Wordpress vs Joomla vs Drupal - a comparison
 

If you're looking for a non-paysite CMS, Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal are probably the candidates you'll be looking at. Here's a small comparison of which one does what best.


Ease of use & speed of deployment

Wordpress is the clear winner here. You can have a fully functional blog (including design and ads) up in a matter of minutes, and an online magazine in a matter of hours (again, including design and ads). The great availability of both free and paid premade themes means that in many cases, you will have to do very little customization

Joomla comes in as a distant second. Even with the good availability of existing designs, you will in most cases spend hours if not days on customization even when using premade templates. Integrating essential features will most likely take even more time.

Behind that comes Drupal. Even more customization and development will be needed for viable commercial sites, and the learning curve is relatively steep. Commercial quality premade designs are hardly available.


Versatility & scalability

Drupal easily comes in first here. For online magazines and communities, it is capable of doing more than most would ever need.

Joomla comes in second. For most sites, it will easily satisfy your needs, but once you reach the limits of its intended usages it will provide you with a neverending supply of frustration.

Wordpress is a (very) distant third. Essentially blogging software at heart, it still provides a good amount of versatility, but once your blog turns into a full-fledged magazine or community, you'll pretty much have to switch.


SEO

Drupal beats Wordpress beats Joomla. However, given enough customization, all can perform equally well.


Server load

Drupal wins here, followed by Joomla and Wordpress. As a site becomes larger and more complex, the difference really becomes noticeable.


User management

Drupal wins here, hands down. It's the only one of the three truly suited for building a community site. After that comes Joomla, but far in the distance.


Development cost

Wordpress wins this by a landslide, followed by Joomla, followed by Drupal in the far distance.


Recommended usage

For something that will always stay a blog, use Wordpress. The same for small online magazines and news sites.

If Wordpress is unable to do what you need but you don't want to invest heavily in professional development, go for Joomla.

If you have a decent budget, and you need heavy customization and scalability, Drupal should be your first choice.

Cheers Libertine, interesting read! Have never tried Drupal before but might give it a try.

Joo what? Are you racist?

where does learning some programming and setting up a cms with Ruby on Rails fit in to this group?

Drupal is pretty good, though I definitely wouldn't recommend using it for things which you can achieve with Wordpress.

For bigger stuff, though, it has awesome potential:
http://www.theonion.com
http://www.yourtango.com

Nowhere. If you can't program already, it's a complete waste of time. If you can, it probably still is, unless you want something really simple or really specific.