CMS Comparison: WordPress vs. Joomla vs. Drupal (2021)

If you’re thinking about building a website or blog, you should consider using one of the best CMS available in the market. A CMS (content management system) helps you create, manage, and modify the contents of your website without the need for any HTML or CSS coding skills.

The easy-to-use nature of the modern CMS platforms means that anyone can build themselves a great-looking website all on their own. You don’t need to be a WordPress web design company, a designer, or have any previous experience with website building either.

In this post, we look through three of the most popular and best CMS platforms coming into 2021, compare their pros and cons, and help you pick one.

1. Costs and Expense Comparison for the Best CMS

Talking about the costs involved in using any of these CMS gets real tricky real fast. Here’s the deal. Each of these three best CMS is 100% free in itself – you can download either one directly from the official websites in just a couple of clicks, there are other side costs that you have to take onto yourself. These side costs involve chiefly two things: a domain name and web hosting.

A domain name is your website’s address on the web. This website’s domain name is websitesetup.org. Buying and keeping a domain online costs around $15 annually.

A web hosting setup is where your website sits and from where your visitors can access it. Good hosting starts at ~$3 a month. Here are our hosting recommendations.

Building your website on either of our three best CMS will cost the same in terms of the domain name and hosting.

While the CMS platforms are free to download, in some cases, users will want to extend the native feature sets of their CMS with extra modules and/or designs.All three of the best CMS have add-ons in roughly the same price range. Ultimately, you don’t have to buy any add-ons if you don’t have the budget.

That being said, your results may vary depending on what your expectations are and how advanced of a site you want to build.

WordPress is arguably the easiest one to use. Expanding the functionality of your site and finding and customizing the designs is much more approachable.

Additionally, many hosting companies now offer what’s called “WordPress hosting,” meaning that you don’t have to worry about the technical setup of the server or even worry about installing WordPress on your own. The hosting company will handle all of that.

Regarding customization, WordPress comes with a friendly interface for tweaking the looks of your site, changing the colors, backgrounds, and other visual elements.

WordPress customize

Joomla and Drupal are more developer-centered and do expect you to be reasonably comfortable working with HTML and PHP – that is, if you want to build a more custom-looking and custom-operating website.

There are not as many versatile add-ons available for either CMS, and the ones that are there are not as refined as their counterparts for WordPress.

In most cases, you can expect to either have to hire someone or learn the inner workings of either Joomla or Drupal if you want to end up with a custom-looking website.

Joomla creating a new post

This all comes down to the size of the community – there are many more people working on WordPress-related products and add-ons than they are working on Joomla or Drupal. This means that if you want to get a feature for your website that’s not available via a plugin, you’ll have to create that feature yourself.

The Popularity of the Best CMS

The popularity contest is actually a no-contest. WordPress takes this round hands down. Take a look at this chart – it presents the usage of content management systems on the web.WordPress is used more than 35% of the entire web. Read: more than one in every three websites run on WordPress.