Joomla vs WordPress in 2026: Which CMS Should You Choose?

And the numbers show that WordPress will be the better choice for most businesses by 2026. It now powers around 41% of all websites and roughly 59% of sites running any CMS, according to W3Techs. Joomla has shrunk to about 2.2%. That gap matters less than you’d think when you’re deciding what’s right for your specific project, though.

Joomla still wins on granular permissions, native multilingual support, and complex access rules, which is why it survives in government, university, and membership-site builds. WordPress wins almost everywhere else, and the gap widened further this year: AI tooling is now landing natively in WordPress core, while Joomla’s AI plans are still an unreleased experiment. Here’s the full comparison.

What Is WordPress?

WordPress is a popular open source content management system because of its ease of use, flexibility and large, active community. It started in 2003 as a blogging platform and has grown into a general-purpose CMS that now powers around 41% of all websites, per W3Techs’ 2026 usage data, and roughly 59% of sites that run any identifiable CMS at all.

It’s built on PHP and MySQL, and it scales from a simple personal blog to a full e-commerce store without switching platforms. Every WordPress build we scope in 2026 starts the same way: figure out which of the 69,000-plus plugins in the official directory actually solve a real problem for this client, and skip the rest. Plugin sprawl, not the platform itself, is what slows most WordPress sites down and creates most of the security exposure we clean up

WordPress Features

• An intuitive dashboard for content creation, editing, and day-to-day management
• A large library of themes for fast, professional-looking customization
• A modular plugin architecture that adds features like forms, galleries, and SEO tools on demand
• Built-in blogging tools, including categories, tags, and commenting
• Flexible user roles and permission levels for teams of any size
• SEO-friendly defaults, including clean permalinks and XML sitemaps

WordPress Pros and Cons

Pros

• Accessible to users of any skill level, with easy content management and customization
• Thousands of themes and plugins to shape the site’s look and functionality
• A large, active community with forums, tutorials, and paid support options
• Free to use at its core, with many themes and plugins available free or at low cost

Cons

• Heavy reliance on plugins can introduce compatibility issues or security gaps if they’re not maintained
• Regular updates to core, themes, and plugins take ongoing time and attention

Notable WordPress Users

Major publishers and brands, including The New York Times, TechCrunch, and Sony Music, run on WordPress, which says something about how far the platform scales beyond its blogging roots.

What Is Joomla?

Joomla is a free, open-source CMS built on a model-view-controller framework, which keeps its content management layer separate from how a site actually displays that content. It is written in PHP and uses MySQL, MS SQL or PostgreSQL for data storage.

W3Techs data for 2026 shows that Joomla’s market share has been falling for over a decade and is now around 2.2% of all sites. The current release is Joomla 6.1 “Nyota,” shipped in April 2026, which added a visual drag-and-drop workflow editor, a privacy-friendly proof-of-work CAPTCHA, and PHP 8.4 compatibility.

Of the few Joomla projects we still take on, it’s almost always a university, government agency, or membership organization that needs Joomla’s built-in access control levels out of the box. We don’t recommend it anymore for a standard marketing site or online store.

Joomla Features

• A stable, security-focused core framework with strong backward compatibility
• Advanced, granular user management and access control built into core, not bolted on
• An extension ecosystem of components, modules, and plugins
• Native multilingual support without needing a third-party plugin
• Built-in caching to help with page load times
• A flexible templating system for custom designs without heavy coding

Joomla vs WordPress: Head-to-Head Comparison

Security: Which CMS Is Actually Safer?

Patchstack tracked 11,334 WordPress vulnerabilities in 2025, but only 6 of those were in WordPress core itself. The other 91% came from plugins, which lines up with what we see in client cleanups: it’s almost never the platform, it’s an unmaintained plugin nobody removed.

Sucuri, whose hacked-site reports get cited constantly in these comparisons, says outright that WordPress’s larger share of compromised sites mostly reflects its larger share of the internet, not a weaker platform. Joomla and Drupal show up in the same reports at lower volumes for the same reason there are fewer of them online.

A WordPress site with a handful of well-maintained plugins is not the same security risk as a WordPress site running forty of them. The number of active plugins is a better security predictor than which CMS logo is on the login page. If you want a deeper breakdown of hardening a WordPress install specifically, our roundup of the best WordPress security plugins is worth a look.

Joomla’s real security edge, where it exists, comes from its native access control levels limiting what any one compromised account can touch, not from the core code being inherently harder to break. Both platforms need the same basic discipline: keep core and extensions updated, and don’t install more than you actually use.

AI Tooling: The Real 2026 Differentiator

This is where the gap between these two platforms opened up the most this year. WordPress 7.0 shipped a centralized AI Connector Screen, letting a site connect to OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google Gemini from one settings panel instead of configuring API keys plugin by plugin. That’s on top of a fast-growing ecosystem of AI plugins for in-editor content generation, layout assistance, and natural-language site administration.

Joomla’s AI plans are still a developer proof-of-concept, built during a January 2026 sprint, that hasn’t shipped in any stable release yet. When a client asks us whether to future-proof a build for AI features, we run what we call the AI-Ready Stack test: can the CMS connect to a model provider without custom code, does the editor support AI-assisted content blocks, and is there an active plugin ecosystem building on top of that. WordPress passes all three today. Joomla passes none of them yet.

If AI-assisted content and workflows matter to your roadmap, that’s a meaningful strike against Joomla right now, not a hypothetical one. Our guide on using AI to translate a WordPress website is a good example of what that native AI ecosystem already makes possible.

E-commerce

Joomla has extensions for building an online store, but expect to assemble your cart, payment gateway, and shipping logic piece by piece before you get something production-ready. WordPress, through WooCommerce, gives you customizable starter themes, shipping carrier integrations, and payment support across dozens of countries in a single, well-supported plugin. WooCommerce alone now powers close to a third of all online stores tracked across the web, which is the plugin ecosystem effect in action.

SEO

Joomla’s built-in SEO settings cover meta descriptions, keyword fields, and clean URL rewriting out of the box. WordPress doesn’t ship as much SEO tooling in core, but its plugin ecosystem, Yoast SEO, RankMath, and All in One SEO among them, goes further: content analysis, readability scoring, automatic sitemap generation, and schema markup without touching code. For most businesses, that plugin depth is the deciding factor.

So, Which One Should You Choose?

Pick WordPress if you’re building a blog, a business site, an e-commerce store, a publisher site, or almost anything else a typical business needs. The plugin ecosystem, the AI tooling now built into core, and the sheer size of the developer pool all make it the lower-risk, lower-cost choice for most projects.

Pick Joomla if you specifically need its native, granular access control for a multi-team government, university, or membership site, and you’re not planning to lean on AI-assisted content tools any time soon. Outside of that specific case, we steer clients toward WordPress.

Still not sure which fits your project? Reach out to KrishaWeb and we’ll walk through your requirements with you, or explore what our WordPress development team can build for you directly.

Frequently Asked Questions

Girish Panchal

Technical Architect

A Technical Architect, proficient in WordPress, Drupal, Laravel, and DevOps tasks, crafts robust IT solutions with a blend of expertise and versatility in web development and infrastructure management.

Interact With Me