Trying to decide between Joomla vs WordPress for your next website? While there are tons of good reasons to use WordPress, we recognize that WordPress isn’t the only content management system to help you build a website.
We’ve already spent time looking at Drupal vs WordPress, as well as WordPress vs hosted solutions like Squarespace. Now, we’re back to do the same for Joomla.
We’ll dig into each content management system and give you a better idea of each platform’s pros and cons.
And, to make this even more helpful, we’re going to follow the exact same format as our Drupal vs WordPress comparison so that you can easily compare all three platforms against one another.
Joomla vs WordPress: Introduction And What The Numbers Say
Both WordPress and Joomla are self-hosted, open-source content management systems that have been around for well over 10 years.
Originally launched as a blogging platform in 2003, WordPress is now a multi-purpose content management system that powers over 43.5% of all the websites on the Internet (including a lot more than just blogs!). In terms of the market share of the content management system market, WordPress holds an even more dominant 62.5% market share.
Launched in 2005, Joomla is almost just as old as WordPress. Behind WordPress, Joomla is the second most popular content management system, powering around 3% of all the websites on the Internet and holding 5.4% of the content management system market.
While Joomla still retains this second place crown for now, its content management system market share has been shrinking since at least 2010 and its overall share of the website market shrank for the first time ever in 2017.
You can see this trend play out visually if you look at a Google Trends comparison between “WordPress” and “Joomla” from 2004 to present. Joomla was actually leading or equal until 2010 when WordPress began dominating:
All that to say – WordPress is still growing, while Joomla is slowly moving in the opposite direction. That doesn’t mean Joomla has nothing to offer, though!
What Are Some Of The Commonly Touted Advantages Of WordPress And Joomla?
If you search around for Joomla vs WordPress, you can find plenty of ideological battles between developers on both sides of the spectrum. In general, here are some of the broad reasons you’ll see on each side for why one platform is the best:
WordPress Advantages
- Ease of use – WordPress is generally regarded as being the easiest content management system to use, especially for non-developers.
- Better suited for blogging – WordPress includes a distinction for “blog posts” vs “static pages” right out of the box, whereas Joomla just includes a single “article” type that you can manipulate with categories.
- Extensibility – WordPress has, by far, the largest ecosystem of WordPress plugins and WordPress themes, which makes it easy to extend your site with a variety of different features.
- Huge support community – because WordPress is so popular, it’s easy to find help via the massive third-party ecosystem of blogs, Facebook groups, and developers.
- Lower development costs – this huge community also means you can generally get development work done a bit cheaper.
Joomla Advantages
- More advanced user management – Joomla offers a more advanced system for user access controls and user management out of the box.
- Flexible for different content types – Joomla’s components and modules give you a bit more flexibility for displaying non-standard content types.
- Multilingual support – Joomla has multilingual support built-in to the core, while WordPress requires you to use a third-party plugin.
- Multiple templates – Joomla lets you use different templates for different pieces of content, whereas you can only use one WordPress theme.
How Easy Is It To Get Up And Running With WordPress And Joomla?
While Joomla is a more beginner-friendly option than something like Drupal, WordPress is still the easiest and fastest way to create a website.
WordPress Ease Of Use And Learning Curve
If you’re just creating a “regular” website with static content and/or a blog, it’s possible to get up and running with something that looks good in just a couple of hours.
Most hosts include WordPress auto-installers or even come with pre-installed WordPress.
From there, the WordPress interface is easy enough that most casual users can start creating content right away.
Newer additions like the WordPress Customizer now also make it easy for people to make safe, code-free theme changes, which is especially helpful as more and more WordPress themes are embracing the Customizer in interesting ways:
For more advanced content designs, the myriad of page builder plugins make it easy to build layouts using drag and drop and the upcoming Gutenberg editor will make it even easier for users to create unique content.
Joomla Ease Of Use And Learning Curve
Like WordPress, most web hosts sport a Joomla auto-installer that makes it easy to get the Joomla software installed.
From there, you’ll need to put a little more time and effort into your site, though. As we said, Joomla uses a combination of Articles and Categories. So before you start creating content, you need to create categories for the type of content you want to create.
It’s nothing too overwhelming, but it is a bit more of an involved process than WordPress, especially for non-developers.
The Joomla TinyMCE Article editor is almost identical to WordPress’ implementation of the TinyMCE editor, so there’s no huge difference on that front:
But those who aren’t already familiar with the Joomla interface are going to be bogged down by the sheer number of options available in the various admin screens:
With that being said, Joomla does have some user-friendly editing tools, like page builder extensions, that make things a little less developer-oriented.
Speaking of extensions…
How Can You Extend Your Website With Joomla And WordPress?
Both Joomla and WordPress offer multiple add-on types that you can use to extend your site:
- Functionality – WordPress calls these plugins, while Joomla calls them extensions
- Aesthetics – WordPress calls these themes, while Joomla calls them templates
WordPress’ extension marketplace is larger in terms of sheer numbers, but both platforms have a good deal of variety.
How Many Plugins And Themes Does WordPress Have?
Currently, WordPress has:
- 54,000+ free plugins at the official WordPress.org plugin directory, plus thousands of premium plugins
- 5,000+ free themes at the official WordPress.org plugin directory, plus thousands of premium themes
How Many Extensions And Templates Does Joomla Have?
Currently, Joomla has:
- ~8,000 extensions listed at the official Joomla extension library
There’s no official Joomla template library, so it’s hard to get a number for available Joomla templates. Some basic Google searching turns up a wealth of (mostly) premium Joomla templates, though.
Are WordPress And Joomla Equally Secure?
The core software of both Joomla and WordPress is secure. Additionally, each platform also features third-party plugins or extensions to add additional security, as well as easy in-dashboard update systems to help keep everything up-to-date.
With that being said…human error is always a real thing and, because each platform is extensible, there are bound to be security issues.
According to Sucuri’s data, Joomla sites seem to experience a higher number of hacked sites in comparison to their market share. But again, there’s nothing inherent in each that makes one platform more or less secure in the majority of situations.
WordPress Security
According to Sucuri’s Hacked Website Report – 2016/Q3, WordPress accounted for 74% of the hacked websites in Sucuri’s sample, which is ~25% larger than its market share of 58.9% (at the time):
Despite that, WordPress actually fared better than Joomla according to Sucuri’s data…
Joomla Security
In that same report, Joomla sites accounted for 17% of all the hacked websites, which is ~132% higher than Joomla’s 7.3% market share at the time:
Interestingly, though, 84% of the hacked Joomla sites were running out of date software at the time of infection, compared to just 61% for WordPress sites:
This bolsters the idea that, “platforms aren’t insecure. Out-of-date platforms are insecure.”
Migrate From Joomla to WordPress
If you’re currently using Joomla and are looking for an easy way to migrate to WordPress, we recommend checking out WordHerd. They are an official Kinsta partner and provide full-service website migration services to move data from any CMS (Joomla) platform into WordPress.
WordHerd handles migrations of all sizes, from small businesses to large enterprises. In addition to CMS migration, the WordHerd team is also well-versed in assisting with CRM data migration.
If you want a more DIY method, you can check out the following plugin: FG Joomla to WordPress.
Joomla vs WordPress: Which Is Better?
Like our Drupal comparison, we think asking “which is better?” by itself is a flawed question. Both platforms have their advantages and neither is superior in 100% of all situations.
Instead, you should ask, “which platform is better for the specific needs of the website that I’m creating?”
WordPress is probably better for the vast majority of websites and should be your default choice for most situations because:
- It’s the most user-friendly content management system, especially for non-developers
- You can quickly get up and running with an attractive website without lots of development hours/costs
- It’s easy to find free and professional help if you run into any issues
But if you are a developer, or are willing to hire one, Joomla can give you more flexibility for displaying different types of content and managing users.
The one thing to consider here is that Joomla’s market share is declining, which isn’t the case for WordPress or Drupal.
While Joomla is still second place and not going away anytime soon, there’s something to be said for picking a growing content management system when you’re looking towards the future.
Do you agree or disagree when it comes to Joomla vs WordPress? Let us know in the comments!
Joomla!® logo is a registered trademark of Open Source Matters, Inc.
Brian has a huge passion for WordPress, has been using it for over a decade, and even develops a couple of premium plugins. Brian enjoys blogging, movies, and hiking. Connect with Brian on Twitter.
An awesome article, a debt of gratitude is in order for composing it up, and I think your last line totals everything up pleasantly. Agree with your point of view.
Let me guess :) This comparison by a fully managed WordPress hosting provider will lean towards WP in this comparison
Hey Stanley, I think that is pretty obvious :) We do list advantages of Joomla over WordPress. Multilingual and more advanced user access controls out of the box are just a few of the areas Joomla really shines. If you have more, we’d be glad to hear them and update our post!
Totally agree with you.
That’s why I converted all my Joomla sites to WordPress. For the ones who want to do the same, you can use this WP plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/fg-joomla-to-wordpress/
And what about this plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/cms2cms-joomla-to-wp-migration/ ? In my opinion, it is way better service for website migrations, especially its Demo option.
yes, You are right…
I never used Joomla and I am happy with using WordPress.
I use WordPress for some sites and Joomla for others. I agree with all that’s said about themes and so on, but there are two key issues which effectively dictate my choice.
Multilanguage – In WordPress the Polylang plugin works perfectly for me (in a 3-language site). Polylang is very user-friendly. The multi-language facility in Joomla is cumbersome and consumes an unreasonable amount of time.
Controlling user access – I have a one-language site that is for registered users only. Users are assigned to certain user groups and only see content that is relevant to them. As you say, Joomla is better for this; much, much better in fact. I have tried 2 or 3 times to do this in WordPress and have given up.
Hey Alan, yes we agree there are definitely some good plugins out there that do make multilingual easier in WordPress. In fact, we have an in-depth tutorial on this: https://kinsta.com/blog/wordpress-multilingual/
Yes, user access in WordPress has always been tricky. Again, this is probably where you’ll end up having to use a third-party plugin and sometimes these can get complex and confusing.
Web developer here who uses both. I prefer WordPress for my clients. The biggest issues I run into with Joomla are it’s much more difficult to train users how to use (it’s not intuitive to use at all), and it’s more difficult to update extensions & core without breaking the site.
For whatever reason, WordPress updates and WP plugin updates are easy to patch. One click, and ~99% of the time they work without issue. With Joomla the updates often seem to crash the site or conflict with other extensions, which throws error codes on the site. This means my clients have to spend more money paying me to troubleshoot why they can’t update a site or extension. And in several cases the clients just have to leave their sites not updated because any attempts to update breaks everything (and they don’t want to spend the $ to have me troubleshoot).
From a COST perspective, WordPress will be significantly cheaper to end users because you don’t need to hire a developer to perform updates and teach you how to use the CMS. As a developer I prefer Joomla because it keeps me busy and earning money, but if I was an end user I would much prefer WordPress. Joomla feels like it was designed in order to keep developers gainfully employed.
Great insights! Always good to hear a developer’s perspective on the two different platforms.
Interesting.
I currently have around 80 Joomla Website and I never brake a Website with an upgrade during the last 2 years.
Joomla 3 is way different than before. But you need to use decent extension.
Pro template + Page Builder + Akeeba + JCE and you can build 90% of any Website you want.
Then, you have the rest for any more complex Website.
And if something really happen, usually, it’s very easy to fix it. Error message under Joomla are way better then the error 500 of WordPress.
But as long your client are happy, guess there is no debate here.
I appreciate your in-depth and informative comparison.
Really Good writeup, I have always used WordPress for most of my websites, I enjoyed manipulating themes and plugin, finetunning them to suite my purpose, With WordPress I can do anything, most of the things i find interesting in WordPress is hard-coding of plugins…….. I HATE JOOMLA !!!
You left out one of the most important points.
WordPress (on LAMP) is easily tunable to 1,000,000+ requests/minute throughput.
Joomla… Drupal… All other CMS system rarely approach a fraction of this speed.
For high speed, high traffic sites, WordPress is the only real CMS option.
Hello,
I am running a website on wordpress and joomla 2.5. The blog part is on wordpress whereas all other functionality (forum, users management…) are on joomla.
I need to upgrade joomla from 2.5 to 3 but I strongly hesitate to do so. I wonder if I shouldn’t migrate to wordpress.
It would be easier to maintain but I am concerned by the datable sizes. If everything is in the content table, it will be very big and I am not sure the server will be able to handle it. There are also 100 k+ users and a lot of content managed by seblod (3000 contents).
Is there a maximal size for this table, so that the website runs well? I am using a shared hosting server and don’t want to change.
What would you choose : migrate every thing on wordpress or upgrade to joomla 3?
Tell me if you miss some elements to compare !
Thanks a lot for your help!!
Perrine
Hey Perrine,
There are no limitations to database sizes and these are what indexes are used for. A site like that would work fine here at Kinsta as we can help you select a plan with enough PHP workers which would work better for a large community site which typically has a lot of un-cached content.
However, if you’re using a shared host I would probably recommend against moving it to WordPress. Large WordPress community sites need a quality host to perform well.
Thanks a lot Brian, that helps!!
I use Joomla for government sites that are too large and complex for WordPress. We have numerous contributing editors that maintain their sections with daily updates and we find Joomla simple to use and very robust.
There are tons of QuickStart Joomla templates, with InspireThemes having some of the best. With these themes you can be up and running in an hour or less. SiteGround has a one-step Joomla installation application that makes the installation process a breeze.
There are numerous and extremely helpful YouTube video tutorials for Joomla that will guide you and your project so you can become a true Joomla expert. Great free resources and many free Joomla extensions too!
Glad to hear Joomla is working for you! Many users we chat with have found Joomla too confusing for their needs. But it definitely depends on what you’re doing. Each platform has its pros and cons.
Joomla is far easier to WordPress – the simple poor of that is that IF WordPress was so easy, SquareSpace and it’s competitors would never have risen from nothing into what they are – aside from that every single time I have shown a WordPress and a Joomla backend [based on current versions of course] to clients they have found Joomla easier to get a handle on – and that’s before the advent of Drag and Drop Visual Site Builders like SP Page Builder, Quix and the like… [and that’s not just new comers but also people familiar with WordPress – so let’s quit the narrative that WordPress is easier than Joomla because it’s SO not true anymore and hasn’t been for a few years now…
While it is true that Joomla has it’s issues and one of them in the past was the upgrading process as it was complicated or problematic, Joomla is now far less finicky than WordPress and let’s NOT even talk about trying to move WordPress from one hosting company to another – at which point WordPress becomes a pre-madonna and you spend hours trying to solve it’s temper tantrums…
The reality is WordPress is actually a poor CMS, a great blogging platform that has been pulled, pushed, nudged, bent to do other things – like eCommerce which it does somewhat decently – but it’s still not nearly as purpose agnostic as Joomla is – by far.
And while there ARE more plugins/extensions for WordPress, it’s a little bit like the App Store, there is so much fluff, so much poor quality that you take more risks than you want to on adding something into WordPress than with Joomla.
Joomla web development continues to be thought of a decent possibility for making governmental websites. it’d be robust for Joomla to contend with WordPress, however it will provides a rough time to Drupal.Joomla,if it positions itself neatly, will tackle that as its management and joomla web development is much easier than Drupal.
Ugh…not another Joomla vs WordPress article. I have 12 years of experience with both, so here is my professional opinion…First, the biggest factor is dependent on the type of website you have or will have.
WordPress is a “blogging” platform and Joomla is more of a full content management system and better suited for larger websites that are more complex. If you simply need to drive around town, you don’t need a car with a space shuttle cockpit, but if you need to go further and offroad, then you know the answer.
Both are content management systems, but for different markets. Each and every other CMS will have their pros and cons, but you have to consider the type of website you have, is it just you manging it and logging in or do you have user/member registration, do you sell stuff onsite, are you using third party plugins or extensions, and if so, what kind and how many and from whom?
What about costs, are you limited on startup costs and ongoing up-keep, or do you have deep pockets?
I can go on, but it really comes down to what type of website, how many people will be managing it, what are your needs, and what is important to you.
Hey AJ,
Definitely agree that both have their pros and cons and it does depend on how how you want to manage your site to choose the best platform.
However, we would have to respectfully disagree that WordPress is just a blogging platform. Our entire website runs on WordPress and so do thousands of Enterprise clients around the globe, such as https://mariadb.com.
Wait a few days until wordpress users upgrade to v5.0 and see what happen.. huehuehue
Yeah, to the end of this year Joomla will lunch the new v4.0 version and then I will see that will happen ;).
“From there, you’ll need to put a little more time and effort into your site, though. As we said, Joomla uses a combination of Articles and Categories. So before you start creating content, you need to create categories for the type of content you want to create.”
This is not true.
You know need create categories before you start creating content (articles), you can create categories in same time when you are crating content.
I remember building my first WordPress site in 2007 and 2008 and then switching to Joomla 1.5 in 2008-09. I’ve probably only built 10 WordPress sites and about 35 Joomla sites. Honestly, I can completely get why random people who know nothing about Joomla completely diss it because the templates that were built for Joomla for some reason just don’t look that great and they all follow the same look and feel. But that is not on the platform, that is on the designer. I do not really get when people say WordPress is way easier, for me I think the Joomla admin with the top menu is a lot more intuitive and cleaner than the WordPress side menu. For me, WordPress seems to just display everything on that sidebar and seems like a mess. However, I will say that I think the Joomla admin is cleaner, but when I buy a component from WordPress versus Joomla it definitely does have a better look and feel to it. Not sure why, but I think some people would be surprised at some of my sites I built in Joomla were actually built in Joomla. Also, yea if the client doesn’t update there Joomla website, they always seemed to get hacked. I don’t know the security differences but I get hacked all the time. I just think there is a lot more potential for Joomla it is just not realized yet for the masses. But like the actual professionals are saying, it is really dependent on the scope of the site. And for people who don’t know anything about building sites, then I can understand why WordPress, who has a plugin for everything would be the first choice.
Thanks for sharing this best article about Joomla vs WordPress websites. Personally, I prefer WordPress websites over Joomla. Because Joomla sites are difficult to customize and need to install more plugins and Joomla website security is a major concern.
That is not true at all.
Joomla is much more secure than WP and customization is more easy, in WP you need to install plugins for everything, in Joomla the most used plugins are bulled in (they come with Joomla installation).
I totally agree.
I really like Joomla because it allows you to create unique content with different layouts (templates). But, it is a bit dificult to use for most people that is why I migrated to WordPress. I own a local business ( a computer room) in my country where I teach people how to start a blog and make money from it. And, as they are all beginners and have no coding skills, it sucked. But since I started teaching WordPress, it has become demn simple!. I even started building professional website for people without any line of code. WordPress is really fantastic!
I always choose Joomla when I want to have everything under my control.
Core Joomla + good template framework + page builder and this is enough for me to create website.
With WP is big minus that I need 20+ plugins to do something.
WordPress can run a website out of box. Joomla is an open-source project aimed at developers. Even giving a title or header to your page is a project. Don’t talk about lack of properly placed menus. Well people don’t start webpages to learn programming. That is where joomla goes down big time.
In my experience it is down to a personal preference.
Wordpress – I tended to see Worpdress as an enhanced blog with ‘pop’ design ease of use. But woocommerce is quite something. SO it’s not so much WP itself as the extensions that it supports.
BUT, the absolute urls and the huge amount of page requests it demans simply puts me off using it as anything other than a basic CMS. It just feels a bit fragile and quite weak in gt metrix scores.
Joomla – This CMS is better for knowing and just feels more capable and robust at a fundamental level. Its ACL is unparalleled and the page theme flexibility is pretty awesome. Also I have to say that Joomla has SEO firmly in the bag (based on personal experience again). SEO is built into Joomla from the start and you can really see the results in the search engines.
I would say that if there was a woocommerce (the killer WP app) for Joomla the numbers would shift enormously especially when you see your SEO results. However, WP has it nailed when it comes to interfunctional plugins. Joomla’s extensions are generally more isolated from each other and the user experience can feel frustrating at first.
WP wins on approachability, plugins and ease of use
Joomla wins on template flexibility, ACL, SEO and code efficiency.
Finally, I can make just about any site with any level of user access with Joomla. I cannot say the same for WordPress.
Nobody yet has mentioned the component architecture of Joomla which allows third party Components (applications) to gain control of core functionalities of the CMS and extend it greatly. These components allow me to do things that I can’t do with the WordPress plugins. That said, I understand why so many people use WordPress even though I try to almost always use Joomla. It really depends on the complexity of the web site desired. The strength of Joomla also is that it cleanly and clearly separates content from functionality from design. So, no themes with built in functionality that will break if you move to a different theme. And, add to that the many powerful frameworks that you can use and it is easy to understand why developers tend to prefer Joomla.
Joomla’s competition is not WordPress, but the scalable, enterprise applications like Kentico, .NET, etc.
When you want to scale WordPress, it either requires a ton of back end programming, or it is itself integrated as the UI of a back end platform and is not self-hosted anymore. (Real Estate sites, many news sites, political sites all do this – and you pay monthly fees for this.) WordPress also lacks MVC templating capability, so when I need this – or scalability – I reach for Joomla. For many sites, and clients with low demands for highly-customized features, I head for WordPress. (My business is 50/50.)
Both platforms, by the way, incorporate page builder plugins, and the experience is nearly identical between the two.
Decide which platform meets your customer’s current *and future* needs.
I came here to help choose between WordPress and Joomla for a new site. The article itself did not address the issues I need to consider but the comments and using this website did. To be fair, I have been using Joomla for a long time and was using it way before WordPress was capable of doing the things I have used Joomla for. So I am a little biased. And I have decided to stick with Joomla. Why?
1. why does the menu on this site keep disappearing? I hate that and it seems a common thing on WordPress sites. I know, in this case, scroll up a little and it reappears. But ugh it just seems illogical to me and not what I want.
2. From what I have read above it seems wordpress does not allow users groups. Or is not as good at having user groups. I had kinda assumed this was a really basic function for a CMS.
3. I would need to relearn everything. e.g. the content structure of Joomla was criticized. So without categories, how do you organise your content in WordPress?
4. something was said about only being able to use 1 template in wordpress. Is this right? Eek! so every page has to look the same. mmmm less than ideal.
5. Cost. Everything I need initially is free or can be done without extensions on Joomla. The only costs are domain name and hosting. Not sure if that is the same on wordpress. But for a start up cost is so important. Once a business is up and running it is fine to improve and go to paid versions but at start up it is really important to keep the costs down.
Happy to be corrected on any of these points.
I am just trying to decide if I should risk a [proprietary] build out with an advanced but mostly codeless (line input), from something like WIX…where I like the open nature of designing, or start learning either Jooma or WordPress? From what I read within this nicely reviewed, and sometimes harshly critiqued thread, is that WordPress has come a long way from its inception as a ‘blogging, posting, open source, ” It’s free” downloadable software, with many more plug-ins/apps and assorted templates than one could possibly even dream of reviewing. While Joomla, on the downswing in social opinions, might have the upper hand to actually making a nice looking, less generic site? So from a NON-Professional who knows exactly what they want, and mostly HATES all the generic sites that seem to be cookie cutter molds, and appreciates the conceptualized look of a SquareSpace design, but doesn’t want; a) to be beholden to SquareSpace, b) would really like to add some transition effects, in a subtle way, ( not kitschy), maybe something like Parralex… Joomla or WordPress ? I very much appreciate all the professional detail you would like to provide, thank you very much. (I pretty much like my 2 business websites I created and updated over the years, but neither are supported any longer & need to step up).
I know this is an old thread by will throw in my 2 cents of experience. I hv used both and the power of Joomla over all CMS in existence is customisation. Very easy to do on Joomla and even creating your own templates. Try that with WordPress and u in for a rude awakening. Hving said that I use wordpress with most clients since all they need is something to showcase their content without much customisation. Then I use Joomla mainly when creating sites for large corporations.
i have used both wordpress and Joomla for many years , for a simple site i would use wordpress , however if i wanted to build components/plugins and have them integrate with several other plugins etc , i would use Joomla …why you say ??, because in a nutshell , when joomla components are built they are very easy to get into and modify etc, i have found with wordpress this is not the case and most developers lock out their components so you have no way to modify or extend easily and at times have to speak to the original component /plugin developer. I also believe Joomla has far better security tools and options
Hello Darren, thank you for your feedback!
Having read all these, so which of the two is best to build a classified website like olx or gumtree…..Wordpress or Joomla???
Hello Olu, personally speaking I think it’s easier to build with WordPress.
Tnx for the fair comparison of both CMS`s. For my club I really need the groups/roles features of Joomla. So, that will be the argument for my pick. And for the sake of security: I will make sure to be in sync with the latest security releases!
Most of the comments in here appear to reflect the preferences of the people who are making websites. My business uses both and typically finds what others have done – that WordPress is simpler to get going on and if the website is just five pages and a blog, terrific to use.
Joomla is a bit harder to learn but totally with the effort for more complex sites. People have mentioned user management (built in and adaptable), SEO and the advantages of Joomla components over multiple WP plugins.
There are two other things worth mentioning.
The first is Joomla’s handling of media which out of the box way better with the ability to create folders and manage media along with your content.
The second is bloat. WordPress performance is heavily affected by the number and type of plugins you use. In our experience, big WP sites require heavy server power. A WooCommerce shop of a couple of hundred items is way slower than say a Hikashop Joomla installation with thousands.
Anyone who wants to become a serious developer should seriously consider having more than one string to their bow. It is easy to become blind to the growth of sophisticated “builders” which already do everything a simple WP or Joomla site can do. It is also easy to ignore the growth of Javascript platforms with database back ends that allow a developer to focus on a single language.
PS – on security – keep your website and its components up to date, back up often and use appropriate security components and you should be fine. But for the record, WordPress has been marginally worse than Joomla over the past 12 years as far as we are concerned.
I think it comes down to use.. so you nailed it there.
Many people can “Do WordPress”. Less can “Do Joomla”.
I select Joomla for most implementations as I use it as a framework to make systems.
Yes I make websites for brand type stuff as I am familiar. Yes I will agree WordPress is easy to use for Jo and Josephine Public.
So if you want a few pages to show something off or provide daily updates etc… totally see why you would use WordPress.
If I was asked (and do) the question of “We would like a stock management system” then I would choose Joomla for its flexibility and the integration I can perform.
YES.. I could do a custom solution across Word Press pages… But then.. YES.. I could do this in MS Publisher and spend time sorting it out.
I am not sure there is an answer.
My personal view.. You want something more brand focussed with ability to update.. Yeah totally.. I will give you a WordPress site.
You want a system. I will probably suggest Joomla unless there is an overwhelming reason as I can reuse so much of the framework and NOT write my own custom.
My view.. we all have them… and we are all correct :)
R
I used to develop exclusively within Joomla and over the past 5 years, have switched to 100% of all new sites I develop are in WordPress. WordPress is far superior in the ease of setup, extensibility and allowing everyday users to manage and update. I still have several websites in Joomla and each time I must update content on one, it feels very clunky at first, but there are several areas where I still feel Joomla is far superior to WordPress and the biggest one is in regards to Joomla’s Users Management. The ability to easily setup user groups, access levels, and configuring frontend login forms to perform different actions based on the user, group, access or even section of the website exceeds what WordPress offers. Yes, you technically can install a series of plugins in WordPress to try and mimic the offering of Joomla, but the fact that it’s Core within Joomla makes it better as the more plugins/modules/components, etc. you have to install on a site, the greater risks you add for security as a website is only as secure as it’s weakest link.
To that end, I still feel like Joomla is a true CMS and WordPress is a more functional WYSIWYG builder tool. Having said that, I will continue to build my sites in WordPress and continue to ask for a better core user management tool as a feature request in WordPress.
One other area I think Joomla is superior is in the extensions offered by RegularLabs. These plugins pretty much extend Joomla to be an amazing website tool, but, I think the years of lagging in the GUI battle will ultimately cost Joomla the war.
Joomla VS WordPress again? I use both but I prefer Joomla, Joomla is much easier for me than WordPress, The only downside of Joomla is their lots of files and folders lower nodes for shared hosting are not applicable.
I came from Mamboo CMS where the design of Joomla came from, so when the mamboo just ends its development I jump to Joomla the beta version,.
I use phpNuke once and never use it again.
I have a question about whether Joomla is customer friendly. I am hearing that customers do not want to create an account and would like a guest checking option.
I have used WordPress and Joomla and I find Joomla is easier to learn and far more intuitive. I shudder every time that I have to add anything or make changes on the WordPress site that I manage. We are changing that one over to Joomla and I will be very very happy when it is up and running. I manage one other Joomla site and co-manage another.
The Joomla category/article system couldn’t be more intuitive. I find WP counter-intuitive and not as user-friendly.
WordPress is the favorite platform of spammers. It is easy to locate and download software that generates hundreds or even thousands of sites using WP as the base cms to spam a product. So I don’t know if the true market share (spam sites removed) is as high as the numbers say.
I’ve used both WP and Joomla and they’ve had their day. They are less useful now as I’ve moved to nodejs. That being said, Joomla was always problematic if you installed 3rd party plugins or extensions because these were often incompatible with the latest core Joomla, leaving the sites vulnerable until updates were available.
However, being able to structure my site is easy with Joomla, grouping articles into categories is how the brain works. And the URL’s reflect that structure /domain/category/article so it is intuitive and helps with SEO as well.
If I had to use a cms again I’d use Joomla but I’m biased due to experience. As mentioned, my main dislike of WP is that nearly every spammy site I’ve come across is a WP site.