Joomla vs WordPress in 2026 : Where Each One Actually Wins
A balanced comparison, including the several project types where WordPress is plainly the better answer.
You have a project to build and you are choosing between Joomla and WordPress, probably having read a dozen comparisons that concluded whichever one the author happened to sell services for. This one is published on a Joomla site, so the bias is worth naming up front — and the honest conclusion is that WordPress is the right answer for a majority of projects, with a specific and identifiable set of cases where Joomla is clearly better.
The comparison covers current Joomla — the 6.x line, released in October 2025, along with the still-supported 5.x line — against current WordPress. Comparisons against Joomla 3 are not relevant — that line is end-of-life — and a great deal of the “Joomla is complicated” reputation dates from that era.
Market share: the honest number
WordPress powers roughly 41% of all websites and holds around 60% of the CMS market — a share that has been slowly declining from its mid-2020s peak of about 43%. Joomla sits at low single digits, and its share has declined over the past decade rather than grown.
This is not a detail to argue away, because market share is not merely a popularity contest — it compounds into things you will feel directly. More developers, more agencies, more tutorials, more Stack Overflow answers, more plugins, more themes, more hosting products built specifically for the platform, and more people who can take over when whoever built your site moves on.
It does not tell you which platform fits your project. A large share of WordPress’s install base is small blogs and brochure sites, which is a category it serves outstandingly well. It says nothing about which platform handles a five-language site with six editorial roles, and that is the sort of question where the answer diverges.
Multilingual: a clear Joomla win
This is the strongest case for Joomla and it is not close.
Joomla has multilingual support in core. You install language packs, enable the language filter plugin, create content in each language, and associate the equivalent items across languages. The language switcher, hreflang tags and per-language menus follow from the core system. No plugin, no licence, no vendor dependency.
WordPress has no core multilingual capability. You use a plugin, and the serious options are commercial with an annual licence. They work well, are actively developed, and are used on many thousands of sites — but they are third-party infrastructure sitting underneath your entire content model. If that plugin stops being maintained, or the licence lapses, or a major WordPress release breaks it, your multilingual site has a problem that reaches all the way down.
| Joomla 5 | WordPress | |
|---|---|---|
| Multilingual support | Core | Plugin |
| Ongoing cost | None | Typically €40–100/yr per site |
| hreflang output | Automatic | Plugin-provided |
| Per-language menus and modules | Native | Plugin-managed |
| Risk if the vendor disappears | None | Structural — the content model depends on it |
| Migration away | Standard Joomla export | Difficult; translations live in plugin structures |
If you are building a site in four languages that must still be running in ten years, the calculus favours Joomla clearly. For two languages on a small site, a WordPress plugin is entirely reasonable and this advantage is not decisive on its own.
Access control: the other clear Joomla win
Joomla’s ACL system is genuinely more capable out of the box than anything WordPress offers natively.
Joomla gives you arbitrary nested user groups with inheritance, view access levels controlling who sees what, and permissions settable at global, component, category and individual item level. You can express “this category is visible only to paying members, editable by regional editors, and publishable only by the editorial lead” using core configuration alone.
WordPress ships six fixed roles with a capability system underneath them. Extending it requires a plugin or custom code, and the plugins in this space are competent but you are again adding third-party infrastructure to do something structural.
| Requirement | Joomla 5 | WordPress |
|---|---|---|
| Author, editor, admin roles | Core | Core |
| Custom nested groups with inheritance | Core | Plugin |
| Per-category permissions | Core | Plugin |
| Per-item permission override | Core | Plugin |
| Members-only content tiers | Core view access levels | Membership plugin |
| Departmental editorial separation | Core | Plugin, with effort |
The honest qualifier: most sites never need this. A blog with two authors is served perfectly by WordPress’s fixed roles, and Joomla’s ACL is then complexity you pay for and do not use. Where it matters — intranets, membership sites, universities, multi-department organisations, publications with real editorial workflow — it matters a great deal.
Extensions and themes: WordPress wins decisively
WordPress has tens of thousands of plugins in its official directory and a commercial ecosystem several times larger again. Joomla’s directory holds a few thousand extensions. That is an order of magnitude, and it shows in practice.
The consequence is not usually “Joomla cannot do that”. It is that in WordPress the thing you want probably exists, is maintained, has competitors, and has documentation written by people who are not the developer. In Joomla you are more often choosing between two options where one has not been updated in three years, or commissioning the work.
This is most acute in three areas. Ecommerce — WooCommerce has an ecosystem of thousands of extensions and near-universal payment gateway support, and nothing in Joomla approaches it. Page builders — WordPress has several mature, heavily used builders; Joomla has good options such as Yootheme and the established template frameworks, but fewer. Niche integrations — if you need to connect to a specific CRM, booking platform or industry SaaS, a WordPress plugin very likely exists and a Joomla equivalent very likely does not.
A larger ecosystem is also a larger attack surface, and abandoned plugins are the leading cause of WordPress compromises by a wide margin. Ecosystem size is a genuine advantage only for plugins you would actually choose — actively maintained, from vendors with a security process. Judged that way the gap narrows, though WordPress still wins comfortably.
Ease of use for non-technical editors
WordPress wins this, and it is the reason for a large part of the market share gap.
The WordPress admin presents a short, flat menu and a content editor that behaves roughly like what people expect. Joomla 5’s administrator is much improved on Joomla 3 — the interface is cleaner and better organised — but the underlying model asks more of the user. Joomla separates articles, categories, menus, menu item types and modules into distinct concepts that must be connected, and a new user must understand that a piece of content does not appear on the site until a menu item or module points at it.
That model is more powerful. It is also a genuine conceptual hurdle, and if your editors are volunteers at a community organisation or staff who use the site twice a month, it is a real cost that shows up as support requests forever.
| Task | Joomla 5 | WordPress |
|---|---|---|
| Publish a simple article | Straightforward | Straightforward |
| Get that article to appear in a menu | Requires understanding menu item types | Usually automatic or a simple menu edit |
| Add a sidebar element | Module, with position and assignment | Widget or block, drag and drop |
| Build a landing page layout | Template or builder needed | Block editor, natively |
| Understand it without training | Unlikely | Often yes |
Developer availability and hiring
This is a business risk that gets underweighted at the point of choosing, and dominates the conversation three years later.
Finding a WordPress developer is trivial anywhere, at any budget, at any hour. Finding a competent Joomla developer takes longer, costs somewhat more, and in smaller markets may mean working remotely with someone in another country. The Joomla developers who remain are frequently very good — the ecosystem has consolidated around people who chose to stay — but there are fewer of them.
Ask the question directly before you decide: if the person building this site is unavailable in two years, who maintains it? If the answer is “we will find someone”, that answer is considerably easier on WordPress. For an organisation with no internal technical capacity, this consideration can reasonably outweigh several technical advantages.
Security: a fairer comparison than the headlines
WordPress sites are compromised more often in absolute numbers. This is mostly a function of running many times more sites, and the comparison people should be making is about the causes rather than the totals.
Both projects have competent security teams, both publish advisories, both ship fixes promptly, and core vulnerabilities in both are relatively infrequent and quickly patched. In both ecosystems, the overwhelming majority of real compromises trace to the same three causes: an out-of-date third-party extension or plugin, an out-of-date core, and weak or reused administrator credentials.
| Joomla 5 | WordPress | |
|---|---|---|
| Core security process | Dedicated strike team, coordinated disclosure | Dedicated team, coordinated disclosure |
| Multi-factor authentication | In core | Plugin |
| Granular ACL to limit blast radius | In core | Plugin |
| Automatic background updates | Manual or scheduled | Automatic for minor core releases |
| Third-party ecosystem risk | Smaller surface, more abandonment | Larger surface, more churn |
| Attacker attention | Lower | Very high — mass scanning is constant |
Two rows genuinely favour each side. Joomla ships MFA and fine-grained ACL in core, which are meaningful defaults. WordPress ships automatic minor-version updates, which — given that unpatched core is a leading compromise cause — is arguably the single most valuable security default either project has.
The practical conclusion is that platform choice is a minor factor in your security outcome compared with whether you patch promptly, use MFA, and keep tested backups. A well-maintained site on either platform is fine. An unmaintained site on either platform is compromised eventually.
Cost of ownership
Both are free software; the cost is everything around them.
| Cost line | Joomla 5 | WordPress |
|---|---|---|
| Licence | Free | Free |
| Hosting | Standard shared hosting is fine | Same, plus a large managed-host market |
| Template / theme | Free options; commercial ~€40–90 | Free options; commercial ~€30–90 |
| Multilingual | Free — core | ~€40–100/yr plugin |
| Advanced ACL | Free — core | Plugin, sometimes free |
| Backup | Akeeba free or ~€40–100/yr | Several free and paid options |
| Developer day rate | Somewhat higher; harder to source | Lower; abundant supply |
| Ongoing maintenance | Similar | Similar |
Software costs are close. Labour is where the difference lives, and it favours WordPress for most organisations — with the exception of multilingual sites, where Joomla’s core capability removes a recurring licence and a recurring source of upgrade friction.
Performance
Broadly a draw, and rarely the deciding factor. Both are PHP applications with a database behind them, both cache well, and both are fast when hosted properly and slow when not.
Joomla’s core is arguably tidier out of the box and a default Joomla site tends to load fewer assets than a default WordPress site with a commercial theme. But the variable that dominates is not the platform — it is how many extensions load assets on every page, how large the images are, and the quality of the hosting. A well-built site on either platform reaches good Core Web Vitals; a site with thirty plugins and unoptimised images fails on both.
How to actually make the decision
Comparison tables are useful and they are not a decision. Four questions, answered honestly about your own project rather than in the abstract, settle it in most cases.
Will this site be multilingual, genuinely?
Not “we might add French one day” — is more than one language a real requirement in the next two years? If yes, and particularly if it is three or more languages, Joomla’s core multilingual system is a strong enough advantage to lead the decision. If no, this entire category drops out and the balance shifts noticeably toward WordPress.
Does anyone need to see or edit only part of the site?
Members-only sections, departmental editors who must not touch each other’s content, an approval step before publishing. If you can describe such a rule, Joomla expresses it in core configuration. If every editor can edit everything and every visitor sees everything, WordPress’s fixed roles are sufficient and Joomla’s ACL is unused complexity.
Who maintains this in three years, by name?
If you can name a person or agency comfortable with Joomla, that risk is handled. If the honest answer is “we would advertise and see who applies”, weight WordPress heavily — developer availability becomes the binding constraint on every future change, and it is the factor most consistently underestimated at the point of choosing.
Is there one specific integration the project depends on?
A payment gateway, a booking system, a CRM, an industry-specific SaaS. Check before deciding whether a maintained connector exists for each platform, and treat commissioning custom integration work as a real cost. This single question overrides most of the others when the answer is that only one platform has it.
If questions one and two are both no, choose WordPress and stop deliberating. If either is a firm yes and question three has a satisfactory answer, Joomla is likely the better long-term fit. Question four can override everything.
The decision table
| Project type | Choose | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Blog or personal site | WordPress | Built for it; lowest friction |
| Small business brochure site | WordPress | Easier handover; cheaper to maintain |
| Ecommerce | WordPress | WooCommerce ecosystem is unmatched in either project |
| Multilingual site, 3+ languages | Joomla | Core multilingual; no plugin dependency or recurring licence |
| Membership or intranet with content tiers | Joomla | Core ACL and view access levels |
| Publication with editorial workflow | Joomla | Granular per-category permissions in core |
| University, government, NGO | Joomla | Multilingual plus departmental access control |
| Site handed to non-technical volunteers | WordPress | Lower training burden |
| Organisation with no technical staff | WordPress | Developer availability is the binding constraint |
| Existing well-maintained Joomla site | Stay on Joomla | Migration cost rarely pays back |
| Existing Joomla 3 site | Either, but move | End-of-life; migrating to Joomla 5 or WordPress both beat staying |
If you are already on Joomla 3
Joomla 3 reached end of life in August 2023 and receives no security fixes. Staying is not an option that can be defended; the only question is where you go.
Migrating to Joomla 5 is usually the cheaper path, because content, menus, users and structure carry across through the supported upgrade route, and your editors already know the interface. The friction is extensions: some Joomla 3 extensions have no Joomla 5 version, and each of those is a replacement decision.
Moving to WordPress is a rebuild. Content can be migrated with tooling, but menus, modules, ACL and every extension are re-created rather than converted. It costs more up front and is defensible when your reasons for leaving are structural — you cannot find anyone to maintain the site, or you need an ecosystem Joomla does not have.
A Joomla 3 site accumulates permanently unpatched vulnerabilities with every passing month. A web application firewall buys time to migrate; it is not somewhere to live. If budget is the obstacle, migrate to Joomla 5 — it is nearly always the cheaper of the two routes and it resolves the security position immediately.
Frequently asked questions
Is Joomla dying?
Its market share has declined for a decade and that trend has not reversed, so the concern is legitimate. But the project ships regular releases, Joomla 5 was a substantial modernisation, and there is an active core team and security process. It is a smaller ecosystem than it was rather than an abandoned one — reasonable for a new project in the cases above, and no reason to abandon a working site.
Is Joomla harder to learn than WordPress?
Yes, meaningfully. The separation of articles, categories, menu items and modules is more powerful and takes longer to internalise. Someone who has never used a CMS will publish a post in WordPress faster than in Joomla, and for sites handed to occasional non-technical editors that difference is a real ongoing cost.
Which is more secure?
Neither by a margin that should decide your choice. Joomla ships MFA and granular ACL in core, which are good defaults; WordPress ships automatic minor updates, which addresses the single most common compromise cause. In both ecosystems, out-of-date third-party code and weak admin credentials account for the overwhelming majority of real incidents.
Can I migrate from Joomla to WordPress easily?
Content, yes, with migration tooling. Everything else, no — menus, modules, user permissions, template overrides and every extension are rebuilt rather than converted. Budget it as a rebuild with content import, not as a conversion, and expect URL structures to change, which means a redirect map.
Is WordPress really better for ecommerce?
Yes, clearly. WooCommerce has an extension ecosystem, payment gateway coverage and a developer pool that nothing in the Joomla space matches. If ecommerce is the primary purpose of the site, that is close to decisive on its own — though a dedicated hosted platform is also worth considering ahead of either CMS.
Does Joomla’s built-in multilingual actually work well?
Yes. It is the feature Joomla is most consistently praised for, it handles content, menus, modules and hreflang natively, and it does so with no licence and no third-party dependency. The setup takes an hour or two and is well documented; once configured it is stable and needs almost no attention.
I inherited a Joomla site and hate it. Should I move to WordPress?
Not on that basis alone. First check whether it is on Joomla 5 or something older — much of the frustration people attribute to Joomla is really Joomla 3’s interface, and the upgrade path resolves it far more cheaply than a rebuild. Move if you have a structural reason: you cannot find anyone to maintain it, or you need something the ecosystem does not offer.