In the world of open source CMS there is no comparison more attention getting than an article comparing Drupal and Joomla!. Probably, the grand daddy Drupal versus Joomla! comparisons of them all was posted over three years ago by the Joomla SEO company, Alledia. I extended the discussion Alledia started with my own comparison between Drupal and Joomla. My article evidently struck a chord in late 2006 and currently is approaching near 200,000 reads.
Good comparisons between Drupal and Joomla! are popular because quality comparisons between the two applications are rare. It's very difficult to have passion for one CMS, be well informed on both CMS, and in the end be non-bias in your comparison. In the three years since I wrote my article, I've only come across three additional comparisons between Drupal and Joomla! that I thought worthy to bookmark.
I haven't updated my own article comparing Drupal and Joomla because I have developed a bias opinion over the years that I can't overcome...I prefer Drupal over Joomla! Both are good applications in their own right, but in the end I almost always recommend Drupal over Joomla!. That's why I'm glad to see Alledia update their own comparison between these popular CMS with Joomla and Drupal - Which One is Right for You? Version 2.
In re-doing this chart I found that both projects have moved forward but neither has really changed its essential character:
- Joomla is still more user-friendly with a more active developer and designer community.
- Drupal is still more flexible and developer-friendly with a more coherent and stable community.
This chart was initially written for a client who wanted to make a rational business decision as to which was right for him. Please read it in the same way. Neither one is better than the other, but each one is better for different purposes.
The comparison that Alledia makes between Drupal and Joomla! is fair and they do a decent enough job indicating that "out of the box" features not present in the CMS can be obtained with third-party modules/extensions. I also think they are right in giving more credit to the CMS that brings features into the core. For instance, I think for the average CMS user it is not in their best interest to not provide some type of rich text editor when the software is first installed. Kudos to Joomla! and hundreds of other CMS in providing this feature to their users.
I don't want to be too nit picky about the Alledia comparison between Drupal and Joomla! As I mentioned earlier, I know first hand that CMS comparisons are difficult to do. But there is a box in that table that I really disagree with and it is in regards to Drupal and its commercial community.
Drupal's commercial talent pool is very high-quality but also very shallow. Most commercial developers work with large-to-medium size business and charge accordingly.
I just don't see Drupal's commercial pool that small. Over 4000 developers providing Drupal services are registered at Drupal.org alone and I've never really heard someone looking to hire a Drupal site developer have that much difficulty finding a developer. Perhaps, there is a reason why those outside the Drupal community don't recognize the thousands of commercial developers associated with Drupal. In Drupal the "general community" and "commercial community" is united as one open source community. My understanding and observation of the Joomla! community is that this isn't always the case and why perhaps Alledia says what it says about Joomla's general community.
The community as a whole has a tendency to argue and fragment but its also highly dynamic with 1000s of companies offering support and services.
Drupal has had some intense arguments over the years but almost never fragments. Drupal is in the middle of a massive redesign of it's flagship Drupal.org website and needless to say there has been a lot of opinions that have been expressed on how, who, and what should be involved in that redesign. But the strength of the Drupal community is that commercial and non-commercial contributors have little difficulty coming together. Just yesterday, Acquia's Kieran Lal called for volunteers in the redesign and by the end of the day, he had his sponsoring companies and contributors. I wonder how well many other open source projects could bring their commercial people together like that in a single day?
Refer to Drupal's commercial community as shallow? Somebody needs to take another look at their analaysis. Luckily, it has been my experience that Alledia is always open to discuss their comparison of Drupal and Joomla! and when convinced they are willing to modify their table. Perhaps later today, I might just go over there and convince them via comments that the use of "shallow" to describe the Drupal commercial support is a poor term to use indeed.
Comments
I've searched for Drupalators
I've searched for Drupalators on drupal.org, Twitter, Facebook, local newspapers, and university bulletin boards. All of these have yielded about 10 responses. Of the 10, 8 were from foreign countries, half half of them come from countries that don't exist, the other half had no experience with Drupal but 'some' experience with Wordpress and php in general. The other two were from the US - both hard to find, but both worked out very well.
Over the last 2 years, if I could have found someone I would have hired them in a heartbeat. In the end I had to learn myself.
A Growing and Changing Community
I wasn't really into Drupal more than a year ago, but we did our first round of dev hiring in the summer via drupal.org (our local group) and had almost 84 applications. We even had people submit their resume's via the orchestrateam.com contact form so we had better internal tracking. Sure, a lot of them were non-US, but that's not always a bad thing. We found a great dev that we're really happy with.
However, I don't think it's about finding talent. I think it's largely about the commercial opportunities available with Drupal. In this case, I actually agree with the somewhat critical stance on Drupal. In terms of commercial opportunities, there are a lot of big companies solving big problems and charging big bucks to do so. There is also a pretty active freelance community that handles the "small sites", but, in my opinion, there is really limited marketing as a whole within the small and medium enterprise space. However, this is starting to change. You're seeing firms like Acquia actually doing huge pushes for brand awareness. Also, marketing, social media awareness, and educated adoption (people specifically looking for Drupal) is improving.
Coding and deployment methodology is fast dissipating as a competitive advantage for most Drupal firms as the community overall gets better. Drupal is going to become more commercialized as the easy problems get solved and the big ones come into the limelight. Established Drupal players are seeing this happen and are differentiating from other firms via commercializing their product as a result (think OpenAtrium or Acquia Gardens). However, right now, it's still fundamentally not as mature as Joomla in the commercial market.
Different tools for different jobs
As with many applications it is more a matter of choosing the right tool for the job. Personally I am of the belief that Joomla is far more usable out of the box, straight away giving you backends (which are far easier to explain to non IT professionals how to use).
However, I find that a big failing with Joomla, and possibly why I use it less and less, is that companies appear bound to put links on your site for using their components. You just dont get this with the majority of Drupal modules.
In terms of scalability Drupal feels far more capable, however, joomla takes far less time to set up and arrange. Horses for courses I guess.
@Will, mandatory back-linking
@Will, mandatory back-linking is the exception, not the rule, but where they are present they are easily removed. Only a minority use the pay-extra-to-remove-my-link business model (and even then this is almost completely restricted to templates, not components).
Thanks for the constructive criticism
Thanks for the constructive criticism, Brian
I thought long and hard about that particular sentence but I stand by it. There just isn't the same quantity of public-facing webfirms using Drupal as compared to Wordpress and Joomla.
I could use anecdotes but stats might be more useful.
Google results:
"Drupal web design" 5,290,000
"Joomla web design" 12,700,000
"Wordpress web design" 57,400,000
ODesk projects: http://www.odesk.com/blog/2009/02/joomla...
Google trends: http://www.alledia.com/blog/general-cms-...
Again, its not a question of which is better. Drupal is doing a great-job of entering over the higher-level or enterprise sector, its just not making the same in-roads into the mass market.
re: Drupal v. Joomla! comparison by Alledia
Great review, Brian, and a worthwhile refresh of the original post by Alledia. As President of a company that has implemented both Joomla! and Drupal, our team has definitely been leaning heavily toward Drupal. One of our team members, Conor McNamara, blogged about our collective experiences a few months ago (I won't post the link since I don't want you to think I'm shamelessly plugging our site!).
With regard to the comment post by Alledia, I would hardly call a Google search as proof of either volume or quality of Web design/development shops that are qualified to implement either product -- either in a workgroup or enterprise. These search results are generally easy to manipulate with smart 'link juicing'. I would suggest that there are probably nowhere near 75 million resources that implement these three products globally -- the number is more in the tens of thousands. Thus, the Google stats are fairly irrelevant.
However, I would submit that a really great endeavor would be for someone to take on the project of creating a directory of WCMS integrators, developers, designers for all three camps. What a worthwhile buyers guide that would be! You can find some of that information on the Drupal.org site, although it is a hard list to get on. Still another place for that information is www.acquia.com, where that company certifies Drupal shops (disclosure: DPCI is one such certified shop).
For small business, does the CMS matter?
Hi Steve (Alledia), Thanks for stopping by and I've been meaning to stop by your site to leave my own comments (I think the shopping cart discussion over there is interesting). As I hopefully made clear in my post, any criticism I have of your analysis is not intended to take away that I think your comparison of Drupal and Joomla is one of the best to be found online. Without your comparisons, I wouldn't have been as inspired to write my own comments about Drupal/Joomla! comparisons.
On Twitter, I asked Drupal developers and those seeking Drupal developers if they thought finding commercial support for Drupal was difficult. I got a wide range of responses in both the "yes" and "no" category. Probably the best response came from Karyn Cassio (@TechGirlGeek).
I'll argue that your response may be bias in favor of Joomla! commercial developers because you're more involved with Joomla! than Drupal. Why else would you describe Joomla! commercial community as "Perhaps the best in the Open Source CMS world with a wealth of developers, designers and consultants". The best, you're now not even putting Joomla's commercial support ahead of Drupal but all open source CMS in the world. There is bias you're showing in this analysis. In the same token, I know Drupal better and that is perhaps why I promote Drupal's community a little better than Joomla's community. Though like you, despite my bias, I see just as you do that both open source projects are worthy of being placed in the spotlight.
Now the interesting thing we're all not talking about is most site owners really don't care about the software being used to run their site. Away from the CMS folks and in the real world most small business site owners will just stare back at you with a blank face when you mention Drupal, Joomla! or the countless of other open source and proprietary CMS out there. For most businesses...they're just relieved they found any developer willing to build them a site at a reasonable price.
In other words, I don't think it really matters to the customer how strong the commercial support is for Drupal or Joomla!. All the customer really wants is a site that works and he/she has really little interest on the engine that runs the site. The customer is more worried about the quality of the work the developer they're hiring is going to do than the CMS that is being utilized. At least that's my take of the small business site owner.