Drupal vs. Joomla vs. WordPress How to Choose the Best CMS Platform
If you’re planning to create a website or blog, you should think about utilizing one of the top CMS’s on the market.
Without the requirement for HTML or CSS coding expertise, a CMS (content management system) enables you to build, administer, and modify the contents of your website.
Anyone may create a beautiful website on their own thanks to the latest CMS platforms’ user-friendly design. You are not required to be a web designer or developer, nor do you need to have any prior knowledge in creating websites.
In this article, we examine three of the most well-liked and effective CMS platforms for 2022, weigh their advantages and disadvantages, and offer advice on which to choose.
The top three CMS’s that we are considering are:
* WordPress
* Joomla
* Drupal
What you need know about them is as follows:
1. Comparison of costs and expenses for the best CMS
Talking about the costs associated with adopting any of these CMS quickly becomes quite difficult.
Let’s get to it:
* Each of these three top CMS’s is completely free, and you can download them both in a matter of seconds from their respective official websites.
However, there are other expenses that you must bear on your own.
A domain name and site hosting are the two significant extra expenses here.
* A domain name is the Internet address of your website. Websitesetup.org is the domain name for this website. An online domain can be purchased and maintained for about $10 per year.
* A web hosting configuration is where your website is located and accessible to users.
The cost of the domain name and hosting will be the same whether you choose one of our three top CMS’s to build your website on.
Yet another thing
Although the CMS platforms are available for free download, there are times when users will wish to add additional modules and/or designs to their CMS to expand its native feature sets.
You’ll learn:
WordPress plugins range in price from $0 to $200.
*Plugins for Joomla: $0–$70
*Plugins for Drupal: $0–$100
The same is true for themes, which are installable design bundles. You’ll learn:
WordPress themes are priced from $0 and $250.
*Joomla themes: 0–200 dollars
*Drupal themes: $0-$80
The three best CMS all provide add-ons in a similar pricing range. In the end, if you don’t have the money, you don’t have to purchase any extras.
2. Required Expertise Level
At the end of the day, you won’t need any prior knowledge to use one of our top CMS from this lineup.
However, depending on your goals and how complex a website you intend to create, your outcomes may differ.
Possibly the simplest to use is WordPress. It’s much easier to increase the functionality of your website and find and alter the designs.
WordPress has a user-friendly interface that you can use to modify your site’s appearance by altering the colors, backgrounds, and other visual components.
If you want to create a website that is more unique in its appearance and functionality, Joomla and Drupal are the best options because they are more developer-focused and do need that you have some level of comfort working with HTML and PHP.
For either CMS, there aren’t as many functional add-ons, and those that are available aren’t as well-designed as their WordPress equivalents.
If you want to end up with a website that looks customized, you can often anticipate having to pay someone or learn how to use either Joomla or Drupal.
The size of the communities is the deciding factor here; far more individuals are working on WordPress-related goods and add-ons than on Joomla or Drupal. This implies that you will need to develop the feature yourself if you want to add it to your website but it isn’t offered by a plugin.
3. The Best CMS’s Popularity
In reality, there is no popularity battle. WordPress wins by a wide margin. Look at the following graph, which shows how content management systems are used online:
The raw numbers are as follows:
More than 43% of the web is powered by WordPress.
1.7% for Joomla
1.3% of Drupal
4. Design Options
A key consideration while selecting your CMS is the design quality. Everyone wants their website to be attractive and not offensive.
Let’s start by discussing the CMS’s “out-of-the-box” design, or how attractive it is in its initial configuration following installation.
If you ask us, Drupal and Joomla both appear a little dated. WordPress has a cutting-edge, efficient design.
Most consumers will wish to choose to a distinctive design instead of the default, so leave that alone. Themes and templates are useful in this situation.
For WordPress, there are countless themes available. both no-cost and cost-based. You might start by visiting WordPress.org’s official theme directory. More than 8,000 free themes are offered there. Thousands of additional free themes can also be found online.
Then paid themes appear. There are numerous high-quality theme shops that will sell you optimised and lovely themes for as little as $2.
In general, WordPress offers a wide variety of design options.
Both Drupal and Joomla have a significantly limited selection. Most importantly, there aren’t many attractive free themes. Hundreds to thousands, as opposed to thousands for WordPress, are what we’re talking about.
Having saying that, the premium themes do have a nice appearance and a large selection of styles and features. Just a lot less of them than there are on WordPress.
5. Choices for Customization
The top CMS’s listed here each have a unique approach to adding new features to your website:
*WordPress refers to every new add-on as a plugin.
*Joomla refers to them as extensions.
*Drupal refers to them as modules
They all essentially have the same goal: to help you expand the CMS’s standard set of capabilities.
Let’s start with some numbers:
*The official directory for WordPress alone has more than 50,000 plugins. There are tens of thousands more that are offered by independent developers.
*The official Joomla extension directory contains about 6,000 options, and there are a few hundred more online.
*Approximately 48,000 Drupal modules are available in the official directory, however there aren’t many more online.
WordPress has the most plugins available, and they are the most user-friendly. They offer a polished UI and intuitive control panels because they are designed to be utilised by the site’s end user. Additionally, you can be sure that if your WordPress website needs a new function, there is certainly already a plugin for it.
Despite having a considerably lower selection of extensions than WordPress, Joomla also has a good selection. The most important components of your site, such galleries, SEO, analytics, contact forms, and more, can still be handled via extensions.
Drupal modules are significantly more geared toward developers. There are many ways to increase the APIs, create more tokens for developers, perform more sophisticated user management, and so on.
Overall, if you’re working on a more significant project, they will assist you in further customizing Drupal’s internal workings. However, there are fewer modules that are visible to users. Even searching for something as straightforward as “contact form” in the module directory yields uninspiring results.
6. Updates and security
A new WordPress version update should be available every 50 to 60 days. Many of the updates are minimal and only address a few isolated bugs and problems. Twice a year, larger WordPress releases are made available.
The smaller Joomla updates are released more frequently, generally every 10 to 40 days, but the larger ones are only released once or even less frequently, once or twice a year. For instance, Joomla version 3.9 has been around since 2018.
One security update and one bugfix update are delivered by Drupal each month according to a predetermined release schedule. Major versions, or larger changes, occur twice a year.
Let’s now discuss security. This doesn’t appear to be good for WordPress, as you can see. WordPress is used by more than 90% of all affected CMS websites. This number will probably have increased by 2022. (There are no recent studies published just yet).
There are a few reasons for WordPress’ poor rating. First of all, it’s just the most widely used CMS online. Naturally, it will get a bigger share of the hacking pie.
Additionally, since so many of these websites are powered by WordPress, hackers who spend in creating an exploit for WordPress might potentially gain access to thousands of websites, as opposed to a far lower number of Joomla or Drupal sites.
However, it’s important to note that despite the popularity of all three CMS’s, Drupal and Joomla are proportionately less frequently hacked than WordPress. There is no chance for this. Actually, one of Drupal’s key selling features is security. Due primarily to its significant emphasis on website security, Drupal has earned the trust of many government organizations and other institutions.
7. Community and Support
All three of our top CMS include ways for you to receive assistance if you need it when completing a task:
*On the main WordPress website is a support area. There are user manuals, documentation, and a user forum where other like-minded people can assist you in finding a solution.
*There are a few places on the official Joomla website where you may receive different kinds of assistance. There is the primary documentation, a portal for the community, training materials, and user forums.
*A similar strategy is used by Drupal, which provides sections for help, community portal, tutorials, and user manuals.
The quality of all those documents seems to be best in Joomla and Drupal’s offerings. Even while WordPress provides a respectable documentation section and user guides, you may definitely find more comprehensive tutorials and information elsewhere on the internet (like on our site, for example).
The official help forums for each CMS are very similar to one another.
Last but not least, it will be far simpler to discover WordPress developers than Joomla or Drupal developers if you need to employ a professional to help you figure out some more complicated things or even work on your entire website.
To sum up:
Now that you are familiar with the three CMSs, let’s discuss when to use each one.
Use WordPress When?
If you want to build a website yourself and ensure that it will function properly and have all the features you require, WordPress is a fantastic all-around CMS.
If you’re a beginner, it’s the platform to use because it gives the best designs and the largest selection of them.
Additionally, if you ever wish to grow your site, you may pick from tens of thousands of plugins that can accommodate just about any brand-new feature you can imagine.
Use Drupal When?
If the website you want to construct will need both top-notch security and a lot of bespoke features, Drupal might be your best option.
Instead of DIY users who work on their websites in the evenings, Drupal is more suited for developers.
To get the desired result using Drupal, you’ll probably need to do a lot of custom work and coding.
Use Joomla When?
In a way, Joomla meets you halfway between Drupal and WordPress. It does offer a lot of user-facing capabilities, but it also requires you to custom-code the non-standard components.
If your website is intended to be controlled by several people, Joomla’s more sophisticated user management system may come in helpful. The same is true of multilingual assistance. Joomla offers out-of-the-box multilingual site creation, but WordPress requires an additional plugin.
Despite this, the learning curve for Joomla is still fairly high. This can be problematic if all you need right now is a “functioning website.”
