Joomla vs WordPress: Battle Between Two eCommerce Frameworks

For over a decade now, both Joomla and WordPress have been self-hosted and open-source. WordPress, in 2003, was launched originally as a blogging platform. At present, it’s a multi-purpose CMS powering more than 40 percent of the websites in the world. It also has a 40 percent share in the market. 

Joomla was launched two years after WordPress. Now, it’s the second most popular CMS that powers around three percent of all websites. Additionally, it has a 5.4 percent share in the market. It also has a 5.4 percent share in the market. 

The battle between the two eCommerce platforms? Which one is better? Let’s find out. 

Joomla Versus WordPress: Which to Use in 2022?

Currently, WordPress and Joomla stand out from the other platforms. But, which to use this year? Both are famed for their active communities, ease of usage, and extensive customization opportunities. 

WordPress and Joomla—the Advantages

Learn the pros of WordPress and Joomla to learn the difference between the two content management systems. 

WordPress – the Advantages

1. Usage ease. Generally, WordPress is considered as the easiest CMS, particularly for non-developers.  
2. Better Blogging Tool. WordPress has a distinction for blog posts’ against ‘static pages’. Joomla only has one article type that could be manipulated with categories. 
3. Big Support Community. Finding help is easy due to its popularity. Also, it has a huge third-party Facebook groups, developers, and bloggers ecosystem.  
4. Lesser Cost. The significant community support means that you could, in general, get development work done at lesser costs.

Joomla – the Pros

1. Many templates. Joomla lets you use various templates for different content. WordPress only lets you use one theme. 
2. Different content types flexibility. The modules and components of Joomla provide more flexibility to display non-standard content types. 
3. User management that’s more advanced. Joomla’s system is more advanced when it comes to out-of-the-box user management and user access controls. 
4. Multilingual Support. Joomla has in-built multilingual support to the core. On the other hand, WordPress requires using a third-party plugin.

WordPress and Joomla – Pricing

Joomla Pricing

Joomla, just like WordPress, is an open-source platform that’s free and easy to use. Nonetheless, you have to buy these:

• Getting a hosting provider: $150-$500 for 12 months
• Domain registration: an average of $10-30/year
• Maintenance: $100-$1000 per month
• Design and development: $500-$5000 for tailored work

In all, you may have to pay $700-$6500 per month or even higher to have a Joomla website, which seems to be quite expensive than WordPress. With both are open-source, the difference in pricing could come from the gap in some fees, like maintenance and development costs. 

WordPress Pricing

Since WordPress is open-source, it’s free to download and install.  The only requirement is a domain name and web hosting. Moreover, you need to do backup and any updates necessary. WordPress website cost:

• Domain name: $12/annual
• Plugins: $0-1,000 (one-off charge of ongoing)
• Hosting: starts at $3.95/month
• Developer fees: $0-1,000 (one-off cost)
• Maintenance: $99/month
• Security: starts at $50 (one-off or ongoing)

Depending on what you need, the cost of starting a WordPress website could vary from $100, $500 to $3000, to as high as $30,000 or more. However, you can launch a professional website with a technical support team behind and unlimited customization and gain full control of it. Moreover, a WordPress development company could help to know the exact price to create a WordPress site. 

Technical Viewpoint

Both Joomla and WordPress, from a technical viewpoint are not stand-alone software pieces. They work only when installed on a web server. If you want to create a website, the major consideration is how comfortable you are with the configuration, dealing with technical aspects of the process, and working with servers in general. 

Joomla, on a technical point of view, is geared towards developers who aren’t hesitant to get their hands dirty. WordPress is easy to begin with and more beginner friendly.   

Addons/Themes

The two popular platforms come with plugins, modules, and themes as a way of extending the features and the software appearance. The themes control the website’s appearance and how it appears to users. Modules and plugins are similar to apps for your CMS. 

WordPress Themes

There are more premium WordPress themes developed by third-party shops, such as Astra Theme, StudioPress, Elegant Themes, and so on. All are paid themes with options for premium support.  

Extensions and Templates of Joomla

Joomla, the same as WordPress, comes with extensions and templates. Great extensions could do just about anything, from building an eCommerce store to email management. Nonetheless, the templates and extensions quantity is not as high compared to WordPress. Finding the perfect extensions and templates is more difficult. 

Joomla, by default, has no feature that enables users to search and install templates or extensions from the admin area. However, an extension enables adding an ‘install from the web’ feature. 

Wrapping Up

Joomla and WordPress are both fantastic content management systems. Joomla has a lot of built-in features. WordPress, however, beats it in terms of usage ease, themes, and plugins as well as a huge community. Fortunately, they both have quite the same requirements, meaning that all top web hosting companies support them.