We've worked with Joomla and Wordpress for so long and we can't even tell which of these 2 most popular CMS are our favorite.
Well, it depends on the use you are going to be squeezing from it.
Disk Space
A basic blank Joomla! site will take up to 50Mb (source: Joomla) and a blank Wordpress site will take up around 35Mb (as said here and here).
15Megabytes these days are nothing but I've seen both installations grow to several Gigas per website.
If it were a matter of size with core functions and 1 or 2 extensions/plugins, then Wordpress would be our pick.
Core functionalities
If you compare what Joomla does out of the box and a Wordpress site, you would have to install so many plugins to match what Joomla does as a fresh install.
Installing plugins and components for any of these two CMSs increase the maintenance routines, vulnerabilities and chance to have conflicts between them.
In this round, Joomla would be our pick.
Speed
In our case, we've been using both with LiteSpeed Webserver which is a lite-weight Apache alternative and it's also integrated with Cpanel and has several plugins for different CMSs
Litespeed is, or course, more integrated with Wordpress than with Joomla. The plugin for Wordpress sites is way more developed and has many many options that the Joomla component lacks.
The Joomla component is under-developed and we've had to uninstall new versions to rollback to previous versions because the updates were so bad they broke the administrator panel.
We've test them on the same environment with both using the LiteSpeed plugin/component. And somehow the Joomla sites perform a bit better than the Wordpress sites.
In this round. This is a tie.
Large sites or small sites
We've used both for online newspaper sites. And the answer is clear:
- If you have a large site like an online newspaper that grows several articles per day, pick Joomla.
- If you have a small site that has 1 blog section you feed weekly, pick Wordpress.
This is because with the core installation, you can create folders to manage photos better than Wordpress that throws them all on a single folder. When you have hundreds of articles per month, loading all those photos every time you need to upload a picture or trying to find an specific one, is a mess on Wordpress.
Learning Curve
We won't waste time here. Wordpress can be learned really quick for people who don't know anything. The way they separated pages from posts make it very clear of where to go.
Joomla on the other side, is a bit messy to organize. It offers way more options to customize an article or menu item but if you want to make it smooth like Wordpress then you have to use Access Lists (ACL) to show the end user a friendly dashboard.
Joomla takes a bit more to learn and because it comes complete on a fresh install with so many functionalities, it intimidates the new users.
Complex Sites
We won't waste time here. Joomla has so many options out of the box that you can create very complex sites. Specially if you are making internal pages with different levels of access.
This can be achievable also with Wordpress but via 3rd party plugins.
Extensions and Plugins
We don't like that some core functionalities in Joomla can be acquired in Wordpress only by plugins. This forces us to come (as admins of the hosting service we provide) more often to check plugins than on Joomla Websites.
Some Joomla extensions just throw the towel and forget about new Joomla versions and you end up like crazy looking for a substitute. There are amazing extensions that require an standing ovation and there are also several Joomla extensions that are plain trash.
On the other hand, Wordpress plugins have several options for that particular thing you are looking for and they are regularly well done. The fact that most of them require a paid subscription for something so simple feels also like someone taking advantage of people who don't know anything about websites.
We also had some issues when updating plugins or extensions but Wordpress has a fail here. If you (by mistake or chance) navigate out of the page when you are updating a plugin in Wordpress your site can crash.
Joomla is our pick here.
E-commerce
Wordpress wins with WooCommerce integration. Plain and simple.
Joomla is so way back on this category that whenever we have to make this integration, we opt to set the store on Ecwid or something.
And the winner is...
- If you are creating a simple site for blogging, don't have time to configure things and need to have it up and running quicky: Wordpress
- If you are creating a complex site with many contributors, and can invest some time on setting everyting up: Joomla
- If you want to set up an online store: Wordpress
- If you want to reduce the amount of components installed: Joomla
We would pick Joomla over Wordpress for projects that will grow, for example: A site that needs to offer clients a dashboard to consult documents like a clinic, or an online newspaper, or a site that needs complex forms. In our Joomla Hosting we offer not only a fast hosting but also access to several hand-picked components that will make your site a warhorse.
If you only require web presence and need a small blog or need to set up an online store Wordpress is our pick.