Which is Better CMS - Joomla or WordPress?

Joomla and WordPress are in a league of their own. Drupal is coming close but it is still far away from the leaders. Most of the other content management software is also good but since it seriously lags behind in terms of popularity, very often when a webmaster compares Content Management Systems, the selection for a best CMS starts and ends with Joomla and WordPress.

What Makes a CMS a Good One?

Choosing a hosting company is important, but it is not a big deal. It is important to know what factors to consider for the comparison. There are many factors to take into account but some of the major differentiators are:

Reliability – a CMS is a work horse and if it crashes unexpectedly and frequently, such CMS is no good.

Features – a rich feature set is very important because if a CMS doesn't offer even the basic functionality a webmaster needs, this isn't very useful.

Extensions – no matter how rich the basic functionality of a CMS is, a webmaster will always need more features and that is why plugins, extensions, and add-ons are for. Here the rule is the more extensions, the better.

Support – even the most reliable software crashes and even the easiest application might pose difficulties when implementing it and that is why reliable support (i.e. a knowledgeable and friendly community) is of vital importance.

Ease of use – this is another important factor, especially for beginners because if one needs a lot of time to figure out how to do a simple task, this is simply waste of time.

There are many more criteria that differentiate CMS, for instance popularity but the factors in the list above are the key ones and they are enough to get the idea if Joomla or WordPress is the better choice.

So, Which Is the Best CMS?

When Joomla and WordPress are to be compared according to the criteria above, it is not surprising that both of them get 5 out 5 stars for each of the factors. Both Joomla and WordPress are very, very reliable. The basic packages of both Joomla and WordPress include almost everything a webmaster needs.

As for the number of extensions, it is impressive - maybe there are more extensions for WordPress but since there are thousands of them for Joomla, it is not correct to say that Joomla lacks extensions. Additionally, the number of extensions for any other CMS is significantly lower than the number of extensions for either Joomla, or WordPress.

As for support and ease of use, the support community of both Joomla and WordPress is really a devoted one, so when a webmaster is in trouble, he or she has people to rely on. Ease of use is very subjective and if a webmaster is used to one of them, he or she might find it a bit difficult to learn the other because they are very different from one another. Still, the learning curve is certainly not very steep.

To summarize, both Joomla and WordPress are great but none is better than the other – they are different and in a sense comparing them is like comparing apples to pears. So, it is not possible to say if Joomla is better than WordPress but certainly they both are better than many of the other content management software on the market.

The article is taken from here.