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Joomla vs Craft CMS

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Our analysts compared Joomla vs Craft CMS based on data from our 400+ point analysis of CMS Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

Overview Pricing Benefits & Features User Ratings Analyst Summary Screenshots
Joomla Software Tool
Craft CMS Software Tool
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Product Basics

Joomla is a free, open-source solution to manage and publish content online and design websites. Built on a model-view-controller (MVC) framework, it enables building a variety of websites like blogs, business websites, intranet, community forums and more. It comes with built-in templates with the option to change colors, fonts, layouts and features without the need to code. With a variety of publishing tools and a WYSIWYG editor, it includes content versioning and article management through a media manager.

Users can choose from more than 8,000 third-party extensions to set up reviews, run contests, allow post liking and additional functionality on their websites. It provides out-of-the-box SEO optimization with metadata and keywords, including support for SEF URLs. Available in more than 70 languages, it is maintained by a volunteer community of developers, support personnel and IT professionals.
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Craft CMS is a software to manage content and design websites from a centralized unified interface. Users can create content through attributes like custom fields, image editor, form builder and live preview. It enables digital asset management with files stored in Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud Files and Google Cloud Storage. Users can customize its dashboard and add and resize widgets which include an RSS feed, quick post, recent entries, updates, Google Analytics and commerce reports.

User management with role-based access permissions is available in the Pro version and above. Templates are powered by Twig, with DRY code and flexible, bring-your-own HTML development. For non-public URLs, the licensed plans are available for free so long as the site is not deployed to a public server. The vendor provides a free version.
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$0 Open-Source
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$279/Project, Freemium
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Product Assistance

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Product Insights

  • Flexible Content Management: Joomla allows users to easily create, edit, and manage content without needing extensive technical knowledge, making it ideal for businesses aiming to maintain dynamic websites.
  • Extensive Customization Options: With thousands of templates and extensions available, Joomla offers unparalleled customization, enabling businesses to tailor their websites to their unique branding and functionality requirements.
  • Robust User Management: Joomla provides a comprehensive user management system, allowing for detailed control over user roles, permissions, and access levels, ensuring secure and efficient management of website contributors and content.
  • SEO Friendly: Joomla is designed with SEO in mind, featuring options for meta tags, keywords, and SEF URLs, helping businesses improve their search engine rankings and online visibility.
  • Multilingual Support: Offering support for over 75 languages, Joomla enables businesses to create multilingual websites, reaching a broader audience and catering to global markets.
  • Strong Community Support: Joomla boasts a large, active community of developers and users who provide extensive support, tutorials, and forums, making it easier for businesses to find help and resources.
  • Highly Secure: With regular security updates and built-in features like two-factor authentication and CAPTCHA, Joomla prioritizes website security, protecting businesses from potential threats and vulnerabilities.
  • E-commerce Ready: Joomla supports a wide range of e-commerce extensions, allowing businesses to easily set up and manage online stores, complete with product catalogs, shopping carts, and secure payment systems.
  • Responsive Design: Joomla templates are generally designed to be responsive, ensuring that websites look great and function well on all devices, from desktops to smartphones, enhancing user experience and engagement.
  • Powerful Extensions: With over 8,000 extensions available, Joomla extends its core functionalities to include social networking, forums, galleries, and more, enabling businesses to add complex features without heavy custom coding.
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  • Intuitive Content Management: Craft CMS offers a user-friendly interface that simplifies the process of creating, managing, and updating website content, making it accessible for users of all skill levels.
  • Flexible Templating: With its Twig-based templating system, Craft CMS allows for the creation of complex, dynamic websites that can be tailored to meet specific design and functionality requirements.
  • Highly Customizable: Developers can extend the functionality of Craft CMS through plugins and modules, enabling the creation of bespoke solutions that cater to unique business needs.
  • Robust Security: Craft CMS is built with security in mind, offering features like proactive updates, secure password hashing, and built-in protection against common vulnerabilities, ensuring your website remains safe from threats.
  • SEO Friendly: Craft CMS facilitates SEO efforts with features like automatic generation of SEO-friendly URLs, easy metadata management, and the ability to create sitemaps, helping improve your site's visibility in search engine results.
  • Multi-Site Capabilities: Manage multiple websites from a single Craft CMS installation, allowing for streamlined operations and consistent branding across all your digital properties.
  • Live Preview: The Live Preview feature enables content creators to see how their content will look in real-time before it goes live, ensuring accuracy and alignment with design standards.
  • First-Class Localization: Craft CMS supports multi-language and regional differences out-of-the-box, making it an ideal choice for businesses targeting a global audience.
  • Performance Optimization: Designed with performance in mind, Craft CMS ensures fast loading times and a smooth user experience, even for content-rich sites.
  • Community Support: Benefit from a vibrant and supportive community of developers and users who contribute to the platform's extensive plugin ecosystem and offer help and advice through forums and social media.
  • Content Versioning: Craft CMS automatically saves versions of your content as you make changes, allowing you to easily revert to previous versions if needed.
  • Comprehensive Asset Management: Efficiently manage digital assets like images and videos with powerful tools for uploading, organizing, and editing, directly within the CMS.
  • Granular User Permissions: Control access to different parts of your site with detailed user permissions, ensuring team members can only see and edit what they need to.
  • Scalability: Whether you're running a small blog or a large e-commerce site, Craft CMS scales with your business, accommodating growth without sacrificing performance.
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  • Extensions: Choose from over 80,000 extensions to personalize sites and create unlimited menus and menu items while maintaining site speed with caching capabilities.
  • Access Controls: Produce business sites, blogs, community websites and more with the free-to-use platform.Have full management capabilities over what customers can view and do with an access control list (ACL).
  • Multilingual: Create sites in over 70 different languages.
  • Web Design: Build custom designs and templates to control the website’s look and feel through customizable attributes such as color scheme, images and effects, fonts and more. Choose from external template frameworks and add them to the designated pages. Provide HTML from objects and an array of data. Produce responsive designs with LESS CSS and Bootstrap.
  • Content Editing and Publishing: Create content with a WYSIWYG editor tool, edit while browsing sites and add to content with one click. Manage articles, choose publishing start and finish dates and create new versions of the content every time a change is made while preserving the old ones. Drag and drop images directly from a computer and use the media management tool to upload and consolidate images and files.
  • Core Website Functionality: Enhance websites with banners and ads, contacts and departments, including contact forms and external news feeds.
  • Tags: Attach tags to various content types and create up to 15 custom fields to keep content, users and contacts organized for customer search.
  • Messaging: Communicate with administrators via private messaging on the site’s back-end.
  • Backend Management: Update core software and extensions with one click and install extensions and plug-ins from the site’s back end. Permit visitors to register and access additional resources on the site.
  • Development Tools: Access developer documentation and secure coding guidelines for assistance. Integrate microdata into extensions and sites, write web and command line applications and utilize Model-View-Controller design patterns. Runs on PHP support.
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  • Field Customization: Manage all custom field types and organize them. Assign bespoke fields to sections, users, tags and more.  
  • Multi-site: Run multiple sites from within a single software installation. Manage content across different regions and use other websites under the same parent company. Configure site-specific settings and employ site groups to keep them organized and define the order they should appear in on the control panel. 
  • Hassle-Free Localization: Target multiple territories and translate different languages by creating new sites to represent the content. 
  • Sharing Page Reviews: Share unpublished pages privately with team members using a link, keeping a tab on the work progress. 
  • Optimized Asset Management: Access built-in desktop-class asset management. Move files and folders quickly between local and cloud-based sources. Create a new transform that sets the parameters to output images at a specific size. 
  • Single-Click Update: Keep the software and plugins up-to-date with bug fixes, security enhancements and the latest features with a single click. 
  • Control Over Publishing: Full control over when to publish changes, along with the option of ‘Post Date’. 
  • Image Enhancement: Use the software’s Image Editor for resizing, rotating, flipping and cropping images. Set focus points, ensuring that every image renders seamlessly on all devices. 
  • Matrix: Split the content into different blocks and use them multiple times in any order. Enjoy the flexibility in creating any number of blocks containing as many fields as required. Change the layout of fields within the Matrix field to save space and give a better experience. 
  • Real-Time Preview: Update changes in the content and preview them even before publishing. Get a better idea of the design and appearance of the content in advance. 
  • Syntax Alert: Catch typos within the template with a helpful error message, along with a snippet of the code highlighting the offending line. 
  • Twig: Compile powerful template engines into optimized PHP files. Access various solutions offered by the language to keep templates DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself). 
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Product Ranking

#21

among all
CMS Software

#57

among all
CMS Software

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User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 1429 reviews
Great User Sentiment 34 reviews
81%
of users recommend this product

Joomla has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 81% when considering 1429 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

83%
of users recommend this product

Craft CMS has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 83% when considering 34 user reviews from 2 recognized software review sites.

4.3 (14)
n/a
3.9 (321)
n/a
4.14 (516)
5.0 (1)
4.1 (453)
4.1 (33)
3.9 (125)
n/a

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Extensive Extensions: A vast library of extensions is available to expand Joomla's core functionality, catering to diverse needs such as e-commerce, social networking, and SEO optimization.
Multilingual Capabilities: Joomla's built-in multilingual support simplifies website creation and management in multiple languages, eliminating the need for extensions or complex workarounds.
Active Community: A large and active community of users and developers provides support, resources, and extensions, fostering collaboration and knowledge sharing.
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Intuitive Interface: Craft CMS is often praised for its user-friendly interface, making it easy for content editors and administrators to manage and publish content efficiently. The interface is clean, well-organized, and intuitive, allowing users to find what they need quickly and easily.
Flexibility and Customization: Craft CMS provides a high degree of flexibility and customization, allowing developers to create bespoke content models and tailor the system to meet specific project requirements. This flexibility empowers users to build unique and complex websites without being constrained by rigid structures.
Performance and Scalability: Craft CMS is known for its excellent performance and scalability, ensuring that websites built on the platform can handle high traffic volumes and complex content structures without compromising speed or reliability. This is crucial for businesses and organizations that require a robust and scalable online presence.
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Extensions Can Be Pricey: While Joomla offers a wide array of extensions, many of the most useful ones require a financial investment, which can be a deterrent for budget-conscious users or those just starting out.
Learning Curve: Joomla has a steeper learning curve compared to some other content management systems, especially for users without prior experience. The interface can feel overwhelming at first, and understanding the extension ecosystem takes time.
SEO Challenges: Optimizing a Joomla website for search engines can be more complex than with other platforms. Achieving good SEO often requires additional extensions and a deeper understanding of technical SEO principles.
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Steeper Learning Curve: Craft CMS's flexibility and power come at the cost of a steeper learning curve compared to simpler platforms like Squarespace or Wix. Users accustomed to more intuitive interfaces may find Craft's initial setup and content management less straightforward.
Plugin Dependence: While Craft CMS offers core features, extending functionality often requires plugins. This can lead to challenges in maintaining compatibility between plugins and the core system, especially during updates. Additionally, some essential plugins may require a purchase, adding to the overall cost.
Pricing Structure: Craft CMS's pricing structure, which involves a per-project license fee and potential plugin costs, can be a deterrent for budget-conscious users or smaller projects. The initial investment might seem higher compared to open-source alternatives or platforms with freemium models.
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Joomla's open-source CMS platform has been making waves in the web development world, but what are users saying about it? Let's dive into the nitty-gritty of Joomla's strengths, weaknesses, and unique features based on recent user feedback. Joomla shines with its user-friendly interface and extensive customization options. Users appreciate the intuitive layout and ease of navigation, making it a great choice for beginners and experienced developers alike. The platform's flexibility allows for creating diverse websites, from simple blogs to complex e-commerce platforms, thanks to its vast library of extensions and templates. Joomla's multilingual capabilities also make it a popular choice for international audiences. However, some users find the abundance of options overwhelming and the learning curve steeper compared to simpler CMS platforms like Wix or Squarespace. One of Joomla's key strengths is its active and supportive community. Users can access numerous forums, tutorials, and documentation, making troubleshooting and learning a breeze. Additionally, Joomla's open-source nature fosters continuous development and improvement, ensuring the platform stays up-to-date with the latest web technologies. However, some users express concerns about security vulnerabilities and the need for regular updates to maintain a secure website. Compared to WordPress, Joomla offers more built-in features, reducing the reliance on third-party extensions, which can be a double-edged sword as it limits the platform's extensibility to some degree. So, who is Joomla best suited for? Joomla is an excellent choice for users who value flexibility, customization, and a supportive community. It's perfect for small to medium-sized businesses, non-profit organizations, and individuals who want to create professional-looking websites without extensive coding knowledge. However, for users seeking a simple drag-and-drop website builder or those with limited technical skills, simpler platforms might be a better fit. Ultimately, Joomla's versatility and powerful features make it a compelling option for those who want to take their web development game to the next level.

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Looking to "craft" the perfect website? Craft CMS might just be the tool you need. Craft CMS has garnered a reputation for its user-friendly interface and flexibility. Users appreciate the intuitive control panel, which simplifies content creation and management. The ability to customize the dashboard to individual preferences further enhances the user experience. Craft CMS's flexible content modeling system allows users to design their content structure, making it suitable for various website types, from simple blogs to complex e-commerce platforms. Its headless architecture provides developers with the freedom to deliver content to any platform, offering greater versatility compared to traditional CMS platforms. However, some users find Craft CMS's capabilities less extensive than those of platforms like WordPress, which offer a wider range of built-in features and plugins. Additionally, Craft CMS's flexibility can lead to a steeper learning curve for beginners. Despite these drawbacks, Craft CMS's strengths lie in its ability to empower users to create unique and tailored digital experiences. Its focus on customizability and user experience makes it an ideal choice for businesses and individuals seeking a CMS that can adapt to their specific needs and grow with them over time.

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