, videos and other multimedia stuff.
Joomla: Joomla has just as many multimedia options as Drupal, so no big differences here.