Joomla vs Drupal

Pick Joomla when a small team has to publish quickly — with built-in multilingual menus and maybe a shop — without writing PHP; pick Drupal when the content model itself is the product: many content types, field-level structure, revisions and editorial workflow. Both are free, GPL-licensed PHP systems, so the choice is about shape of work, not licence cost.

• Joomla 6 is the current line: 6.0 shipped 14 October 2025 and 6.1 in April 2026; Joomla 4 support ended 14 October 2025, so no new build should start there.
• Drupal 11 is the current line: it requires PHP 8.3 as a minimum, while Drupal 10 (PHP 8.1+) reaches end of life in December 2026 — a new build belongs on 11.
• Curve and server: Drupal's learning curve is steeper, and it wants more memory and tooling on the server than Joomla does.

Drupal stores every piece of content as an entity with fields you define, so a recipe, a case study and a staff profile can each carry their own fields, and views build lists from those fields without custom queries. That is the whole argument for Drupal: structure first, output second.

Joomla gives you articles inside categories, with tags and custom fields layered on top. That covers most brochure sites, blogs and small catalogues. It gets awkward when five content types each need their own display rules and their own approval path. Test it before you commit: write down every content type the site needs and the fields inside each — if the list runs past three and the fields genuinely differ, Drupal saves rework later.

Both run a two-language site without extra software, and Joomla's per-item language assignment is enough for most Indian company sites. Install the language packs, then assign a language per article, menu item and module — a Hindi and English brochure site works comfortably that way.

Drupal goes further: translation of individual fields, language-aware menus and a translation workflow. A site with three languages and per-language editorial teams will feel the difference; a two-language brochure site will not. Match the tool to the number of editors, not the number of languages on the page.

The software is free in both cases; the recurring cost is the person who applies core updates, checks extension compatibility, and takes a backup before each one. Plan an update window every month and a full backup before it.

A Joomla site with five extensions is a small job. A Drupal site with ten contributed modules needs a staging copy, because a failed Drupal update can take the whole site down rather than one page — the same entity system that makes it powerful makes its updates all-or-nothing. Email support@webji.services when the PHP version has to change, a migration needs a maintenance window, or the account runs out of memory during an update: the mailbox is staffed 24/7 in Hindi and English, and the average first reply is under 60 minutes. The office phone is business hours only and is not a support line.