Top 3 CMS Comparison WordPress vs Joomla vs Drupal for Websites

Top 3 CMS comparison of the world WordPress vs Joomla vs Drupal

Costs and Expense Comparison for the Best CMS:

While opting for a CMS system for your need, the first thing that tickles your mind is the costs for using the required one.

Though the three of these CMS are free and perform perfectly, at the same time, you can download them easily from the official websites and start working with them. However, the real cost comes later that you need to take.

The CMS platforms come with some of the side costs that you need to consider to run them properly. Here are the side costs that you are going to need:

Domain name: The domain name on your website suggests the address of the web. The cost for buying and keeping the domain is at about $15 per year.

Web hosting: The web hosting setup marks the area where your website sits. Also, you get access from the visitor using web hosting. A convenient web hosting comes with a cost of $3 per month.

CMS Comparison WordPress Joomla Drupal

All three of CMS costs almost the same for the domain name and web hosting as the CMS platforms are free for installing. However, in case you want some advanced features with the CMS, there are various plans.

Here are a few CMS platforms.

WordPress: The plugins comes at the cost of $0-$200

Drupal: Plugins for Drupal costs around $0-$10

Joomla: Joomla comes with the $0-$70 plugin cost

Also, there is pricing variation for the various themes.

WordPress: Themes come with the $0-$250 pricing range.

Drupal: The pricing ranges from $0-$80 for the themes.

Joomla: Joomla comes in the $0-$200 price range.

Also, there are various add-ons that come with these CMS systems. The pricing ranges differ for the add-ons. However, the add-ons are optional. The minimum you are going to cost for any of these three plugins is $51 per year.

Level of Expertise Needed:

The important area of peace about these CMSs is you can use them without any high-qualified previous experience. It’s all up to you based on how advanced you want your site to be.

WordPress is much easier to use. Moreover, it comes with a lot of functionality and customized designs suitable for your site.

Also, many hosting companies come with the managed WordPress hosting, which helps you with no technical set up required for the server. At the same time, the installation is pretty easy. The hosting companies offer you the complete set.

WordPress is also good for the customization of your site. The user-friendly interface of WordPress there comes with easy options for color changing, look changing, and tweaking the presence of your site. At the same time, there are attractive backgrounds and an array of visual elements.

Joomla and Drupal, on the other hand, needs a little bit of developing knowledge for easy workability with HTML and PHP. For making a customized website with many advanced looks, you can use the developing skills.

The add-ons are quite limited for Drupal and Joomla. Those which are available are not much refined. For a customized look, you can hire a developer for your Joomla and Drupal CMS. If you want to build a future for yourself, you need to build it as there are no plugins for it.

The Popularity of the Best CMS:

Looking at the popularity of the three CMS systems are enough to give you an idea which one is loved by most. WordPress comes with 35% of users in the entire web.

The majority of websites are usually run using WordPress. At the same time, Joomla holds the popularity of 2.7% on the whole web and Drupal coms with 1.7% of popularity.

Websites like Harvard University, NASA, and Tesla are run with Drupal. Joomla, on the other hand, comes with websites like itwire, United Nations Regional Information Centre, etc.

The White House, PlayStation Blog, University of Washington are run within the WordPress CMS.

Choice of Designs:

The choice of design also plays an important factor in picking a good CMS system. A nice-looking website is always liked by the user and the readers. All three CMS systems come with their distinctive design facilities.

The WordPress CMS system comes with thousands of themes, which are quite loved by the series. All the themes come with both paid and free options.

To enable those, you need to go to the official directory for themes using WordPrss.org. You can pick from 10000 free WordPress themes. Throughout the web, there are also a lot of free themes.

The paid themes range between $10-$250 with beautiful designs. With WordPress, there is no shortage of themes and designs.

For Drupal and Joomla, the design options are not that extensive ranges like WordPress. However, the themes are also good for an attractive looking website.

The choices are limited in Drupal and Joomla. Also, the attractive themes look come with the pricing plans. The paid themes come with hundreds of options.

Customization Options:

All the CMS platforms come with an array of new features that you can use for customizing the site. WordPress addresses the add-ons as plugins, which Drupal calls it modules and Joomla calls it an extension.

However, the work is almost the same as they are made for giving you a lot of features essential for using the extensive range of features for your CMS.

For WordPress, the plugin options extend up to 50000. From the official directory. There are also thousands of other third-party developers that offer you a large range of features. All the plugins offered by WordPress are much user-centric.

The UI offered by WordPress is easy to implement through the control panels. Also, the plugins ensure security, and for all the needs, there is a plugin.

Drupal, on the other hand, comes with 44000 modules available in the official directory, but the third-party extensions are not that much.

Drupal modules need developer knowledge. There are various options with API solutions. Also, there are areas of additional tokens for devs for more advanced functions.

Joomla, on the other hand, comes with only 8000 extensions from the official directory. Joomla comes with an impressive catalog along with the extensions. The extensions are much useful for the sites along with SEO, analytics, gallery, contact forms, etc.

Security and Updates:

Security is the most focused feature for any of the CMS systems. The WordPress version comes with updates every two months. However, most updates are small for fixing the issues and small bugs on the site. The bigger changes come once in two or one years.

Joomla checks on updates every 10-40 days. The updates are quite small. On the other hand, the bigger updates come once a year or with much less frequency.

Drupal works well with a set of release schedules for buffing and updates. One major security update comes once a month. The big update with the major versions comes twice a year.

However, the current confusion about Drupal is it is running both the 7 and 8 versions simultaneously.

As 90% of infected CMS websites are running on WordPress, the security score is definitely low. It is one of the most popular CS for the web and receives a large number of hacks every year. WordPress holds a higher ROI in hacking.

Drupal and Joomla, on the other hand, receive less hacking than WordPress. Drupal is reckoned for its security especially, which makes many Government agencies and institutions depend on it with its robust website security.

A Content management system (CMS) is a software system that provides website authoring, collaboration, and administration tools designed to allow users to create and manage website content with relative ease.

It is used to create and manage digital content. CMS comparison is difficult however today we are going to compares three of the most widely used one’s CMS.

1. WordPress
2. Joomla
3. Drupal

All three CMS Comparison platforms are open-source software, each developed and maintained by a community of thousands, and all are free to download and use.

1. WordPress

wordpress.org

WordPress is an online, open source website creation tool written in PHP. When it comes to CMS comparison, it’s probably the easiest and most powerful blogging and website content management system (or CMS) in existence today.

It can also be successfully used for designing simple websites. WordPress is powerful enough for web developers or designers to efficiently build sites for clients; WordPress is ideal for fairly simple websites, such as everyday blogging and news sites; and for anyone looking for an easy-to-manage site.

The development on WordPress is easy and one can see real-time changes as they apply changes on their website.

Benefits of WordPress

  • It comes with preinstalled plugin and template function.
  • It’s ease-of-use.
  • User-friendly and best for beginners and amateurs.
  • It has over 45,000 Plugins for almost all the functionality.
  • WordPress offers lots of customization options of a theme.

2. Joomla

joomla
Joomla is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) for publishing web content. It’s great for e-commerce or social networking websites, but when it’s about CMS comparison it requires a basic understanding of technical skills.

Joomla is designed to perform as a community platform, with strong social networking features. When it comes to complexity as per CMS comparison, Joomla comes somewhere between simple WordPress and comprehensive and advanced Drupal.

Joomla helps you keep track of your web content. As per CMS comparison, Joomla allows you to build a site with more content and structure flexibility than WordPress offers.

When CMS Comparison comes, Joomla has brilliantly combined the power and flexibility which Drupal has to offer, while also retaining the intuitive, user-friendliness that WordPress excels at, making it a perfect middle ground in a crowded marketplace.

Benefits of Joomla

  • Joomla is an open source so its license is available free of cost.
  • Joomla can be used for Multipurpose like government applications and organizational websites.
  • It’s Easy to Use.
  • Not too Technical.
  • There are thousands of templates and themes available for Joomla CMS development.
  • Joomla CMS development can be easily migrated to any server.

As per CMS comparison, Joomla requires certain Plugins for certain scripts. Its Customization is limited. It is heavy for the simple and small website.

3. Drupal

drupal
Drupal is the most difficult, but also the most powerful. It requires a familiar understanding of HTML, CSS, and PHP. Drupal an exceptionally SEO Friendly CMS it comes with the Clean code and effective modules.

If CMS Comparison appears then Drupal is known for its powerful taxonomy and ability to tag, categorize, and organize complex content.

Benefits of Drupal

  • Drupal doesn’t require any specialized capacity for coding (like HTML coding).
  • it comes with Thousand of free Modules.

  • Drupal has Basic and Advanced Features.
  • Drupal comes with Readymade Professional Themes.
  • It has the neat code and exceptionally potent modules that are liked by major search engines.

Comparison

Comparison
All three are excellent choices in most cases. But your own unique scenario will require different capabilities, which probably makes ONE of these three CMS options the perfect fit. CMS Comparison is between WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.

All these offer great features and tons of customization, ease-of-use, and strong security. As per CMS comparison, Choosing the right is indeed the difficult task because they’re all good options.

When compare three of them for a simple blog or brochure-type site, WordPress could be the best choice (while very friendly for non-developers, it’s a flexible platform also capable of creating very complex sites).

If you are looking for something more advanced than the highly customized site requiring scalability and complex content organization, Drupal might be the best choice. And for something in between that has an easier learning curve, As per CMS Comparison Joomla is a perfect choice.

If we compare three of them WordPress offers almost 4k + themes while Joomla 1k + and Drupal 2k+. If talk about the Plugins WordPress offers more than 45k + free Plugins while Joomla 7K free + Plugins and Drupal offers almost 34 k + free Plugins.

When it comes to using, WordPress is most user-friendly as compared to Joomla and Drupal.

CMS comparison clearly shows WordPress is best used for simple blogging, corporate website, or small business websites. Joomla is mainly used for, E-commerce and Social networking sites.

Drupal is the most technically advanced and good for technical people who like to get into the technicality. Anyone considering Drupal should have at least a basic knowledge of HTML, PHP and other common web programming languages.

Which one should you select?

Everyone has their own choices, however, if we have to select one we will go for WordPress. WordPress is the best option among all of them as we did CMS Comparison and it’s clearly visible that

It’s super easy to add new content and there are tons of free Plugins and layouts to choose from so we can easily change and tweak basically anything we want without needing to know HTML, CSS, or any other programming languages.

There are thousands of different themes available. It also has a ton of security updates and features. It’s the clear winner for us.

Everyone will say their content management system is the best. If you are still not sure which one to use, take a look at our CMS Comparison of WordPress vs Joomla vs Drupal.

It might help you. Or else you can download each of the free platforms and do a trial run all by yourself to decide what suits you the best as per your requirement.

Summary:

For which kind of business you should use WordPress?
WordPress is considered to be the all-rounder CMS because if you want to build a website you get most of the features in handy. Also, you get all the features that your business required.

WordPress is the simplest platform ever that can be handled by a non-tech person even without having proper knowledge of HTML and CSS. WordPress users get access to the thousands of templates that can be featured the same as you want.

Along with this, you can access thousands plugins that enhance your simple website functionality to extend the level.

If you are a beginner, a non-tech person, a small startup, and an entrepreneur then WordPress should be your first choice.

For which kind of business you should use Drupal?

Your 1st choice should be a Drupal when you are looking to create a website with too many custom functionality. If you want to give first priority to your website security then Drupal is the best platform to go with.

If you are an expert or knows technical stuff then you should create a website with Drupal. Drupal is not best for the beginner users as they will lack in technical code.

Plus, you need to know some code for doing custom work for improving the functionality that Drupal provides.

For which kind of business you should use Joomla?

If you want to create the most powerful online application then choose the Joomla Platform. Joomla functionality lies between WordPress and Drupal. Top-level organizers and website developers prefer Joomla platform then others.

The biggest benefit of using Joomla is that it is much secure with 2 factor authentication and B-Crypt algorithm.

If you want that your website should be handled by multiple users then Joomla is best because it supports the user management scheme.

With Joomla, you can create a multilingual website whereas if you choose WordPress that supports different languages you will need to integrate seperate plugin for it.

Expenses on WordPress vs Joomla vs Drupal

Get WordPress Plugins at price $0 to $200.
Get Joomla Plugins at price $0 to $70.
Get Drupal Plugins at price $0 to $100.

Get WordPress themes at price $0 to $250.
Get Joomla themes at price $0 to $200.
Get Drupal themes at price $0 to $80.

The popularity of WordPress vs Joomla vs Drupal

WordPress users are more than 35%.
Joomla users are more than 2.8%.
Drupal users are less than 2%.

WordPress is used by

The White House
University of Washington
PlayStation Blog

Joomla is used by

RogerFederer.com
United Nations Regional Information Centre
itwire

Drupal is used by

NASA
Harvard University
Tesla

Customization options

WordPress has more than 50,000 plugins in the official directory.
Joomla has more than 80,000 extensions in the official directory.
Drupal has more than 44,000 modules in the official directory.

If you are looking to hire any professional developers to create a website or helping out in some difficulties then you must choose WordPress because you will be able to find lots of developers who work on WordPress rather than the Drupal or Joomla

Count of freelancer offering work

More than 68000 freelancers offer WordPress related job.
More than 10,000 freelancers offers Joomla related job.
Less than 5,200 freelancers offers Drupal related job.

About Sonnal S Sinha

Sonnal S SinhaSonnal S Sinha is a passionate writer as well as WordPress and WooCommerce rockstar who loves to share insights on various topics through his engaging blog posts. He runs a successful website design and digital marketing company. With 15+ years of experience in WordPress theme development, he strives to inform and inspire readers with his thought-provoking content. He helps thousands of small and medium businesses and startups create a unique online presence. Follow Sonnal S Sinha for your regular dose of knowledge and inspiration.