Drupal vs Joomla: Which CMS Is Right for Your Business or Nonprofit?

TL;DR 

• Choose Drupal if your website needs scalability, strict compliance, or complex integrations.
• Choose Joomla if you need a quicker, lower-cost launch with simpler content needs. Joomla offers more flexible “ready to go” templates that make it a good fit for organisations and teams who want a fast solution
• Drupal is especially strong at content architecture which is why it’s the perfect pair for content heavy websites
• The right solution will depend on your technical requirements, timeline and budget.

Finding the right content management system (CMS) for your needs can feel overwhelming. Perhaps you’re an Australian nonprofit nervous about compliance, a marketing team looking to make the most of the annual budget, or a frustrated Joomla user looking to make a change. 

Selecting a CMS that best suits your organisation needs will help your organisation stay within budget, achieve each user’s requirements, and ensure you meet the required compliance for your industry.  Despite some common features, different CMS options, like Drupal or Joomla, solve unique problems. 

PixelStorm has been advising organisations for over 20 years on technical solutions, including evaluation of website frameworks. In this guide, we’ll share a comparison of Drupal and Joomla across cost, security, and flexibility so you can decide which CMS best fits your organisation.

What Is Drupal? 

Drupal is a highly sophisticated and flexible open-source content management system (CMS) using a PHP framework. Known as highly secure and scalable for more robust requirements, built with a modular architecture and designed to give you the fields to create whatever content structures and custom post types you need. Drupal scales well making it the perfect choice for high-traffic sites and has a strong, actively maintained security track record, which is why it’s a common choice for government and enterprise platforms.

What Is Joomla?

Joomla is also a free and open-source CMS using a PHP based framework. A more  cost-effective solution for small to medium sized businesses and organisations that are looking to manage their content internally, wanting more built-in native features and structure than WordPress without the upfront build time and investment of Drupal.

Is Joomla still supported/relevant in 2026?

Yes, Joomla is actively maintained. There is a clear release roadmap (e.g. Joomla 5.x), which shows its developer community is not going anywhere, and Joomla remains a supported platform in 2026 

What is the market share of Drupal vs Joomla?

According to W3Techs, Drupal powers approximately 1% of all websites and Joomla approximately 1.8–2%, compared to WordPress at over 60%.

Head-to-Head: Feature Comparison

Joomla sits between WordPress and Drupal: more structure and native technical ability than WordPress, but without the initial cost of a web development team needed for Drupal. It’’s worth considering where they differ: 

“WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are all content management systems, but they’re built for different needs. WordPress is like a Metricon off-the-plan home, Joomla is a structured townhouse, and Drupal is an architecturally-designed home. The right choice depends on whether you need scale or simplicity, your budget, your timeline and user structure..” 

– Daniel Florido 

Technical Lead at Pixelstorm

Who Should Use Each Platform: By Organisation Type

Ask a Drupal agency and a Joomla agency who their ideal client is, and you’ll get similar answers: government agencies, nonprofits, universities, education, associations, and organisations that need more structure and access control.

Drupal is popular for large institutions. It’s used by 70% of the world’s top 100 universities, and maintains strong market share among high-traffic enterprise sites.  The Government has a dedicated Drupal CMS (GovCMS) and, according to Technology Checker, is a large percentage of Drupal’s customer base at 3.55%, followed by Non-profit Organisations at 3.49% and Higher Education at 2.99%, showing its power as a solution for public-sector organisations. 

But don’t under-estimate Joomla. Joomla still has a niche with organisations wanting built-in multilingual support and granular access control without Drupal’s complexity, price tag for development. They are just looking for a quick way to build a  consistent, simple user interface.

Marketing Teams

Both Drupal and Joomla offer benefits for internal marketing teams, depending on the unique project. 

If you need your website to connect to other marketing tools, both integrate with email tools, analytics, CRMs, etc. Drupal has a larger range of off the shelf integrations (called modules) available because of its popularity within marketing teams.

If you need a micro-site or a brochure website, Joomla is a safer choice, as you can get development with smaller budgets, or utilise templated solutions. 

If you are wanting to be AI ready, Drupal is worth considering. It treats content as structured data, letting AI models query content via APIs, personalisation engines plug into content directly, and chatbots pull data as if they’re querying a database. So your marketing team can plug in AI personalisation or chatbots easily.

Business Owners

If you’re a small to mid-sized business looking for a user-friendly, cost-effective CMS solution, Joomla is a great choice. It is designed out of the box for non-technical editors to use, and offers more natively integrated functionality than WordPress, but is cheaper for a simple site than Drupal. Pixelstorm recommends Joomla for conventional websites given its easier to get started and quicker to get live.

Drupal is ideal if you’re a business in need of a highly customisable solution and are looking for a platform to support your growth over time. It’s handy for enterprise-grade projects thanks to its security features and customisation options. 

Can non-technical staff use Drupal?

Yes, but it depends on how the backend is configured. With the right setup, Drupal can be user-friendly for content editors. 

“Drupal isn’t only for huge institutions. Most individual Drupal sites are run by small teams (freelancers, small agencies, niche nonprofits) but it has a disproportionately large footprint among genuinely huge organisations compared to other CMS platforms.”

Daniel Florido, Technical Lead, PixelStorm

Not-For-Profits

Drupal takes more setup work and usually needs a developer to build it properly at the start. For nonprofits, especially, that upfront cost is worth weighing up.

Joomla is also a solid option for small nonprofits with simple needs. It provides user-friendly templates for professional-looking websites and is typically more cost-effective to run with less lead time to launch. If the budget is constrained and technical know-how is limited, this is a good option. 

• Drupal offers greater flexibility and governance
• Drupal is excellent for structured, interconnected content
• Joomla can be cheaper for a simple site
• Drupal offers multiple content editor roles
• Accessibility out of the box is better with Drupal
• There are more off the shelf Integrations available with Drupal
• Both have great multilingual support

If you’re building a nonprofit website, both CMS options will work. Drupal’s developer costs are higher, whereas Joomla offers more accessible pricing for nonprofits on a budget. The final decision comes down to scalability, accessibility, and your long-term budget. 

Why this not-for-profit chose Drupal

Recently awarded Drupal site of the year for 2026, Community Work Australia runs their not-for-profit website off Drupal. The project required a highly accessible, scalable platform that could support diverse users and complex content structures. Drupal enabled us to deliver a solution that not only met accessibility standards but also empowered the organisation to manage and grow their content confidently over time. 

Education Institutions and Course Providers

When you have large course catalogues, research libraries, policies and technical information, your website can quickly become complex with sophisticated information architecture, UX and search behaviour required to create a clear structure. 

Joomla would be the right solution for small to mid sized websites with limited in house development resources or budget. The interface is more intuitive out of the box than Drupal’s, which needs to be “built up”. It’s also the better choice when timeline is a concern.

If a school needs a professional website using templates that look modern and fast loading, Joomla is the CMS of choice.

If you’re looking to manage a larger website with a course directory and many different audiences, Drupal might be the better choice. TheDropTimes lists Australian education-sector Drupal users including Kaplan Business School, the Australian Skills Quality Authority, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, and Questacon, a mix of pure private-sector and quasi-government education bodies.

How VETASSESS benefited from the Drupal framework to support traffic, caching and user experience

The project aimed to overcome cumbersome navigation and content, and deliver a simple to navigate website for a multi-audience product. The focus was on providing intuitive navigation, and guiding users through the site as a journey, from landing on the homepage to working out which skills assessment they needed based on their experience, and the steps required to complete an application. The challenge was to create a new website experience that is user first, that is around industries, such as trades and hospitality, not around the technical assessment names.

The right solution for organisations with complex content websites 

For organisations running large content websites or complicated information architecture, the conversation between Drupal and Joomla changes.

Joomla can handle mid-sized websites (a local business, a mid-sized nonprofit, a school), but beyond this, Drupal is better. Joomla gets less common as sites get bigger/more trafficked, while Drupal gets more common. This is because Drupal is built to handle large amounts of structured content and complex relationships between pages, so as your site gets bigger and more complex, Drupal can handle the load, and doesn’t need constant patchwork.  Unlike Joomla’s architecture, which can hit roadblocks when a project needs highly specialised applications or deep integration with multiple systems like ERP or CRM.

Where Joomla falls down is the out of the box capabilities to build out the content structures and custom post types you need that Drupal offers. This means you can create highly structured content with structured permissions. For example, you are a larger manufacturer of AV equipment. You have different teams for Mobile phone content than for TVs. You can release permissions to edit only certain sections of the site for the relevant team. This means more brand control, increased security and minimisation of both compliance risk and error risk. 

Compliance & Security 

An organisation needs to consider a CMS that offers the controls, governance and development practices to reduce risk over the life of the website. 

Both platforms have:

• dedicated security teams
• formal vulnerability disclosure processes
• security advisories
• regular security releases
• access controls and permissions
• security-conscious development practices

Security and Patch Transparency 

You’ve got enough on your plate running a business without the fear of cyberattacks and data breaches. They damage your brand and reputation and can cause costly legal issues. 

Both Drupal and Joomla take security and patching seriously, but their approaches differ. Both have had security issues reported over time, which are tracked through Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs). Drupal has highly structured advisory systems, with clear patch cadence releases. Their security advisories offer database encryption, patching off issues before they’re exploited. View Drupal’s full security advisory list here. 

Joomla also maintains a solid security track record, though its processes are generally less formalised compared to Drupal. They offer guidance on their website and document the Joomla release announcements here. 

Accessibility beyond WCAG 

The ABS found that 5.5 million Australians, that’s 21.4% of the population, had disability in 2022. That’s more than one in five Australians. 

For organisations where accessibility is a genuine requirement, the question isn’t simply whether a CMS can produce an accessible website. It’s whether it’s considered throughout the platform, from the development process through to ongoing management of the website.Both Drupal and Joomla recognise the importance of accessibility, with Drupal gaining a slight edge over Joomla due to its maturity with which accessibility has been incorporated into its core development processes and governance.

Drupal is recognised worldwide for its strength in accessibility compliance and is often chosen by organisations that need to meet strict standards. Drupal has formal core development policies and accessibility gates and issues can be treated as blockers to changes being accepted into Drupal core. Drupal has an Accessibility Team, coding standards and core development policies, with guidance covering things such as semantic HTML, keyboard forms, focus management, ARIA and support for assistive technologies. 

“If the CMS itself generates inaccessible components, you could potentially be creating problems every time an editor uses the system. Whereas if accessibility is considered at the CMS level, you’re starting with a stronger foundation. There is still plenty of responsibility on a website development agency. A poorly developed Drupal website can absolutely be inaccessible. Components, forms, modules and content can all introduce accessibility problems. So Drupal’s approach is not a guarantee of WCAG compliance. It’s a better starting point and development framework”

Daniel Florido
Technical Lead Pixelstorm

Joomla is not ignoring accessibility. Joomla has its own Accessibility and Usability Team. Joomla currently states WCAG 2.1 AA compliance, and its 2026 roadmap has WCAG 2.2 AA compliance for both backend and frontend listed as “In Planning.”

Backend Editing Experience 

When it comes to editing, Joomla sits in the middle of the difficulty scale; it’s easier than Drupal, but much harder than Wix/Squarespace. So if a marketing team doesn’t have a developer on call all the time, Joomla can feel more approachable CMS for day-to-day editing.

The editing experience between Joomla and Drupal is very similar, both having visually attractive user interfaces for updating content. Both provide “boxes” that you write into and allow page structures to add and remove components of content and controls. The actual difference is more what happens “behind” the scenes, not within the editing experience itself.

Drupal is a powerful platform and actually can offer a wonderful editing experience when built well. Like Joomla, you can make direct edits on the page. However, investment usually requires a higher initial investment, as Drupal is a “build up” system, so it can look exactly as to want to make a great editing experience, but deep customisation is needed in developer hours, so it may not be as budget-friendly as Joomla. 

Joomla has a straightforward backend structure and universal editing experience because it’s “out of the box”, so a very reliable and user-friendly experience can be a good fit for organisations that need to make regular content updates between teams without a learning curve. There isn’t much complexity to learn or much to configure.

Drupal, on the other hand, is like Lego bricks. It allows you to define your own pages and content. The editing screen then becomes a “form” that matches those exact structures. Paragraphs act like components that allow flexibility of page designs through the editor which most users can control. Sites with a lot of organised data, and different types of data – like articles, courses, events, standard content pages, really benefit from this flexibility. This is helpful for organisations such as universities, government bodies, large enterprises, or nonprofits managing large amounts of content. 

Page Speed and Performance 

The question an organisation should ask regarding which will handle their website performance is: How much traffic do you get? One of Drupal’s super-powers is the ability for proper caching (such as Redis or Memcached), and handling higher server resources. However, high-traffic Joomla sites still require optimisation, including caching and CDN integration. 

It’s important to note that performance depends far more on hosting quality, configuration and ongoing maintenance than the CMS itself, so investing in the right performance and caching setup is critical regardless of platform. 

Build Cost and Ongoing Cost in Australia: Total cost of ownership

The total cost of ownership will vary based on the complexity of the project. Drupal often requires higher investment (approximately $15,000 benchmark for a mid-size build), whereas building a Joomla website has a much lower entry point, often starting from AU$5,000 upwards. 

While these are typical Australian market rates in 2026, for a bespoke quote, we recommend speaking with a Joomla or Drupal specialist. Contact us to get an idea of which option is best and how much it might cost. 

Is Drupal or Joomla the Right Decision?

There is a reason Drupal has gained 2,827 customers from Joomla while losing only 872 back. However, if you are after a relatively straightforward website, Joomla can absolutely do the job. You don’t necessarily need Drupal’s architectural capabilities to publish 50 pages and a blog. 

Choose Drupal if you:

• Need complex functionality or integrations
• Have a developer team to help support you with the setup
• Require advanced user permissions
• Want strong built-in multilingual support (handles over 100 languages natively)
• Must meet strict security and compliance (e.g. government) 
• Expect significant growth or traffic and large website scaling 

Choose Joomla if you:

• Have a well-built Joomla site, a team that knows it, and no compelling reason to change
• Want to manage your website design internally 
• Want to avoid a steep learning curve and are looking for a simpler editing experience
• Have a smaller upfront budget
• Need a quicker launch timeline
• Have relatively straightforward requirements
• Want multilingual support (via plugins) 

For a medium-to-large organisation starting a new website today, our team at Pixelstorm would need a good strategy before recommending Joomla over Drupal.

Both Joomla and Drupal are powerful CMS solutions, but which is best for you? 

Adding WordPress to the Mix

While Drupal and Joomla are both strong CMS options, WordPress holds the majority of the CMS market share by a long shot. Its known for ease of use, large developer pool, and suitable for start up blogs to sophisticated, modern custom WordPress theme solutions. WordPress sits closer to Joomla than it does to Drupal in audience, Where Joomla stackss up against WordPress is the native user role management, security and features that offer a more robust out-of-the-box solution. 

Which CMS Should You Choose? Our Recommendation

Drupal and Joomla are both very capable CMS options. The right choice depends on your organisation’s requirements now, and in the future. If you’re building for now, Joomla gets the job done fast and on budget. If you’re building for growth, Drupal has more capacity to scale. If you’re finding the decision technically overwhelming, or just unsure which direction is right for you, Pixelstorm’s Drupal team is here to help. Book a free consultation, and we’d be glad to take the time to explore the best path forward for you.