WordPress vs. Joomla

Why choose WordPress or Joomla?

WordPress and Joomla are open source content management frameworks that provide similar features and benefits. Both are fairly easy to use, support e-commerce, multiple user management, social networking and more. Many design themes or templates are available to customize your site design, and many plugins or extensions are available to extend the features and functionality of both WordPress and Joomla. Both frameworks are very popular and supported by many web developers and hosting providers.

WordPress Advantages

WordPress is the dominant content management system due to it’s flexibility and ease of use. The WordPress Dashboard provides a simple user interface that is easy for non-technical people to understand and use for creating and updating web pages. The clean intuitive nature of the WordPress “backend” is a primary reason that WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS). With a relatively moderate learning curve you can create a website and/or blog using WordPress, manage various types of content, and install different themes and plugins for customization.

Joomla Advantages

Joomla provides more features “out-of-the-box” than WordPress, and provides a more powerful but somewhat less intuitive user interface, that is still relatively easy to use. Additionally, Joomla is ideal for the development of portals, blogs and corporate websites. It can also be developed into an e-commerce platform, an application bridge or a dynamic web application. From a development standpoint, Joomla is a more powerful yet complex framework than WordPress.

Which One is Better?

The choice comes down to what you plan to do and how you want to manage your site.

Doing it yourself is easier with WordPress, unless you’re an experienced developer. When it comes to developers, they all have their own preference. Many will tell you one system isn’t better than the other, but they do provide you with different benefits.

Joomla comes with a steeper learning curve than WordPress, which makes WordPress the right choice for beginners. WordPress also makes it a little easier to manage multiple users. However, if you’re trying to manage thousands of articles on your blog or website, Joomla provide options to make it easier.

The Right Choice for Beginners

After evaluating your needs and looking at what you plan to use your website/blog for, most of the time, WordPress will be the better choice compared to Joomla. In every category, Joomla vs. WordPress shows a clear winner for beginners. This isn’t because WordPress is just far better than Joomla because Joomla fits in certain areas. However, for the beginner, Joomla will take much longer to learn and many beginners will find it confusing. The choice may come down to what your developer prefers or the interface you prefer.

Both WordPress and Joomla provide free demos to give you an idea of what the interface looks like and how it works. Try both, compare them and choose the one you like best if you’re not sure which to choose when looking at WordPress vs. Joomla.