Joomla vs WordPress – What’s the Difference? (Pros and Cons). Choosing a quality content management system is a vital decision that you can make for managing your website. There are numerous options available in the industry, but you need to choose the best.
But two platforms stand out from the rest, and one of them can be the best option for your website management.
WordPress and Joomla are two CMS platforms renowned for extensive customization, ease of use, active communities, and premium options.
Both the tools have pros and cons, and it gets difficult to choose one for your website.
But you can’t choose both, right?
Don’t worry. We’ll help you compare both the platforms and help you determine which is better based on your business. So let’s get started Joomla vs WordPress.
What is WordPress?
It was developed by American developer Matt Mullenweg in 2003 and is licensed under the General Public License.
WordPress is the easiest and most powerful blogging and website builder and a platform for websites, such as blogging, e commerce, portfolio and business websites. WordPress platform site is a great solution for both large and small websites.
With WordPress plugins you can create websites, blogs, other mobile applications and online stores. WordPress is a leading CMS solution used by over 60 million websites, including 34% of the leading 10 million sites.
Pros of WordPress
- It’s a user friendly CMS that offers great features.
- Increased security compared to traditional sites. With WordPress security plugins to keep the security of your site hack proof.
- You can use WordPress plugins that can help you streamline your website management.
- You can use highly responsive themes offered by WordPress to increase the intuitive quotient of the website.
- It’s an open source platform that anyone can use, study and change.
- E commerce sites ( a plugins like WooCommerce to make sure your site is efficient for eCommerce)
- WordPress tool is great for bloggers as it has a simple to use interface and features that can be accessed quickly.
- You don’t need a technical background to explore WordPress and extract the desired results. It has a small learning curve and can easily be used by beginners.
Cons of WordPress
- Regular updates can cause some small problems in which the user needs to revert the changes.
- Being an open source platform, it is prone to cyber attacks that can compromise the security of the users. There is WordPress SSO plugin to keep security of your site at high level.
- The generic code of the themes can decrease the site’s speed, hindering the experience.
- It can be expensive to perform different customizations to the WordPress website.
- Poor SEO and website vulnerability.
- WordPress doesn’t offer multiple language support features that can help you manage your website in a language other than English.
These are the basics about WordPress that can help you get an overview of the content management software. Now let’s understand the basics of Joomla.
What is Joomla?
Joomla is another open source and free CMS that can help you publish the web component and different dynamic websites. It was developed by the Joomla community and Open Source Matters Inc in 2005.
It uses the different software design patterns and Object Oriented Programming techniques. Developed using PHP, it enables the users to store the data in different databases like MS SQL, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.
It offers web loading, news flashes, forums, language search, printable versions of articles and support. It has different advantages and disadvantages compared to WordPress so let’s take a look at this fully featured CMS system that is easy to set up, learn, and cost effective.
Joomla is the second most popular content management system, that powers around 3% of all the websites on the Internet and holds 5.4% of the content management system market.
Pros of Joomla
- It’s an open source platform that can be freely modified. You don’t need to pay a license fee to access the CMS solution.
- Joomla server is great for supporting eCommerce as the platform enables business owners to manage their content and inventory from the same place and bypass the need to use multiple platforms.
- Security is another great feature as Joomla comes with many new features to take security to higher level.
- Joomla Content and Image management.
- You can easily edit the content and structure of the website.
- Extensive customization.
- Intuitive admin interface to create and managing the website.
- Great support from the community. You can solve different technical issues that may arise during website management.
- Joomla enables you to manage your website in different languages to provide multilingual freedom.
Cons of Joomla
- You get a few additional modules to your website. You can customize your website easily, but it’s difficult to find something specific based on your requirements.
- Joomla may have compatibility issues that can be frustrating for different users.
- You get access to several paid plugins and modules, but limited resources are available on the platform.
- Joomla is not great for blogging as it doesn’t offer a simple and user friendly interface to access different features.
- It has a larger learning curve that makes it difficult for a new user to understand and explore the platform without proper knowledge. You also need a technical background or web development experience to bypass different difficulties while using the platform.
Now let’s move further to understand Joomla vs WordPress – What’s the Difference? and the major point of differences between WordPress and Joomla.
Joomla vs WordPress – Key Differences
There is a few key points separating both leading content management systems. Please have a look.
Based on search engine optimization
Joomla SEO
If we compare the SEO capabilities of both platforms, Joomla takes an edge as it enables the users to set keywords and meta descriptions for the news articles.
Offers an “Easy Frontend SEO” plugin that is equivalent to Yoast SEO plugin. It allows you to perform some common tasks such as, meta information editing, and a handy automatic mode for generating meta information without any input.
WordPress SEO
But if we look at the wider horizon and include both platforms’ plugin capabilities, WordPress has a popular SEO plugin known as Yoast SEO that offers great features and beats Joomla by miles.
Yoast categorizes the SEO score by analyzing multiple areas of the websites that can help the user improve the areas they lack.
The plugin tells you how to improve your score in different areas and increase your SEO score. The powerful interface to improve the on page SEO enables Yoast to help WordPress outshine Joomla in the SEO segment.
Based on security
WordPress Security
The popularity of WordPress is great, so it makes it prone to attacks and vulnerabilities. Hackers try out to breach the security layers of the platform and harm the website’s owners.
With a large library of WordPress plugins, it gets difficult to ensure that every plugin employs the safety standard that can restrict hacking attempts.
WordPress doesn’t provide the basic features like forcing a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) on the website. You need to rely on different plugins to access the advanced security features.
Joomla Security
The security offered by Joomla is great as it forces the connection over SSL and enables Two Factor Authentication.
The CMS also offers its set of security extensions that enhance the security of your websites and shield them from external threats and attacks.
The overall security segment gives Joomla the extra edge over WordPress because of its strict security precautions.
Based on customization potential
WordPress Customization
You can find high quality WordPress themes with multiple customization features to help you achieve your desired results. The diversity offered by WordPress is great, and it becomes easier to bring your website idea into reality using powerful plugins offered by WordPress.
WordPress also offers a higher level of support and provides the ecosystem to create your desired thoughts with finesse. Joomla’s customization limitation enables WordPress to stand out in the customization category.
Joomla Customization
Talking about Joomla, the platform doesn’t offer the flexibility required for the users to customize their themes, different functionalities, and website style. You limit your ideas and only can explore options provided by the platform.
Joomla platform comes with many features and has 8,000+ extensions in its official library. Compared to WordPress, extension installation in Joomla requires more steps due to Joomla not allowing the access the extension directory from the admin dashboard.
Based on content management
Both platforms offer great CMS control and features. They offer excellent features to manage and create a different type of websites that helps them stand out from the rest.
WordPress Content Management
Even WordPress is considered a simple and strain forward CMS to handle blogs or landing pages, but it can build and manage complex sites.
WordPress has a simplified user experience that can help users manage their content easily compared to Joomla. Users can install the platform quickly and easily learn how to create pages, posts, or different types of options using the software.
Using WordPress, achieving the desired goals and results becomes easier for non technical professionals. The content management process is easier in WordPress than in Joomla, making it in this category.
Joomla Content Management
Joomla is renowned for the complexities it offers and enables the users to build sites that can be evolved into whatever they want. The learning curve is steeper for non technical professionals, and it can trouble users with no background experience in web development.
Offers a built in WYSIWYG editor called TinyMCE that is very similar to WordPress’s Classic Editor. Also Joomla does not have a taxonomy content system. You will need to install content system extension manually, which is complex and time consuming.
Ease of Use
WordPress Ease Of Use
Many web hosting provider companies offers a one click WordPress installer in their hosting plan. So you don’t need to install the WordPress manually.
Another interesting thing is it’s web based control panel. It is simple, easy to use and user friendly, so any normal user with a limited knowledge can setup their blog on WordPress.
The admin dashboard is straightforward and relatively intuitive., which includes all major area in left side bar such as, Posts, Pages, Media, SEO and more.
Joomla Ease Of Use
Like WordPress, many web hosting companies provides a specific Joomla web hosting or include a one click installer. It’s also easy to find Joomla hosting services.
Compared to WordPress, Joomla control panel is not beginner friendly. Setting up a Joomla website is very hard if you are an average user. Like WordPress, Joomla have a side menu in the left panel. However, most of the features and utilities live in the top menu.
In short, Joomla is not easy to use. It is designed for developer, but not for end user friendly at all. It is more complex than WordPress, and it takes time to learn.
Support
WordPress Support
WordPress is a community driven platform, so it does not provide live support. However, it has a large free active support community that range from beginners to advanced users.
If you need hands on assistance, you can hire developer or WordPress professional from the freelance portal in aminimal charge.
Joomla Support
Joomla has an active community that supports users via forum. There are lot of tutorials and guidelines available online. It does not provide any live support.
Compared to WordPress, finding a developer to resolve technical issues can be more challenging and more expensive..
Great! We have read about Joomla vs WordPress – What’s the Difference? and now it is time to summarize.
Joomla vs WordPress - What's the Difference? Conclusion
Having a powerful CMS for managing and creating a quality website is important. You can create different landing pages and websites based on your ideas to achieve your desired outcomes.
Based on the difference, factors, and basic understanding of the two CMS in the industry, you need to decide between WordPress and Joomla as your website management and development platform.
If you have technical knowledge about web development and a techy mindset to handle platforms, choosing Joomla won’t be a bad option.
But if you are new to the web development and management ecosystem, then you need a tool like WordPress to make the process simpler and smoother for you.
You can read through the customer reviews to understand what others feel about both the top CMS solutions.
