Back in December 2006, we wrote the first comprehensive comparison of Drupal and Joomla. Over the next three years both projects have changed substantially, but the popularity of the original post hasn't. Its been viewed nearly half-a-million times and still accounts for between 10 and 20% of our page visits every month. People really want an honest acknowledgement of the differences between the two.

We originally compared Joomla 1.0 and Drupal 4. We're now at Joomla 1.5 and Drupal 6. It's long since past time to update the comparison. It's also a good time because, after nearly three years buried in Joomla, I've spent the last three months returning to and re-examining Drupal and in preparation for teaching it.

In re-doing this chart I found that both projects have moved forward but neither has really changed its essential character:

• Joomla is still more user-friendly with a more active developer and designer community.
• Drupal is still more flexible and developer-friendly with a more coherent and stable community.

	Drupal [-]	Joomla [-]
Content Management	Very sophisticated. It allows unlimited category levels, tagging and categorization. You can also create multiple types of content, each with different features.	Weak. There are only three levels of content - Section >> Category >> Content is available. That's it. No cross-categorization. To get flexibility, use a Content Construction Kit extension.
WYSIWYG Editors	Probably the most common complaint about Drupal - it has no default editor.	TinyMCE comes by default.
Template / Themes	Very few commercial developers and off-the-shelf choices are very poor. Most designs are custom-made.	Perhaps Joomla's biggest strength. Joomla has a wide selection of free and commercial designs.
Community Features	By default it offers the ability to expand user profiles easily and Organic Groups allows for powerful community-building.	Non-existent by default but there are two powerful community extensions. Community Builder is free. Jomsocial is commercial but a powerful social application.
User Permissions	A huge strength of Drupal wins hands-down. You can create unlimited user levels and customize them in minute detail.	Perhaps Joomla's achilles heel. Most Joomla aites will only be able to use three user levels (Public, Registered and Special) without installing a cumbersome Access Control Level extension.
User Subscriptions	The only real option is Ubercart, a shopping cart which allows recurring billing.	Multiple options via extensions. CB Subs and are two of many.
Shopping Cart	See above. The only real option is Ubercart. Its a powerful, fully-featured ecommerce platform but may be overkill for small stores.	Joomla has only one major shopping cart: Virtuemart, but it considered buggy and difficult to work with.
SEO	The out-of-the-box URLs work well and can be improved with one easy addon: Pathauto. The code is generally lightweight and well-optimised.	Reasonable out of the box, but lacks the ability to really control URLs or metadata. Various SEO extensions are needed for those who really care about SEO.
Forums	A native and very smooth forum, but lacking in the high end features of the best modern forums.	The choice is between Agora and Kunena (native to Joomla but short on features) versus RokBrige (a bridge to phpBB3) and JFusion (a bridge to almost any forum software).
Multimedia	Not by default but several multimedia modules for video and podcasting are available.	Yes, the default WYSIWYG editor allows video and there are plenty of podcast and video extensions.
Photo Galleries	Definitely less options than Joomla. Decent galleries require several modules to be combined.	Yes. there's over a dozen excellent galleries.
Event Calendars	Not great. There are options but they are far behind those available for Joomla.	Yes, multiple native and high-quality calendar extensions.
Document Management	Would need to be constructed from other modules.	DocMan and Rokdownloads are both reliable document managers.
Blogs	Good default capabilities, although not a natural blog in the manner of WordPress.	Some out-of-the-box capability (we use Joomla for our blog here on Alledia). Good native blogging extensions plus a port of WordPress are available.
Internationalization	Yes, Excellent.	Not by default. Joom!Fish allows for sites in multiple languages but isn't as powerful as the commercial Nooku.
Standards Compliance	Yes. Excellent out-of-the-box.	Not great. The Beez template does provide clean output but most Joomla installations still use a good number of tables. One company has produced a full set of table-less overrides.
Multisites Management	Yes, out-of-the-box.	Weak. There are some multisite options but they're either unstable or very expensive.
Commercial Community	Drupal's commercial talent pool is very high-quality but also very shallow. Most commercial developers work with large-to-medium size business and charge accordingly.	Very strong. Perhaps the best in the Open Source CMS world with a wealth of developers, designers and consultants.
General Community	Good community. Often more non-profit than business driven. Excellent forum support at Drupal.org.	The community as a whole has a tendency to argue and fragment but its also highly dynamic with 1000s of companies offering support and services.
Ease-of-use	Definitely a weakness. Terms are confusing and overly-geeky. The admin interface is text-driven and often overwhelming to beginners.	Joomla has a very good graphical interface but still retains quite a few quirks and oddities.
Documentation	Not too bad. (Click here for documentation and here for an API reference guide	Pretty good. The main Joomla wiki has a lot of highly-detailed pages but also some with very little information.
Learning Curve	Steeper than Joomla. Drupal's strength is in its flexibility and power, not its ease-of-use.	Shallow. One of the easiest CMS systems to learn and customize.
Current Situation	Clear development path. Currently working on Drupal 7.	Joomla 1.5 is the current version with the possibility of two new versions (1.6 and 1.7) due next year. Roadmap is not always clear.
Overall	Drupal is flexible and developer-friendly. It also benefits from a coherent and stable community led by several large and reputable companies.	Joomla 1.6 will focus on improving two crucial areas: Joomla's inflexible systems for managing users and content. It may become a little more complicated as a result, but it will remain relatively easy to produce a good-looking site with plenty of functionality using Joomla.