WordPress vs Joomla in 2026: Does Joomla Still Make Sense?

WordPress and Joomla used to feel like much closer rivals.

Today, the numbers tell a very different story. When WordPress runs on about 40.2% of all websites and holds 58.7% of the CMS market, Joomla is only used by around 1.1% of websites.

That's a huge gap, and it has practical consequences. WordPress has more plugins, more themes, more tutorials, more developers familiar with it, and more third-party services built specifically around it.

But popularity doesn't answer every question.

Joomla is still actively developed, Joomla 6 is a current major release, and some of the things Joomla has built into its core are exactly the features that WordPress users often turn to plugins or custom development to get.

So the useful question in 2026 isn't simply which CMS is more popular. It's whether WordPress is the right default for your site, or whether Joomla's more structured approach better fits what you need.

And these are the differences that are likely to matter when choosing a CMS:

• ease of use
• content management
• extensions and ecosystem
• multilingual sites
• users and permissions
• SEO
• performance
• security and updates
• ecommerce
• maintenance over time

WordPress vs Joomla at a glance

This shows where the two CMSs start to diverge.

WordPress starts simpler and becomes more capable as you add what you need.

Joomla gives you more CMS machinery from the beginning.

WordPress is easier to get into

For someone building their first site, WordPress still has the easier path.

Install WordPress, pick a theme, create some pages, add posts, install the plugins you need and you're already working with most of the concepts required for a normal website.

Joomla has a steeper learning curve, since you need to understand more of its structure before everything starts to feel natural.

Articles belong to categories. Modules can appear in different template positions. Menus do more than simply provide navigation. Access levels can affect what users see. Components, plugins and modules are different types of extensions.

None of this is particularly strange once you understand Joomla, but there's more vocabulary and more structure to learn before everything clicks.

That extra complexity isn't necessarily wasted complexity. Some of it becomes useful as a site grows.

For a simple company website or blog, though, WordPress generally gets you from installation to publishing faster.

Joomla gets more interesting when the content gets complicated

WordPress started as a blogging platform and gradually evolved into a full CMS. And that simplicity is still one of its strengths.

It isn't limited to posts and pages anymore. WordPress supports custom post types, custom taxonomies, metadata and custom fields, so developers can model products, events, directories, reviews or almost any other kind of content.

This makes WordPress extremely flexible.

The difference is how you get there.

A lot of advanced WordPress sites gradually assemble their content model using plugins, custom post types, custom fields and theme or block configuration.

Joomla feels more like a traditional CMS from the beginning.

Its categories can be nested. Menus and content organization are separate concepts. Modules can be placed around the site independently of articles. Custom fields and content controls are part of the wider CMS structure.

For a straightforward blog, that can feel like unnecessary machinery.

For a university department, association, documentation site, large multilingual publication or another site with many sections and content relationships, the structure starts to make much more sense.

WordPress can absolutely build those sites too. Joomla simply approaches the problem from the opposite direction.

The ecosystem gap is impossible to ignore

This is probably WordPress's biggest practical advantage.

The official WordPress plugin directory currently advertises more than 73,000 free plugins.

That's before counting commercial plugins sold outside WordPress.org.

Need forms? There are many options.

Memberships, backups, caching, image optimization, analytics, SEO, custom fields, ecommerce, events, bookings, newsletters and integrations with online services are all heavily represented.

Joomla still has an active extension directory covering areas such as ecommerce, SEO, analytics, forms, performance and content management. Its ecommerce category alone currently contains hundreds of listed extensions and integrations across its subcategories.

If a SaaS company releases an official CMS integration, WordPress is far more likely to be supported. If you need to hire someone to repair or extend a site, finding a WordPress developer is generally easier. If you search for a tutorial on an unusual problem, the chances of finding a WordPress-specific answer are higher.

Joomla has enough extensions for many real projects. WordPress simply gives you considerably more choice.

That advantage becomes especially important when you cant say what the website will need two years from now.

Multilingual sites are one of Joomla's strongest arguments

Joomla includes the framework needed to build multilingual sites in the CMS itself.

You can install multiple site languages, create language-specific content and menus, and associate an article, category, contact or menu item with its translated equivalents. Joomla's Multilingual Associations interface is specifically designed to help manage those relationships.

Joomla doesn't translate the content for you. Someone still needs to write or generate the translations.

The important point is that Joomla understands those translations as part of the site's structure.

WordPress supports changing the site and administration language, but a full multilingual content workflow isn't provided in the same way by WordPress core. WordPress sites normally handle multiple content languages through a plugin, Multisite setup or custom architecture. WordPress's standard Site Language setting primarily controls the site's language configuration.

There are excellent multilingual plugins for WordPress, so this doesn't prevent WordPress from running large multilingual sites.

But if multilingual content is fundamental to the project rather than something you might add later, Joomla deserves much more serious consideration.

Joomla also has much finer access control out of the box

WordPress ships with six default roles: Super Admin, Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor and Subscriber.

Underneath those roles is a capabilities system, and developers or plugins can create additional roles and capabilities.

For most websites, that's enough.

Joomla goes considerably further in its standard administration interface.

Its Access Control List, or ACL, separates who can see something from what they are allowed to do with it. Permissions can be configured through user groups and access levels, with action permissions applied globally or narrowed down through components and individual items.

Imagine a site where:

• one department can edit its own content but not another department's pages
• some documents are visible only to registered members
• one group can create articles but cannot publish them
• editors can manage a particular section without receiving full administrator access

You can build these workflows with WordPress.

With Joomla, the permission model was designed around this kind of problem.

For a five-page company website, that's overkill.

For an organization with complicated editorial responsibilities, it can be one of Joomla's best features.

Which is better for SEO?

Both CMS can produce fast, crawlable pages with sensible URLs, metadata, sitemaps and structured content.

The difference is mostly convenience and tooling.

WordPress has an enormous selection of SEO plugins. They can provide interfaces for titles, descriptions, canonical URLs, XML sitemaps, redirects, schema markup, indexing controls and plenty more.

That ecosystem makes many common SEO jobs easy to configure without touching code.

Joomla has its own search-friendly URL controls and SEO extensions, and its structured approach can work particularly well on multilingual or deeply categorized sites.

Still, if SEO workflow convenience is the priority, WordPress has the stronger ecosystem.

What about performance?

CMS performance depends on things such as:

• hosting
• PHP and database configuration
• caching
• themes or templates
• installed extensions
• image sizes
• fonts
• advertising and analytics scripts
• page builders
• database queries
• CDN configuration

Both CMSs can be made fast.

Or be made painfully slow.

There are excellent caching and optimization tools available for Wordpress, but all those installed plugins will end by slowing your site.

Joomla's more structured core can sometimes reduce the need for add-ons, but that doesn't guarantee a faster site.

Security depends more on maintenance

Raw vulnerability counts don't make a fair WordPress versus Joomla comparison. WordPress has a vastly larger installation base and extension ecosystem, so the amount of software and number of sites being examined are very different.

Both projects actively publish security fixes.

WordPress automatically applies minor and security updates on supported installations, and plugin and theme auto-updates can also be enabled.

For either CMS, the bigger risks usually come from neglected updates, abandoned extensions, weak administrator accounts, poor hosting configuration or installing third-party software without checking who maintains it.

Ecommerce heavily favors the WordPress ecosystem

You can build stores with either CMS.

Joomla's extension directory includes ecommerce systems such as HikaShop, J2Commerce and EShop, along with payment gateways, billing tools, subscriptions and integrations.

WordPress, however, has WooCommerce.

The official WooCommerce plugin currently reports more than 7 million active installations.

The important part isn't just that number. WooCommerce has built an ecosystem around itself: payment integrations, shipping services, themes, subscriptions, bookings, product add-ons, analytics, accounting connections and specialist hosting.

For a normal ecommerce project started from scratch, that ecosystem makes WordPress difficult to ignore.

Joomla can still make sense if the store is one part of a larger Joomla site, particularly where Joomla's multilingual or permission features are already important.

If the store itself is the main project, WordPress plus WooCommerce will usually give you more choices.

Both are free, but the final site probably won't be

WordPress and Joomla are open-source projects, so there is no CMS license fee just to download and use either one.

That's not the same thing as running a website for free.

You'll still need hosting and a domain. Depending on the site, you may also pay for templates, plugins or extensions, backups, security services, developers, maintenance and external services.

WordPress has a huge amount of free software available, but it's easy to end up with several recurring plugin subscriptions once you start adding commercial features.

Joomla can sometimes provide more of the complex CMS functionality you need directly in core, particularly for multilingual content and permissions. Its smaller ecosystem, however, can also mean fewer alternatives when the extension you need is commercial.

So which one should you choose?

For most new websites, WordPress is the easier default choice.

Its ecosystem is dramatically larger, it's easier for new users to learn, third-party integrations are easier to find, and there is a huge pool of developers, documentation and community help available.

That makes WordPress particularly easy to recommend for:

• blogs and editorial sites
• small and medium business websites
• marketing sites
• portfolios
• ecommerce
• sites that depend on many third-party services
• projects whose future requirements aren't clear yet

Joomla becomes more interesting when you can point to a specific reason for choosing it.

Consider Joomla when:

• the site will be multilingual from the beginning
• you need detailed user groups and content permissions
• the content has a deep or complex structure
• different teams need control over different parts of the site
• Joomla's built-in CMS features can replace several extensions you'd otherwise need
• your team already knows Joomla well

That's an important distinction.

Some years ago someone might have chosen between Joomla and WordPress simply because both were popular CMS options.

But in 2026 WordPress is the obvious mainstream choice.

And that doesn't make Joomla obsolete. In some projects, the features that make it feel more complicated on day one are exactly the features that make it easier to manage once the website becomes complicated too.

WordPress vs Joomla: the verdict

If you're creating a business site, blog, publication or online store and don't have a specific reason to choose otherwise, WordPress is likely to make the project easier.

Its ecosystem alone changes the equation. Finding a plugin, integration, developer, tutorial or hosting provider is easy.

But Joomla still has areas where it deserves more credit than its current market share suggests.

Its multilingual tools are part of the CMS itself. Its access-control system is unusually capable out of the box. Its approach to content, modules, menus and permissions makes sense for sites that need more structure than a typical blog or company homepage.

So this isn't really a choice between the popular CMS and the forgotten one.

It's a choice between a CMS that starts simple and can be extended almost endlessly, and one that gives you more structure before you've installed anything.

For most sites, WordPress is the easier answer.

For the right site, Joomla can still be the better fit.

Whichever CMS you choose to use, being Worpress, Joomla, or any other, always keep in mind that you need to keep your installation up-to-date to prevent security risks.