CMS
| Drupal [-] | Joomla [-] | |
| Community Features |  Very impressive. Users can form groups and expansion of the registraion form is native to Drupal. | Community Builder. A solid component, but one that really needs an SEF extension to enable Youtube-style URLs. |
| Shopping Cart |  Not recommended as it lacks tax and currency options. However, watch out for Ubercart which looks promising. | Joomla has Virtuemart and an integration of OSCommerce, both of which beat Drupal's ecommerce addon. Use OSCommerce if you need multicurrency options or if you have a payment gateway not supported by VM |
| SEO | The out-of-the-box URLs work well and can be improved with one easy addon. The code is generally lightweight and well-optimised. | Poor out of the box. OpenSEF is OK and improving fast. Code is not very well adapted for SEO. |
| Forums | A native and very smooth forum, but lacking in the high end features of the best modern forums. VbDrupal is the best way to avoid this (a Drupal Vbulletin hack) | Use Joomla with Simple Machines Forum, which is the path taken by Joomla.org. Joomlaboard integrates natively to Joomla but lacks many key features. |
| Multimedia | Yes - Drupal Video and podcast options also available. | Yes, plenty of podcast and video options. |
| Photo Gallaries | Has a default module and a Gallery2 integration. | Yes. The best are integrations with Gallery2 and the Flash gallery Expose. |
| Event Calandars | Not great. There are options but they are far behind those available for Joomla | Several native plug-ins and integrations. |
| Template/Themes | Only one commercial developer. Off-the-shelf choices are very poor. Currently, Drupal assumes one template for all pages, although this can be adapted with effort and will 5.0 will allow templates to be assigned according to URL. Developing your own is the best bet. | Joomla has a wide selection of free and commercial offerings. Once installed they can be assigned to different pages. |
| Blogs | Good capabilities, although not a natural blog in the manner of Wordpress. | Some out-of-the-box capability. Joomla.org uses a port of Wordpress. |
| Document Management | Not anything worth considering. | Yes - DocMan. |
| User Permissions | Drupal wins hands-down. However, you still can't manage single members. You need to add them to a certain group. | Some very major forks can work with Joomla, but this is a very poor area. Joomla is very admin-orientated. A small group of people are going to control and run the site. A lot of members can contribute by adding content, forum posts etc. but it is difficult to increase their permissions further. |
| External Integration | Currently Drupal wins easily with plenty of hooks | Joomla 1.5 will help greatly with a much improved API and more hooks. |
| Content Management | Unlimited categories and subcategories. Also allows for cross-categorization of articles. | In the core only Section >> Category >> Content is available. That's it. No cross-categorization. |
| SSL Compatible | Yes | With hacks. |
| Standards Compliance | Yes. Excellent out-of-the-box. | Not great. Accessible Joomla is a fork necessary to move Joomla towards compliance. Mambo/Joomla dates from before standards were even considered (1999). |
| Internationalization | Yes, Excellent. (via i18n module) | With Joomfish. Not an easy or straight-forward solution |
| Commercial Community | Weak. Difficult to find strong Drupal developers in any quantity. Try Drupal.org, Drupal Yellow Pages or Drupalancers. | Very strong. Perhaps the best in the Open Source CMS world. Try Try Joomla Yellow Pages or Joomla.org. |
| General Community | Good community. Often more non-profit than business driven. Excellent forum support at Drupal.org | Great. 100s of extra components available, both commercial and open source. Many companies now offering services. |
| Ease-of-use | Administrator tasks on the current Drupal version are done via a menu on the frontpage which confuses many. Drupal 5.0 will solve this and also provide an online installer. Still, installing many modules needs technical knowledge. | Joomla has a great graphical interface in separate area of website. |
| Learning Curve | A little steeper than Joomla, but still relatively easy to learn. | Shallow. One of the very easiest CMS systems to learn and customize. |
| Speed | A default installation loads in 1.05 seconds. (Score from http://sitescore.silktide.com | A default installation of 1.0.12 loads in 0.90 seconds. A default installation of 1.5 loads in 1.33 seconds. (Scores from http://sitescore.silktide.com) |
| Size | Version 5.0 is 2.89 MB | 1.0.12 is 16.4 MB 1.5 is 16.7 MB |
| Current Situation | Clear development path. Currently working on Drupal 5. Beta 2 came out at the end of November and a Release Candidate is probably next. | Unclear. When will Joomla 1.5 be out? Which version should people currently buiding sites use? One developer recently warned about relying on any firm deadlines or easy upgrades to the new version. |
| Overall | Drupal is more community-oriented and the current live version is more extensible. That advantage will be greatly shortened once Joomla 1.5 is stable. | Joomla 1.5 will be the crucial leap for the platform paving the way for the resolution of many old limitations. Producing a good-looking site with plenty of functionality is a relatively easy task with Joomla. |
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