Joomla! or WordPress?

This type of control is very useful for providing information to our customers and our help desk department on the installations of the various CMS active in web spaces, proposing updates and migrations but above all intervening promptly and precisely when security flaws are discovered on extensions, plugins and on the CMS versions themselves. Yesterday morning, as usual, I received the quarterly report on the versions of the CMS we host from our development manager, Alessandro Fustini, and the data I saw was very interesting.

Joomlahost is certainly a very attractive brand for all those who use Joomla! in Italy, our hosting for Joomla! since 2006 it has had great success, today there are over 40,000 active installations on our platform and our company has gone from 4 to 15 employees in a very short time, all hired on a permanent basis (I really want to say this).

Data in hand Over the years, however, we have also seen other CMS take hold such as WordPress, Drupal, Prestahop or Magento, here is the graph of the diffusion of CMS on our hosting:

CMS hosted on Joomlahost

As you can see from the graph, 75% of our customers use Joomla!, but a good 21% use WordPress and a small 4% other cms such as Drupal, Magento and Prestahop. For the latter, the growth curve has risen significantly compared to the previous report, in particular for Prestahop and Magento which are certainly excellent CMS for the development of an e-commerce site, so the usage trend in recent years by Italian users has really risen significantly.

Joomla! is he still among us? Joomla! Is he destined to die? Absolutely not! Webmasters, webagencies, use different tools for different purposes. It is correct to use Joomla! for some projects, WordPress for others and Prestashop for your e-commerce! In short, a CMS for everything.

I asked our help desk manager Fabio Assenzio what he thinks about the growth of other cms compared to Joomla! in recent years, here is his response:

"Taking Joomla! and WordPress into consideration, in recent months many articles have been written on why one should be better than the other. In my opinion there is no better CMS, each has its strengths and weaknesses and each CMS can be used for any project. However, we tend to associate WordPress with a blog and I have often heard "WordPress is easier than Joomla!" but are we really sure that this is the case?

WordPress was born as a blog platform, the development is focused on blogging and consequently if as soon as I install it I access the backend, I immediately understand how to write an article and fill the homepage of my site, this reassures me and makes me think that WordPress is easier.

Joomla! instead it has another type of approach with the user, it is not immediately clear how to set up the homepage, it is first necessary to understand how the sections and categories work and only after a few days do you become familiar with the CMS. However, if the learning curve is slower, it does not necessarily mean that Joomla is more difficult than WordPress.

Certainly in recent years Joomla! has lost some ground due to the choices that were made with the release of the new versions of the CMS, the 1.5->2.5 and 2.5->3 migrations were not exactly painless and many users abandoned Joomla! to move to WordPress.Fortunately starting from April 2014 there have been some big changes with the versioning of Joomla!, the STS (short term support) and LTS (long term support) versions have disappeared and now there is always only one major release and minor releases all compatible with each other, this was a fundamental step in bringing back Joomla! on the global stage, and we can also confirm the change in trend internally."

To conclude, for any CMS you want to use you can rely on our hosting platforms, Joomla! o WordPress is not important and it is not a competition, soon we will also include compatibility information for WordPress and for all other CMS on our site to allow our customers to have a single, increasingly large, hosting provider for all their customers and for all their CMS.

And what do you think? Do you have a favorite CMS? And if so why? Write it in the comments!