Joomla and Drupal, Which One is Right for You?

During the last few months we've had a lot of clients who are very technically knowledgeable and coming to us to find out more after picking up on the buzz around CMS systems and Drupal and Joomla in particular.

With the upcoming releases of Drupal 5.0 and Joomla 1.5, both systems are poised to make a big leap forward. However those launches may not happen for several months and many companies need to make a decision now, balancing the pros-and-cons of both solutions.

After talking and developing answers for several clients, we decided to put all we'd written into one document to help other people with this decision. Some disclaimers before we start:

• This is not an Drupal vs Joomla discussion, but an open acknowledgement that each choice is appropriate for different sites. Sometimes we have to tell clients that neither will work for what they want.
• This is not a comprehensive list. Please feel free to tell us what we've missed or where we are wrong. Add your own thoughts via the link at the bottom of the form, or simply post a comment.

Comparison Table of Joomla and Drupal

	Joomla [-]	Drupal [-]
Community Features	Yes Community Builder. A solid component, but one that really needs an SEF extension to enable Youtube-style URLs.	Very impressive. Users can form groups and expansion of the registraion form is native to Drupal.
Shopping Cart	Yes Joomla has Virtuemart and an integration of OSCommerce, both of which beat Drupal's ecommerce addon. Use OSCommerce if you need multicurrency options or if you have a payment gateway not supported by VM	No Not recommended as it lacks tax and currency options. However, watch out for Ubercart which looks promising.
SEO	No Poor out of the box. OpenSEF is OK and improving fast. SEF Advance is roughly comparable quality but costs 50 Euros. Code is not very well adapted for SEO.	Yes The out-of-the-box URLs work well and can be improved with one easy addon. The code is generally lightweight and well-optimised.
Forums	Yes Use Joomla with Simple Machines Forum, which is the path taken by Joomla.org. Joomlaboard integrates natively to Joomla but lacks many key features.	Yes A native and very smooth forum, but lacking in the high end features of the best modern forums. VbDrupal is the best way to avoid this (a Drupal Vbulletin hack)
Multimedia	Yes Yes, plenty of podcast and video options.	Yes Yes - Drupal Video and podcast options also available.
Photo Galleries	Yes Yes. The best are integrations with Gallery2 and the Flash gallery Expose.	Yes Has a default module and a Gallery2 integration.
Event Calendars	Yes Several native plug-ins and integrations.	No Not great. There are options but they are far behind those available for Joomla.
Template / Themes	Yes Joomla has a wide selection of free and commercial offerings. Once installed they can be assigned to different pages.	No Only one commercial developer. Off-the-shelf choices are very poor. Currently, Drupal assumes one template for all pages, although this can be adapted with effort and will 5.0 will allow templates to be assigned according to URL. Developing your own is the best bet.
Blogs	Yes Some out-of-the-box capability. A good overview is here. Joomla.org uses a port of Wordpress.	Yes Good capabilities, although not a natural blog in the manner of Wordpress.
Document Management	Yes Yes - DocMan.	No Not anything worth considering.
User Permissions	No Some very major forks can work with Joomla, but this is a very poor area. Joomla is very admin-orientated. A small group of people are going to control and run the site. A lot of members can contribute by adding content, forum posts etc. but it is difficult to increase their permissions further.	Yes Drupal wins hands-down. However, you still can't manage single members. You need to add them to a certain group.
External Integration	Yes Joomla 1.5 will help greatly with a much improved API and more hooks.	Yes` Currently Drupal wins easily with plenty of hooks
Content Management	No In the core only Section >> Category >> Content is available. That's it. No cross-categorization.	Yes Unlimited categories and subcategories. Also allows for cross-categorization of articles.
Multisites Management	No Commercial component.	Yes Out-of-the-box.
Documentation	No Poor, although work on this is progressing. There is however a wealth of useful information on the Joomla forums. Joomla 1.5 promises to be much more thoroughly documented.(Click here for 1.5 documentation.	Yes Not too bad. (Click here for documentation and here for an API reference guide
SSL Compatible	No With hacks.	Yes
Standards Compliance	No Not great. Accessible Joomla is a fork necessary to move Joomla towards compliance. Mambo/Joomla dates from before standards were even considered (1999).	Yes Yes. Excellent out-of-the-box.
Internationalization	No With Joomfish. Not an easy or straight-forward solution	Yes Yes, Excellent. (via i18n module)
Commercial Community	Yes Very strong. Perhaps the best in the Open Source CMS world. Try Try Joomla Yellow Pages or Joomla.org.	No Weak. Difficult to find strong Drupal developers in any quantity. Try Drupal.org, Drupal Yellow Pages or Drupalancers.
General Community	Yes Great. 100s of extra components available, both commercial and open source. Many companies now offering services.	Yes Good community. Often more non-profit than business driven. Excellent forum support at Drupal.org.
Ease-of-use	Yes Joomla has a great graphical interface in separate area of website.	Yes Administrator tasks on the current Drupal version are done via a menu on the frontpage which confuses many. Drupal 5.0 will solve this and also provide an online installer. Still, installing many modules needs technical knowledge.
Learning Curve	Yes Shallow. One of the very easiest CMS systems to learn and customize.	Yes A little steeper than Joomla, but still relatively easy to learn.
Speed	Yes A default installation of 1.0.11 loads in 0.90 seconds. A default installation of 1.5 loads in 1.33 seconds. (Scores from http://sitescore.silktide.com)	Yes A default installation loads in 1.05 seconds. (Score from http://sitescore.silktide.com)
Size	1.0.11 is 16.4 MB 1.5 is 16.7 MB	Version 5.0 is 2.89 MB
Current Situation	Unclear. When will Joomla 1.5 be out? Which version should people currently buiding sites use? One developer recently warned about relying on any firm deadlines or easy upgrades to the new version.	Clear development path. Currently working on Drupal 5. Beta 2 came out at the end of November and a Release Candidate is probably next.
Overall	Joomla 1.5 will be the crucial leap for the platform paving the way for the resolution of many old limitations. Producing a good-looking site with plenty of functionality is a relatively easy task with Joomla.	Drupal is more community-oriented and the current live version is more extensible. That advantage will be greatly shortened once Joomla 1.5 is stable.