Blog

by ROC May 2021
Website development

WordPress vs. Joomla vs. Drupal, Which One Is The Best Option In 2021?

Are you also planning to develop a website or blog? Yes, Of course, but you might be wondering which Content Management System (CMS ) you should prefer to use, right? For those who don’t have any idea about CMS, it is a system that helps you create, manage, and redesign the contents of your website without using any HTML and CSS coding skills. I know deciding the best CMS for your website is a bit of a confusing task! However, there are numerous CMS available in the market you can choose from but, some of the most popular and widely used are:

• WordPress
• Joomla
• Drupal 

All three of them have their pros and cons. Here in this article, you will get to know in-depth information about each one of the CMS. Then, you can choose as per your preference and needs. Keep in touch with us to finalize the best CMS for your website. Before moving forward, let’s discuss each one of the CMS in detail. 

WordPress

WordPress is a decent CMS if you are planning to DIY a website. However, it is a highly recommendable platform for a beginner which offers you the best designs and choices. And later on, if you plan to expand your website, you can choose several other platforms available in the market for any new feature of your choice. 

Drupal

Drupal can be a good option if your website consists of custom functionality and needs first-class security. However, it is more adjustable with developers rather than DIY users. But, here, you will require a lot of custom work and coding for the final results of drupal. 

Joomla

Joomla is a mixture of WordPress and Drupal as it contains some features from both the CMS. It delivers you most of the user-facing features, but Joomla expects you to custom-code the non-standard features. It secures more advanced management features, which might be convenient if multiple people manage your website. In addition, you can also set up multilingual sites right outside the box. Whereas if you perform it with WordPress, it will require a separate plugin.

Now, as you have learned about each CMS mentioned above, let’s discuss the best and worst features of each one of them in detail.

Features Offered By WordPress, Joomla, And Drupal

Let’s check out the characteristics of these three CMS’s and which of the one is the best at which quality or feature. 

1. Cost and expenses

When talking about the costs involved in each CMS, your decision might become a bit tricky! But, don’t worry. 

• All the CMS mentioned above are 100%free. You can smoothly download any one of them from their official websites.
• There are other costs that you have to take care of. 
• The side costs are all about a domain name and web hosting. The domain name is none other than your website’s address on the website. It costs you around $10. 
• The hosting setup is where your website ranks and where your visitors can access it from. In the beginning, it cost you around $3.
• Building your website in any of the above CMS will cost the same amount when talking about domain name and hosting. 

If you would like to extend the native features of their CMS with some extra modules or designs. 

• WordPress plugins: $0-$200
• Joomla plugins: $0-$70
• Drupal plugins: $0-$100

When talking about themes – installable packages.

• WordPress themes: $0-$250
• Joomla themes: $0-$200
• Drupal: $0-$80

2.In terms of expertise 

Now, it all depends on what your expectations are from the CMS. 

• With WordPress, it is easy to expand and functionality of your site also, finding and customizing the designs is more approachable. 
• Most of the companies offer word press hosting, so; you don’t need to worry about the technical setup of the server or installation. 
• WordPress is a more efficient option if you want to add more customized effects to your sites, like looks, colors, backgrounds, and more visual elements. 
• Whereas Joomla and Drupal are developer-centered, you should reasonably work with HTML and PHP for a custom-looking and custom-operating website. 
• Not so many versatile add-ons available for Joomla and Drupal CMS, and others available in the market are not as good as WordPress. 

3.The popularity of the CMS

In popularity tournament, WordPress has got a head start as you can see their usage % below:

• WordPress – 41%
• Joomla – 2.1%
• Drupal – 1.5%

4. Choose your designs 

Design is the main feature for selecting your CMS.

• Joomla and Drupal look archaic, whereas WordPress puts a modern and optimized design.
• . Apart from the default design, you want to shift to a unique design where themes and templates play an important role. 
• WordPress contains thousands of themes, both free and paid. 
• To start, you can go to the official directory of themes at wordpress.org. 
• There are more than 8000 free themes available.
• Drupal and Joomla had a smaller box of choices, and there were only one or two free themes that look good. 
• In short, the paid themes have a better variety of options and design functionality. 

5. Customising feature

Every CMS provides its expertise on installing new features on your website:

• WordPress allows new add-ons plugins
• Jumla allows extensions
• Drupal calls modules
• You can find more than 5000 plugins for WordPress 
• Approximately 6000 extensions are available for Joomla
• And around 47,000 modules available for drupal 

As you can see, WordPress offers the highest number of plugins, and these plugins are the most user-facing. Got confused? Don’t worry! Let me explain what it means to be used by the final user of the site. They also provide a refined UI and are susceptible to comprehending control panels. Moreover, if you are expecting a new feature for your site, then there is a possibility that there might be a plugin that offers that feature already.  

Joomla delivers an adequate catalog of extensions, but it is smaller than WordPress. Other than that, you can find extensions to handle the vital aspects of your site, for instance, series, SEO, analytics, contact forms, etc.

Drupal modules concentrate more on the developer, and you’ll find numerous solutions to expand the APIs, create additional tokens for devs, advanced user management, and more. 

6. Security prospect and updates

Your WordPress version will get automatically updated every 50-60 days. Many of the updates are just minor and small updates or issues. Whereas the more significant updates automatically take place a couple of times in a year. 

Joomla updates appear more frequently nearby every 10-40 days, but more significant updates happen once a year or less often. 

Drupal gets updated once a month, serving one bugfix update and security update. On the other hand, significant updates come twice a year. 

Now, talking about the security aspect, WordPress is the most infected site by CMS hackers. Since it is the most popular CMS on the web, hackers prefer to break into WordPress to yield a higher ROI. 

On the other hand, Drupal and Joomla are hacked a proportionally fewer number of times than WordPress. Also, this has proved to be one primary reason that government agencies and other institutions have trusted Drupal. 

7. Support and community

All three of our best CMS- WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla offer 

ways for you to get help if you’re struggling with a task:

• WordPress consists of its separate support section on its official site. It is available with guides there, documentations, and access to the user forum where other similar people and experts can help you solve your problem.
• Joomla comes with various sections on the official site to provide multiple forms of help. However, it mainly includes documentation, the community portal and training, and also other forums.
• Drupal follows a similar approach to Joomla, offering sections for documentation, support, community portal, and various tutorials and user guides.

What are the benefits that your site will get from these CMS’s?

Benefits of WordPress:

• WordPress offers pre-installed plugin and template functions.
• Easy to operate and use
• It is user-friendly, and even beginners can use it very quickly. 
• Word[resshas over 45,000 Plugins for almost all the functionality.
• WordPress offers lots and lots of customization options for a theme.

Know why WordPress is best for your website development?

Benefits of Joomla:

• Joomla’s license is available free of cost.
• Joomla can be used for multiple purposes, such as applications of government and corporate websites.
• Joomla is easy to Use.
• Joomla offers its users thousands of templates and themes for Joomla CMS development.
• Joomla CMS development can be migrated to any server with ease. 

Benefits of Drupal

• To operate Drupal, you don’t require any technical capacity for coding (like HTML coding).
• Drupal comes with thousands of free Modules.
• Drupal has both Basic and Advanced Features for beginners as well as amateurs.
• Drupal offers Readymade Professional Themes.
• It has a compelling module that is liked by significant search engines.

How to Start with your favorite CMS?

No matter which CMS you use, WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal, you will need to have a domain name and website hosting for making a site. However, fortunately, the requirements of all three of these top CMS software are exact. 

So for a better hosting company, we would prefer Bluehost and Siteground, which are specialized in hosting WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal websites.

Conclusion

Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress are all one of top-ranked content management systems. However, Drupal and Joomla offer some more built-in features than WordPressTherefore, you. Still, WordPress would be preferable for beginners and non-developers as it comes with more convenient and easy-to-use functionality. 

 Additionally, using WordPress, you can opt from thousands of plugins available. This article has compared all the three CMS – WordPress vs. Joomla vs. Drupal that will help you read the comparison and decide more efficiently. Not only this, but you will also get the difference in WordPress vs. Joomla and WordPress vs. drupal in detail to help you to choose a better and the best option for your site. Hopefully, the article was informative, and you find it useful. If by mistake you have missed out on any of the points, hurry up! Please go and recheck it all.