Joomla or Drupal?

Written by John Coonen

Friday, 23 October 2009 10:12

A writer on our LinkedIn Discussion Board at CMS User Group asked that common question:

"I've been working with Joomla for years now, under the impression that it was indisputeably the best open source CMS. Now however, I find that many people suggest Drupal is actually superior. I've never worked with Drupal at all. What do you think about this, and why?" - Tosin O.

I thought I'd share my response here too:

Without knowing your requirements, it's impossible for anyone to make a legitimate recommendation on which is better for your particular needs.

Breathe deeply.

Whichever you choose, you're in a very good place. You will NOT have made a mistake, so RELAX. I say this with 100% confidence. You won't make a bad decision you'll regret later, no matter which one you choose, trust me.

I would suggest that BOTH Joomla! and Drupal are fantastic CMSes. Neither have performance problems; neither has scalability issues; that's just bunk. So don't worry about all the highly opinionated comments you hear, they're just passionate about their CMSes, with good reason. ;)

I heard a great recommendation from my friends over a Palantir.net, a cream-of-the-crop Drupal Development firm in Chicago ( http://palantir.net ):

1) If your project is under 100 hours, and your budget is under $10,000, and you're equipped to site-build, but don't want to dig into the code, go with Joomla!

2) If your project is over 100 hours, your budget is over $10,000, and you're willing to either dig into the code or hire someone to give you exactly what you want for your userbase, go with Drupal!

That's a great 10,000 foot view, and it's a great rule of thumb!
I would add two things:

1) If there are other users needing training on how to add content or (especially) help expand or build-out the site now or in the future (clients, volunteers, other workerbees, etc), choose Joomla! On the other hand, if the current and future userbase on the site is technically proficient and loves digging into html, JavaScript / JQuery and raw database calls, you may want to go with Drupal.

2) If you or those creating/using the CMS are rather new to the CMS world right now, go with Joomla!, get to know it as a great basis that will definitely get your site up and going. Then, after a year or so (depending upon your own threshold for information overload and AFTER Drupal 7 is released), start to delve into Drupal. You'll understand it far better after getting a firm basis in Joomla!

Joomla can act as a great "gateway CMS" to those who want more fine-grain control over their site, and are willing to either dig into the code or have the budget to hire folks to do it; rather than using one or more of the 3,600 off-the-shelf add-ons currently in the Joomla Extension Directory, here:
http://extensions.joomla.org/

You can also see many of the Drupal Add-ons here:
http://drupal.org/project/Modules

Again, you won't go wrong choosing EITHER Joomla! or Drupal. Attend CMS Expo to evaluate and get training on either or both Joomla and Drupal. You won't regret it!