Joomla walks. Drupal droops

It was tough to decide. However, after deep digging in the differences between 2 best CMS available today – Joomla and Drupal – I have come to a conclusion that Joomla is a more competitive system in the market niche.

Both CMS make it easy for you to keep design clean and update content are built in widely used PHP, are extendible (Drupal / Joomla components) and can be hosted in a basic shared environment. The distinctive key features are as follows:

Simplicity

Joomla prioritizes the ease of use. It is hard to excel it with its pre-built customized modules for quick and easy websites. Providing a broader range of functions, Drupal requires more of a learning curve. It could be okay but Drupal lacks …

Support

Joomla extensions – Joomla components, Joomla modules and add-ons - are beautifully documented and easy to find. We cannot say Drupal developers pay proper attention to it. In addition, Joomla has much more active development community – Joomla forum has over 705,000 posts in 133,000 topics while Drupal pool has over 256,000 and 62,000 correspondingly.

Integrity

While Joomla emphasizes “best-of-breed” approach, Drupal offers deeply integrated but sometimes less powerful plug-ins. It is like comparing the well thought-out (nothing unneeded) navigation menu of Nokia and the one of Sony Ericsson, full of options that you do not use. I believe you get my point.

I know you are going to say that Drupal provides more functionality, offers richer platform to extend, focuses on running community websites, eases integration (API) with other components, etc. But do you really need it? And are you ready to take a developers viewpoint to use Drupal?

By the way, the results of the 2006 Open Source Content Management System Award clearly support my point of view. And I invite everyone to clarify if any of my findings were wrong.