Updated March 3, 2023
Difference Between Drupal and Joomla
With everything happening over the internet, it is important that the content over the internet is well organized and is up to date. For the ease of this purpose, there are various content management systems available in the market. Namely, these include WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc. Drupal is an open-source management system that helps in managing content over the internet. It is used by many organizations and maintains all websites. Joomla is also an open-source platform where different websites and applications can be created. It can connect to any database like MySQL or PostgreSQL to manage and deliver content easily. Let us have a look at the difference between both Drupal vs Joomla CMS’s.
Head To Head Comparison Between Drupal and Joomla (Infographics)
Below is the top 5 difference between Drupal vs Joomla
Key differences between Drupal and Joomla
Both are popular choices in the market; let us discuss some of the major differences:
- With so many CMS present in the market, Joomla vs Drupal also stands a strong competition to all. Joomla means “all together” in Swahili. It is the second most used and popular CMS after WordPress. It is based on PHP and SQL databases.
- Drupal, on the other hand, stands third in the race of CMS. It is mostly used to build enterprise sites. It is also among the most technically advanced CMS.
- When I arise to costs, both Drupal and Joomla are free, but you can get advanced features when choosing the premium package. Drupal is not easy to develop, and unless you have programming skills, you will need to pay to use it.
Drupal vs Joomla Comparison Table
The primary Comparison between Drupal vs Joomla are discussed below:
| The Basis Of Comparison |
Drupal |
Joomla |
| Basic difference and history | This is an open-source content management system written in PHP and is distributed under a general public license. It became open source in 2001. The significant use of Drupal started in 2003. The initial release was known as Drupal core and supported basic content management systems. These features consisted of account registration and maintenance, menu management, etc. The core installation helps in creating a simple website or a multi-user blog. It also acts as a web application framework. | Joomla is also an open-source content management system for publishing various web content. It was developed by Open Source Matters Inc. It was created in August 2015. To use this CMS independently, it was created on a model view controller web application framework. This is also written in PHP and uses different OOPS concepts. All data can be stored in MySQL or PostgreSQL. It also has additional features like page caching, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, blogs, news flashes, etc. |
| Ease of Use | Drupal is considered as hardest to learn and is used when the project is complex. Drupal has a modular approach and, as a result, provides a good user interface design and content entry. The web pages are created using blocks and views. The webmaster creating web pages can create all programming modules with flexibility. | Joomla, on the other hand, is a bit easier, and it is created mostly from the webmasters perspective than the programmer’s perspective. Joomla also provides toolboxes to webmasters to create components and modules. The webmaster needs to have some expertise to create new and complex web pages using Joomla. |
| Technical Comparison | The framework of Drupal has a poor design, and the procedural framework makes it difficult to use.
Drupal makes use of the below patterns: 1) Procedural 2) Hooking Drupal uses the database by default to store its views. There is no version control, and the developer also cannot collaborate while developing views. A new view or content, whenever it is created, corresponds to a couple of database tables. This changes the structure of the database with even small changes made by the webmaster. Also, the logs are stored in a database instead of files. To access these log files through a database is difficult and requires special access and profiles. Also, it consumes lots of space, resulting in the inefficiency of a system. To overcome from this, Drupal has introduced Syslog. |
Joomla’s framework is well designed, uses Object-oriented programming concepts and an MVC framework. Its implementations include a number of design patterns. Joomla has below design patterns:
3) symfony2 4) Zend It also uses enterprise programming languages such as Java (including Struts and Spring) Patterns like Database Abstraction Layer (DBAL) work very well with Joomla. Object-relational mapping can be easily integrated with Doctrine. |
| Core Architecture | There is tight integration between all these components, and hence all of these can communicate with each other. Here the structure is circular, and it has numerous points across the surface, which are called as modules. Maintaining such kinds of codes becomes difficult. To implement hooking architecture efficiently, Drupal makes use of call_user_func() and other dynamic function invocation/reflection methods extensively. Debugging is also a difficult task in Drupal. | Joomla has a tree structure. The main part consists of the Joomla core. This can also be called the trunk of the tree. The branches which can be API can have more branches in the form of components. Modules and widgets can be called leaves of this tree. Any component can be plugged in, and its integration can be done with Joomla’s security and the different article management functions. |
| Performance and Caching | To load a particular page, Drupal makes around 100 database queries. These are issues related to hooking architecture. It requires at least 2 GB of memory. If caching is on, then Drupal can be faster. The add-in in Drupal is Solr, which helps to handle large websites and databases. | Joomla is lightweight and is faster. It can work efficiently on 512MB. Caching on Joomla is much easier and requires fewer resources. Joomla provides Sphinx, which is in C++ code and faster than Solr. It can also handle large traffic easily. |
Conclusion
The use of both Joomla vs Drupal depends on your use. If you wish to go for a user-friendly option, then Joomla can be chosen. It has a smaller ecosystem. It is SEO friendly, and anyone can start using it. Drupal can be used when a huge website with many features and customizations. It has many inbuilt functions that enhance performance, but only a developer well-versed in coding and programming can easily cope with it. So choose between Drupal vs Joomla wisely and get your first website done!
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This has been a guide to the top differences between Drupal vs Joomla. Here we also discuss the key differences with infographics and comparison tables. You may also have a look at the following articles.
