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. |