WordPress vs Joomla: Features Comparison

• Blogging , Digital Updates , Plugins , SEO , Themes , Web Designing , WordPress
• blogging, Digital Updates, plugins, seo, themes, web designing, WordPress

It’s a critical decision about your project to make – to select the right CMS. The properly chosen solution will affect all aspects of your future project as building, developing, supporting, changing, upgrading, etc.
That’s why we’ve written this guide comparing WordPress.org and Joomla. Making an in-depth analysis of the services, our goal is to simplify your choice and help you understand which solution suits you better.

Introduction or Briefly about CMS

Let’s start with a brief overview of each platform separately with all the facts and figures provided.

• WordPress.org
  This CMS is free, self-hosted, open-sourced and built on PHP and MySQL, and licensed under the GPLv2. Currently, almost 36% of the world’s websites are built on the platform and the figure constantly grows along with the number of new sites launched.Launched as a software for blogs in 2003, presently, you can use WordPress for any purposes from a simple blog site to the full-packed business website or news portal like CNN. Microsoft, Walt Disney, Mercedes Benz, TED Blog, and others are among the well-known brands using WordPress. Today WordPress provides an ability to customize it and implement any changes without a need to touch a line of code.
• Joomla
  This CMS was launched in 2005 and it’s the second-largest system. Currently 4.2% of all websites in the world run on the platform. This system is open-source, based on PHP and MySQL, licensed under GPL. This solution allows several database options that are crucial for tech-savvy users.The highlight of the solution is advanced management/control systems provided. Hundreds of themes, components, modules are offered by the CMS for creating non-trivial content types. Linux, IKEA, Lipton Ice Tea, Harvard University, iTWire are just a few big names that are running on the platform.

WordPress vs Joomla: In-Depth Comparison

Let’s just start the comparison to understand which one suits your goals better.
Content management The simplicity of managing the content along with various media files is one more huge profit of WordPress.org. Follow the trends and feel free to create animations, GIFs, and other eye-catching elements using the graphic editor and add them to the site running on the platform with no effort by means of its beautifully designed Visual editor. The situation is opposite for Joomla. Managing content with the platform is more complex. That adds a score for WordPress.

Hosting

Here the CMSs get a tie score. It’s because you need to find, select and pay for a web host according to the system you use. Yet, both platforms can be installed on most good hosting plans in a moment. When dealing with WordPress and Joomla, most hosts offer 1-click auto-installers for the software.

Pricing

Tie. Both platforms are 100% free to download and install. But there are some side costs to take into account. While the core CMS are both free, you will need hostings (as mentioned) and you’ll also likely want plugins/extensions and themes/templates to extend the basic options.

Ease of Use and Learning Curve

WordPress wins the round. Simplicity and high usability are serious advantages of WordPress. The navigation is intuitive and requires almost no effort to build the site even for starters. Joomla is less forgiving, because it’s a developer-oriented service with a complicated interface and dashboard full of different settings. That’s why the learning curve of Joomla is greater, especially if you’ve no or little experience in web development.

Security

Here is a score for Joomla. It’s because this solution equips with both SSL and 2FA. With Joomla you can login, get to your Global Configuration and setup your Server Settings to force HTTPS (note – you will still need a SSL certificate for your hosting). Plus, there is a wide array of security extensions to be used.

When dealing with WordPress, there are some strong built-in security measures provided. However, if you want to get advanced features then the installation of third party security plugins is necessary. What’s more, if you’re going to force SSL/2FA, then you’ll have to modify the core .htaccess file (or install a plugin) to enable it.

Customization Potential

Both systems provide you with the freedom to modify and customize your project according to business objectives, user needs, branding and so on. Yet, WordPress library contains 54,000+ free plugins, 5,000+ free themes. Plus, there is a broad variety of premium themes and plugins on the assortment for your money.

Joomla offers 8,000 add-ons available in the official library (with more premium extensions available through third party marketplaces) for extending the functionality. Yet, there is no official library of free and/or premium templates provided. Oops, it’s one of the biggest let downs.

So, WordPress is leading here, not only because it’s easier to find a theme. But the themes usually offer a mostly better user experience along with a higher level of support from developers.

Multilingual Capabilities

Joomla gains a point on the issue of multilingual support. The solution allows to build a multilingual site by default, while the installation of the third-party plugin is required for the purpose when working with WordPress.

SEO

Tie. Again. Both platforms require third-party plugins or extensions to be installed to improve SEO capabilities. Using WordPress, the extremely popular Yoast SEO is at your disposal. Yoast not only signals about the problems, but it also prompts what to do to improve your content for SEO purposes and rates your post’s readability.

Joomla offers you the alternative of Yoast – EFSEO. The highlight of the add-on is the handy automatic mode that generates meta information without your interference or input. Besides that, it allows you to edit the metadata directly on the front end of the website.

Support

And it’s almost a tie again, but WordPress won. Both solutions are open-source with a strong community. Both CMSs offer the official documentation plus support page for beginners. Also, there are different forums, tutorials, articles, videos, and other useful materials available on the net. Yet, it’s a challenge to find Joomla experts, whereas WordPress offers all the stuff.

Bottom Line

It’s time to summarize our guide WordPress.org vs Joomla. So which platform is better? Both CMSs are great with their own traits offered. That’s why it’s more correct to ask: “Which solution is better for the specific needs of your project?”

WordPress.org is more preferable for the vast majority of sites and the platform leads in this run with a total score 7:5. Anyway, Joomla trails closely behind. Yet, WordPress and Joomla are just tools that are bound to help you to create your product. Both systems provide you with all the needed stuff to build the first-class project, the rest is your responsibility only.