Joomla vs WordPress Choosing Best CMS

Joomla and WordPress are immensely popular Content Management System (CMS).

While Joomla has nearly 7.0 percent market share among CMSs, WordPress commands as much as 60 percent.

Moreover, WordPress accounts more than 26 percent of the entire Internet, while Joomla has nearly 3.0 percent.

So, choosing the best CMS requires you to have the thorough ins and outs of these two platforms – Joomla and WordPress.

Here, we bring you an in-depth analysis of Joomla and WordPress so that you can choose the Best CMS for your website.

It’s a Joomla vs WordPress post to help you choose the Best CMS.

Joomla vs WordPress Choosing Best CMS

Joomla and WordPress have many similarities and differences.

Apart from knowing their similarities, it’s important to know their differences as it will help you to make a choice between them.

First up, we want to make it very clear that both Joomla and WordPress are content management systems and so both can be used to create amazing websites.

WordPress is the most popular CMS.

It is the biggest blogging system out there.

However, you can create websites with static pages.

Joomla is also a powerful CMS.

It can be used for building all kinds of websites such as blogs, corporate, business, non-profit, and government.

Secondly, both Joomla and WordPress can be expanded using plugins. Both provide themes and templates so that you can change the look of your site.

You can install them on your server, so there is no such thing as specific hosts and subscriptions.

Their cost of ownership is similar.

Both Joomla and WordPress are free and open source software licensed under GPL.

Both Joomla and WordPress are primarily written in PHP.

Both of them support MySQL as their database management system.

Plus, there is an active community that helps design, support, and builds their favorite systems.

So, what makes them different?

Well, we will point out the differences between Joomla and WordPress. So, let’s get on and check out the differences between Joomla and WordPress.

Joomla vs WordPress

Ease of Use

Ease of use is the most important factor for many users as the majority of them are not designers, developers, or programmers. They are average users who want to build a website, fast and easy.

WordPress

WordPress takes not more than five minutes to install.

So, it is fairly easy for a new user to start a WordPress Blog.

WordPress provides a clean and user-friendly interface.
It has menus for creating posts and pages.

You can easily start customizing appearance and themes.

So, the post-install experience of WordPress has many ups.

WordPress Installation

Joomla

Joomla installation is not as quick as WordPress.

Also, the control panel offered by Joomla is not as straight forward as WordPress. Moreover, it can be scary for a beginner.

It has a lot of menus to click on and customize your site. It might make Joomla powerful but not user-friendly as WordPress.

Joomla Installation

Our Verdict: WordPress is clearly the winner on ease of use and user friendliness.

Themes and Add-ons

Both Joomla and WordPress provide themes and templates for changing the looks and layout of your site. Plus, they can be expanded through the use of plugins and extensions.

WordPress

WordPress allows you to change the appearance of your site using themes. There are more than 3000 themes in the WordPress themes directory. Plus, you get many free and premium themes for WordPress.

Moreover, you can find themes within WordPress by searching in the themes tab. They can be easily installed by clicking a button. The themes can also be edited using the themes editor. You can add child themes, templates, or modify the CSS if you wish.

Further up, you get premium WordPress themes which are developed by third-party theme shops such as StudioPress, Themify, or Themeforest.

WordPress is the most popular CMS largely because of the plugins. There are over 38000 WordPress Plugins available for free in official WordPress plugin directory.

Using the plugins, you can augment WordPress functionality so that your site fits your requirements. Plus, premium plugins are also available which come with paid support by plugin developers.

WordPress Plugin

Joomla

Joomla also comes with templates and extensions.

In fact, there are two types of templates in Joomla:

Frontend and Backend.

However, Joomla doesn’t have a template directory.

Third party developers provide the Joomla templates.

Many of them are free.

Plus, there are extensions with which you can do just about anything. You can go about creating an E-commerce store or manage emails.

However, in contrast to WordPress, the number of templates and extensions in Joomla is not that high. There are more than 8000 extensions in the Joomla extensions directory that are divided into 33 different categories.

So, you may struggle to find the perfect template or the perfect extensions for your Joomla site.

Also, users are not able to search and install templates or extensions from the administration area. Users have to manually search templates and then install them by adding their URL.

Joomla extensions

Our Verdict: Here, WordPress is a winner with plenty of themes and extensions.

Widgets and Modules

You can modify the sidebars on your website by adding widgets or modules.

WordPress

WordPress allows you to add a lot of functionality by using widgets. You can include banner ads, calendars, latest comments, categories, tags, search, latest posts, and much more.

You can drag-and-drop the widgets in the sidebars. You can also set up when the widget will display and when it will not. Moreover, different WordPress Themes provide different widget areas.

Joomla

Joomla allows you to add modules to have different features to your site. With Modules, you can include features such as archived articles, search, news, statistics, and lots more.

You can also have bread crumbs. They can turn off or on from the list. You can also set the order in which they appear.

Our Verdict: With the intuitive drag-and-drop system, WordPress is the winner. Joomla takes a substantial amount of time to add modules.

Content Creatation

Let’s see how Joomla and WordPress fair up when go on to create content.

WordPress

If you see the WordPress Dashboard, all the navigation is available on the left side of the screen. WordPress employs TinyMCE as its visual editor. It has all the rich text features that you expect in any modern editor. You can also work in HTML. You can add images, tags, categories, SEO, and formats.

You can choose to publish immediately or schedule for later. There is also preview facility before publishing. Images can be added or modified in the media library. WordPress allows you to create posts and pages. You get separate tabs on the dashboard for creating posts and pages.

WordPress Post

Joomla

The Control Panel you get with Joomla is neat and clean. It’s intuitive to use, and everything is laid out in an organized manner. Using the control panel, you can add a new article, manage my previous articles, global configuration, extensions, templates, categories, menus, users, modules, languages, my profile, and updates for extensions, and Joomla itself.

The editor includes all the rich text editing options.

On the right side, you get options for publishing, configuration, metadata, etc.

Joomla Article

Our Verdict: On the whole, WordPress is easier is use as far as publishing is concerned.

Security

From a security standpoint, it’s important to keep in mind that every WordPress install is unique. It is mainly because of the thousands of plugins and themes available for the CMS.

So, it is nearly impossible to ascertain the safety standards employed by each of the plugins or themes. Moreover, users have to face compatibility issues which arise due to newer versions of the platform. Plus, WordPress security features rely on plugins.

Here, Joomla takes the lead over WordPress as it provides an option to force connections over SSL and also for 2FA. Plus, Joomla provides its set of security extensions. Its developers have a list of extensions with known vulnerabilities.

Our Verdict: Security wise, Joomla is better than WordPress.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization capabilities of Joomla take an edge over WordPress as Joomla allow users to set Meta descriptions and keywords for new articles.

However, the true SEO capabilities can only be discovered when we take into account the plugins or extensions available for the task.

As for WordPress, it has many popular plugins for carrying out the SEO tasks. The most popular among them is the Yoast SEO Plugin. It is incredibly powerful, with lots of features, and most importantly immensely ease-to-use. The plugin not only shows your overall SEO score but also tells you how to improve your score in each area.

Joomla also provides extensions which carry out the SEO tasks well. One of the popular SEO extensions for Joomla is the Easy Frontend SEO. However, when compared to Yoast, it falls way behind expectations. Due to this, we can easily conclude that WordPress is far better than Joomla when we consider SEO capabilities.

Support Options

Availability of support is very important for beginner users. There’s always going to be some hurdles when you try out new software. However, that’s pretty ok as long as you get support and help.

WordPress

WordPress has a huge community of users.

You get WordPress help on official support forums, as well as on every online forum about web design and development.

You get plenty of free and paid support in the forum of tutorials, articles, and videos.

You can even hire WordPress professionals at very reasonable price. It’s also easy to find WordPress developers.

WordPress Support

Joomla

Joomla also has a large and helpful community.

Plus, you get an extensive documentation on the Joomla website. You can also join forums and IRC chatrooms. Help is also available from third party resources and development agencies.

However, affordable expert help is quite difficult for Joomla.

Joomla Support

Our Verdict: WordPress edges out Joomla on support options.

Localization and Multi-Lingual Support

A CMS becomes much more useful and worthy of its supports different locales and languages. Nowadays, a good number of websites are multilingual sites.

So, let’s find out which one is better in multi-lingual support.

WordPress

WordPress offers a good platform for building a multi-lingual site. There are plugins that help you to create a WordPress multi-lingual site. WordPress supports over 53 languages.

Moreover, many themes and plugins are available in multiple languages. So, WordPress turns out to be a good platform for building a non-English or multi-lingual website.

Joomla

Joomla has the capability to handle a multi-lingual website without using any extension. Using its Language Manager, you can create multilingual content on your website. Plus, translations are available in many languages, and they can be installed from the admin area.

Our Verdict: Both Joomla and WordPress support Localization and are available in multiple languages.

Conclusion

Both Joomla and WordPress are powerful Content Management System. However, as we have seen above, WordPress races ahead of Joomla on many frontiers. Be its ease of use, UI, plugins, or themes, WordPress overshadows Joomla.

That’s precisely the reason why WordPress is the world’s most popular CMS. Having said that, the final call is yours.

Joomla vs WordPress.

It’s been a close fight.

It’s good to see that you have two powerful CMS at your sleeves.

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