A Comparison of Drupal and Joomla
I have been reviewing the web lately for information about Joomla and Drupal in particular as well as WordPress. I am about to develop a new site in my spare time, not that there is much of that, and want to move to a CMS rather than a more traditional website tool. I am new to all three CMS’s and of course like most people would love to find the one tool to do it all, but of course that usually doesn’t happen. First, here are some of the best articles I found comparing WordPress, Joomla and Drupal:
The last link is for an article that includes a survey administered by Webology eBusiness Solutions. They conducted a survey of Joomla and Drupal users predominantly asking each a set of questions covering things such as documentation, Search Engine Optimization, Quality of core code, template availability and more. In their article: “Survey Analysis Part 1: Developers and Documentation” they draw the following key conclusions:
They will be publishing another article analyzing the whole survey they conducted but I can’t wait, so I will have to do some of my own analysis because I am still not sure whether to use Joomla or Drupal for my next site. Another of their articles briefly discusses the “Cost Cutting Features of Content Management Systems” which is certainly one of the main reasons many people are turning to Open Source CMS’s. The full survey results conducted by Webology eBusiness Solutions (and my compliments to them for getting some real data from real users) can be found here: “Drupal vs Joomla Survey Results”. Have a look at that and then read on here for some more analysis. My Analysis of the Comparison of Drupal and Joomla SurveyTo analyse the Webology eBusiness Solutions survey results further I am going to make two simplifications. First, I am going to use only the opinions of the Drupal Users for Drupal, and only the Joomla Users for Joomla and ignore the rest. From the survey I can’t be sure if people who indicated they are Drupal users actually know much about Joomla or were just repeating hearsay or vice versa. I am not interested in people’s perceptions of the two systems but in real experience from actual users and developers. Though the communities would be very interested in the perceptions of the other. Second, rather than try and weight the “Strongly Agree” answers more than the “Somewhat Agree” answers and so on, I will use a simple binary system. I will add the values for “Strongly Agree” to those for “Somewhat Agree” and call those “Good” or “Yes – Satisfactory”, and add the values for “Somewhat Disagree” and “Strongly Disagree” and call those “Bad” or “No – Not Satisfactory”. This will give a more balanced and conservative result than if I had weighted the answers but will be sufficient to draw some conclusions as you see below. In addition, I have inverted some questions for consistency in the table. For example, instead of “The Core CMS has many bugs”, I have written that as “The Core CMS has few bugs” and swapped the “agree values” with “disagree” to get the same logical outcome. The numbers are the same but it makes for a consistent scoring down the columns, so Yes is Good, No is Not so Good. Those questions I have inverted are marked with an *. You can check back to the original survey. If you make those simplifications, add up the numbers, then the survey can be simplified to the following table. This makes it easier to make a fair comparison of Drupal and Joomla.
Conclusion of this Comparison of Drupal and Joomla.From the simplified table above what conclusions can you draw? Let’s look at the numbers first:
On numbers alone Drupal wins for this survey. Of course it depends on what Selection Criterion are critical for your project. Any comparison of Drupal and Joomla needs to take into account your specific site or customer requirements. Here are the areas where Joomla seems to be markedly stronger than Drupal
Here are the areas where Drupal seems to be markedly stronger than Joomla
The choice is good one to have because either way Joomla or Drupal are great systems and for many people either will do what they need. My first suggestion is to go through the 42 criteria and pick out the top say 5-10 that are important to you for your next site and then pick the CMS that excels in those categories. That means for one site you will choose Joomla while for another site you will choose Drupal and of course for some you will choose WordPress. The only drawback is the learning curve involved and perhaps the cost of supporting both Drupal and Joomla versus the benefits of using both. You also have to consider the long term problems you might have if your chosen CMS seems to do the job in the early stages but doesn’t scale up as your site grows and you want to add more and more features to it. All that depends on the size of your organisation and the type of sites you develop and support. But if you are building a 10 page simple site your choices are easier, or at least sometimes appear to be. An important, but often neglected, point to consider certainly for larger sites where it certainly seems clear that Drupal wins is the cost of full life cycle support. Whenever a system is delivered, used and maintained for many years you have to factor in the full cost of delivering and supporting the system. The rule of thumb is that the cost of supporting, maintaining and enhancing a complex system after delivery is four times the upfront cost of the system! For larger long term systems the upfront delivery cost is only 20% of the total lifetime cost of the product. So saving a few dollars on the upfront costs (20%) but losing a lot on the full life cycle support (80%) is not in fact the most cost effective approach. It is important when choosing your CMS, or in fact any product for your business, to work out how long the website you are building is going to be around and how many features may be added to it over its full life. That consideration may in fact be the most important particularly for larger projects where lots of money is at stake. Have you ever had the experience of porting an old system to a new one? Whether it be websites, databases, financial systems, software rewrites to newer languages or whatever example you have no doubt there are lessons you learned from that about up front choices and the cost of life time support. What did you learn from those experiences? What would you make sure does and doesn’t happen next time? How could you minmize the cost of that again? Considering those things might help you make good choices about all your tools and in this case your CMS. If you still can’t decide then my final suggestion for this article to help you decide is this: Spend the same amount of time, say two or three days (or if you can weeks) with each and work out which you are more comfortable with by building a similar simple site with each. There are things you will find that way that you can’t find by reading reviews. Find out what you personally like or dislike and will work for your business. Then use that one. In the overall scheme of things it won’t cost much compared with the full cost of your systems and then you will know what works for you. Hope this helps you, I will write more on this as I use these CMS’s for my own sites. I am following my own advice and have started to build a site in Drupal and Joomla, and will document my experiences when done. Having said all that it is clear that both Drupal and Joomla are great and (and I know I shouldn’t say this) here to stay and will continue to grow. But having seen a a few fads in the software industry come and go over the years I am certainly not going to predict anything except that CMSs will continue to get better and better. The fact that they are free, supported and so feature rich is a powerful statement of the benefits of the Open Source community – all of them in whatever camp they be. Until next time Owen | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
