WordPress versus Joomla (and where Drupal fits)

WordPress and Joomla are both free, open-source content management systems you install on your own hosting, and both have existed since the mid-2000s. The practical difference between WordPress and Joomla is not what either can technically do. Determined developers can make either WordPress or Joomla do almost anything. It is what comes built in versus bolted on, and how many people are available to maintain whichever one you choose.

Disclosure, before the opinions start

This site carries no affiliate links, no sponsored placements and no referral arrangement with either project named on this page — the full position is at commercial relationships. Nobody bought a position in this WordPress Joomla comparison. That is a genuinely stronger position than most agency content on this pairing, since an agency publishing “X versus Y” commonly implements one of the two and is paid according to which one a reader chooses. There is no neutral scoring process behind this page either — no weighted matrix, no panel. What follows is one practitioner’s opinion, with the reasoning exposed so you can reject it.

Measured demand: 40 searches a month in Australia at a keyword difficulty of 7, competition index 24, recorded 3 August 2026 in research/comparison-candidates.json. No advertiser cost is recorded for this pairing, consistent with it being a comparison researched rather than clicked through to buy.

What the actual difference is

WordPress is the larger, more widely adopted of the two by a substantial margin. That larger scale brings a correspondingly larger ecosystem of WordPress themes, WordPress plugins and WordPress developers. Joomla ships with more capability built into its Joomla core out of the box. Multilingual content management and a more granular user-access-control system are the two features most often cited as reasons to choose Joomla, where WordPress typically needs a plugin to do the same job. Both WordPress and Joomla are genuinely capable of complex, database-driven sites. The difference is where the complexity lives, not whether either platform can handle it.

Who each one is genuinely for

WordPress suits almost any small-to-medium business site. Its scale means whatever you want to add — a form, a booking system, ecommerce, a membership area — almost certainly already has a mature plugin built for it, often by more than one developer competing for the same problem. That scale is also WordPress’s own risk, covered below.

Joomla suits a project where multilingual content or complex user permissions are a core requirement from day one, not an afterthought — a membership organisation with different access tiers, or a business publishing in several languages natively rather than through a translation plugin. It also suits a developer or team already fluent in Joomla’s own architecture, for whom the smaller ecosystem is not a barrier because they are not relying on a marketplace of third-party plugins the way a WordPress project typically does.

Cost shape

Both are free to install, and both cost is entirely: hosting, a theme (free or paid), and the plugins or extensions layered on top. Check current theme and extension marketplace prices directly rather than trusting a figure quoted here, since they change.

WordPress’s larger ecosystem generally means more competition among plugin developers, which can mean lower prices for comparable functionality, but it also means more variation in quality and more abandoned plugins that stop receiving updates. Joomla’s smaller extension marketplace means fewer options for any given feature, sometimes at a correspondingly higher price because there is less competing supply.

Development labour cost differs too: WordPress developers are more numerous, which generally means more competitive rates for standard work; Joomla developers are a smaller, more specialised pool, and rates for genuinely skilled Joomla development can run higher precisely because there are fewer of them.

Ownership and exit

This is the section nobody else writes, and it is where the practical gap between these two platforms is largest.

WordPress content is stored in a well-documented, widely understood database structure. Migration tools between WordPress installs — and even from WordPress to several other platforms — are mature and commonly available, because so many people have needed to do it. Moving between WordPress developers is rarely a rebuild. It is usually just a handover.

Joomla’s database structure is equally well documented for Joomla-to-Joomla migration. But the pool of developers who can pick up an existing Joomla site and work confidently in its specific architecture is materially smaller than the WordPress equivalent. This is the single biggest practical risk of choosing Joomla for a small business. It is not that the software is worse. It is that finding a second developer, if the first one disappears, is a genuinely harder search than it would be for WordPress.

Both platforms let you export your own content, and neither locks it inside a proprietary format the way some hosted, closed platforms do. The exit cost is less about extracting your content and more about finding someone available to receive it.

Australian specifics

Neither platform’s core software has anything Australia-specific built in — GST-inclusive pricing, .au domain configuration and privacy policy content are all things you or your developer add regardless of which one you choose, in the same way described for other platforms in this section. Hosting can be sourced from an Australian provider for either, which is a latency and data-residency decision independent of the CMS choice itself.

Who should choose which

Choose WordPress by default. The larger developer pool and plugin ecosystem reduce your risk on almost every axis that matters to a small business. The built-in features Joomla offers instead are only valuable if you actually need them from day one.

Choose Joomla if multilingual content or granular access control is a genuine, current requirement, and if you already have — or can confidently find — a developer with real Joomla experience rather than general CMS experience alone.

What would change this answer

A confirmed, ongoing multilingual content requirement changes it toward Joomla, provided the developer availability question is answered first. A membership site with genuinely complex, tiered permissions changes it the same way. And if you are choosing without either requirement, in a market where you might need to replace your developer at some point without much warning, the larger pool behind WordPress is the safer default.

Drupal, WordPress, Joomla and the learning curve of the third open-source CMS option worth knowing about

Drupal is the third major open-source CMS in this same category. It is generally regarded as more powerful and more complex than either WordPress or Joomla, for a genuinely large, workflow-heavy publishing operation. Government sites and large membership organisations with complex, multi-step content workflows are Drupal’s natural home. For a small business, Drupal’s learning curve is steeper than either WordPress or Joomla’s, and its developer pool is smaller again than Joomla’s. That usually rules it out for the audience this comparison is written for. WordPress versus Drupal covers that specific pairing in more depth, for anyone whose requirements genuinely point that way, including multilingual websites run at a much larger scale than this page assumes.

WordPress and Joomla themes, plugins, extensions, modules, customization and the editor experience for multilingual publishing day to day

WordPress calls its extensions plugins and its design layer themes. Joomla uses the same two words plus modules — a third concept for smaller, reusable pieces of functionality placed around a template’s structure. This is a related but distinct idea from a full extension. The non-technical, day-to-day editor experience is broadly comparable on both once a site is built. WordPress’s larger ecosystem of page-builder plugins generally gives a non-technical editor more visual customization flexibility without touching code. Joomla’s editor leans more toward structured fields and defined workflows, than free-form visual editing.

There is no single “best CMS” answer, only a best fit

Forms, ease-of-use rankings and best-cms roundup articles that declare a single winner are answering a different, more generic question. The one an actual business needs answered is: which platform fits this specific requirement, this specific budget, and this specific developer relationship. There is no single best cms for every business, which is exactly the reasoning behind the “who should choose which” section above rather than a scored verdict.

What either build costs as a commissioned purchase, developer pool included, is covered on website design services as a purchase.