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:
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| 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. |
Back in December 2006, we wrote 
Comments
Drupal has incredible multimedia capabilties:
http://drupal.org/project/media
http://drupal.org/project/bd_video
http://drupal.org/project/audio
http://drupal.org/project/emfield
and many more...
KarenS is our date / calendar guru:
http://drupal.org/project/date
http://drupal.org/project/calendar - this module integrates with the incredibly powerful http://drupal.org/project/views
http://drupal.org/project/wysiwyg supports all popular editors
Just wondering...
1. Architecture:
Drupal has a procedural framework, Joomla has an OOP framework. This is perhaps not relevant for end users, but both Drupal and Joomla have an important developer community. More and more developers are preferring OOP these days, and I believe Joomla's framework is in part responsible for the huge amount of quality extensions.
Which leads to:
2. Choice:
For Drupal, there is (as far as I can see) one forum, one CCK, one community solution, ... In Joomla, there are multiple solutions for each of those. Not only can the user pick what is most suitable, it also fosters healthy competition amongst developers. So I think 'choice' deserves a separate item in your list. There's even a choice in frameworks for Joomla
@Ivo I don't want to go off topic here, but I'm happy to give you a demonstration if you are interested.
1) Yes, I originally wrote this chart for a client who wanted the "what can it do?" angle rather than the "how does it do?" angle. This chart could be done a lot of ways and the dev's point of view is definitely one.
2) Absolutely. That's definitely the biggest difference for me too. I sometimes use the comparison: "Joomla = US-style capitalism and Drupal = European-style capitalism".
Joomla has a fairly brutally open marketplace where there's 10 solutions for everything, not all of which will work great. Drupal is much more community orientated and the one solution on offer tends to work really well if it does in fact meet your needs.
As a European living in the U.S., I guess can see the strengths of both sides
I'm definitely w/ @Jonathan on Ubercart: This is a HUGE advantage over Joomla/Virtuemart. It's actually the reason we're rebuilding our store in Drupal right now. Ubercart rox!
I certainly agree w/@Mathias on having choices in Joomla. Drupal's community seems to stamp down competing modules and make them combine. I'm a firm believer in some health competition.
"CCK" in Joomla w/ K2 & FLEXIcontent is saving Joomla in my opinion right now, even though it's not the real CCK as you have it in Drupal. This took me some time to learn but I'm loving Drupal's flexibility and options.
Drupal is smart to include CCK in Drupal 7, I really thing Joomla needs to include it as soon as possible. Joomla 1.6 will have some nice additions, but I think Drupal 7 will be a huge leapfrog of a step for Drupal.
As always, I still feel that every CMS out there has its strength and it's all about what YOU need in YOUR site.
In Joomla!, it's every developer for themselves, and the solutions are very good, but very stand-alone. So, we might have a whole collection of Galleries, but those galleries are not easily integrated in with other data.
In Drupal, third-party development is approached much more strategically. So, yes, there is one CCK (which is a collection of Modules, btw), but CCK is intended as a useful tool for any use case where you are adding fields of any type. Having more than one would make very little sense, and, in fact, it would require more resources, people of whom would then not be innovating somewhere else.
The Drupal Mission statement pushes developers to work together and come out with one solution that works for everyone. I see that as a significant long term advantage over how we approach development.
Now Mattias has interesting points on the development structure - and I agree with him. Joomla!'s programming architecture using OOPS is better (some may argue slower, but ok, whatever), but Architecture is a much broader topic than simply procedural vs OOPS. Drupal does a far better job approaching development with API's than Joomla! and with thinking about how to interconnect individual Modules. In the end, that's what makes it easier for developers to pick up and combine the pieces into innovative sites.
From an end-user or less technical user perspective, Joomla!'s approach is much easier. Download and install, and you got your gallery. No PHP coding required. For a moment, imagine how huge of a market reach that is. This is a very big advantage of Joomla! over Drupal.
But, if you want a gallery driven by mashups based on zip code, or one that's pulling data from an Amazon Cloud, then Drupal is in a better position.
I am guessing Steve is not going to disagree when I say the title of his post "Which one is right for you?" is now outdated. These are two different tools, both very good for specific use cases, and you can use them both.
Also, Steve, I wanted to tell you, that other post was the first post I read from your site. Thanks for all of your great blogs. You have been an important part of the care and feeding of the Joomla! community. I like seeing you branching out into Drupal and WordPress training, too.
At the time we were building a fairly complex music community trying to use SilverStripe and Magento – and really struggling with lack of documentation and support. When we learned Sony BMG and Warner Bros. were using Drupal for their musician sites we re-evaluated Drupal.
My primary area of concern was its non-OOP architecture. Two years later I am a huge Drupal fan. I still like to complain that it’s not OOP, but it is a very elegant framework with its own patters that work pretty well. It has a great API and hooks system. Drupal’s core code is very well structured and most contributed modules contain surprisingly good code.
One interesting dynamic I have found with procedural code is you get more young programmers that build all kinds of cool edgy stuff.
1. Content Management
If in community part you place V for joomla with words "Not available by default but..." Then you should for first compare use the same . For example "V - not available by default but there is number of extensions like Mighty resources (www.mightyextensions.com/joomla-components/resources-cck-custom-content-types), ... than can create unlimited category levels."
2 - Shopping Cart. Virtuemart not only shoping cart. Theer are number of commercial components very powerful.
3. Forum
You place V for drupal but there is only one forum option and you mention it lacks hi end features. There are 2 native and more then 5 integrated forums for Joomla. Native also lacks features but integrated are top and you give X. Not fair I think.
CCK - Mighty Extensions Resources is far more powerful than any other CCK. THE Joomla Killer App! K2 is best suited to the average user as a tool for glorified Blog's
Community Features - Mighty Extensions Touch again much more powerful than JomSocial, less established but Huge potential.
Document Management - JoomDoc from Artio (1.5 Native update fork of DocMan)
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