There are lots of blogs about which system is better - but few people of companies spend their time using both commercially - at ClystNet we do! Our development time is split almost 50:50 between the two systems, so we have a great understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of both. However, this blog is not just read by our customers, so after much time working with both, here are our observations.

People tend to fall in to one camp or the other. It is rare to hear a Joomla person talking about how ‘wonderful’ Drupal is – which is strange. They both have their advantages – but I suspect that having taken the time to learn one, people rarely also take the time to learn the other.

1. Ease of use – Joomla wins hands down here. It has few customisation options built in than Drupal, which means there is less to learn. The user interface for Joomla is also much easier to follow.
2. Time to develop site – Joomla wins again here. As an easier system, you could get a Joomla site up and running in a few hours.
3. Templates/Themes – Joomla has literally thousand of commercial and free templates that you can download and then customise. Drupal seems to have far fewer (and many of these are of low quality) – so you’ll probably have to design your own. As such, it is easier for someone to get a great looking Joomla site than a Drupal one.
4. User permissions – Joomla biggest weakness! Joomla comes with there default groups – guest, registered user and ‘special’. You can only add more by installing a third party application. Drupal on the other hand allows unlimited user level customisation.
5. Social Networking/Community Features – Drupal, due to its excellent user management and the ability to easily configure and expand ‘organic groups’ allows Social Networking sites to be built fairly easily. Joomla doesn’t do this out of the box, but JomSocial (commercial), Community Builder (free) and Might Extensions (commercial, powerful but complex) give it the ability.
6. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – both have out of the box ability, and both by adding a few readily available and free extensions allow you to further enhance.
7. Shopping Carts – both have excellent Shopping Carts. Drupal uses Ubercart – very powerful (maybe overkill for many sites) – and Joomla uses Virtuemart (again, very (maybe too) powerful). Virtuemart use to have a poor reputation for reliability, but we have used it countless times without issue.
8. Photo galleries and multimedia – Joomla has countless easy to use photo galleries and multimedia plugins. Although Drupal can offer similar functionality – the process is more complex and the choices more limited.
9. International/multi-language – Easy on both. Joomla uses Joomfish and Drual has it built in.

Summary

For the majority of sites, Joomla offers a suitably flexible and easy to use framework allowing rapid development and easy deployment. Combines with the huge range of free and commercial templates, many of high quality, make sit the obvious choice for many.

For more complex sites requiring a high degree of control and with many customisations – Drupal offers a more heavy weight solution. We tend to use it for our most complex sites, or those requiring highly customised community/social networking features. Be prepared to build your own template, as there are few commercial ones available – and those that are we have found to be of low quality and expensive.

We talk about the Cessna light aeroplane vs a 747 Jumbo Jet…..maybe this example is a little extreme! They both have many things in common – they fly, have wings, a tail, a control stick and carry a few passengers (quite a few in the 747 example!). However, you wouldn’t use a Cessna to fly 1000’s of miles across oceans, and you wouldn’t choose the 747 to fly you and your mate from Southampton to Exeter. The 747 is also a little more complex to fly than the Cessna. They’re both very competent planes, but they should be used to solve the right problem. Choose the wrong plane and you’ll find you run out of fuel half way across the Atlantic, or, when you try to land it the runway is too short! Choose the wrong CMS and you’ll find it too complex for what you are trying to do – so you have to sink time and money in to it…or, after weeks of development time, you realise it doesn’t have the power and you have to start again (having sunk time and money in to it).

Can I suggest calling us for advice!