When comparing WordPress vs Joomla!, the Slant community recommends Joomla! for most people. In the question“What is the best PHP CMS?” Joomla! is ranked 4th while WordPress is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose Joomla! is:
Joomla allows for heavily customizable templates to be changed from the admin interface without needing to hack.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Complete control if needed
If you set up WP on your own server, you can change every single aspect of it as you see fit.
Pro Widely used
According to some statistics, WP powers a fifth of the Internet. It means there are resources for everything. Community support, tutorials, extensions and a plethora of customization options.
Pro Self-host & WP-host options
For free WordPress can be hosted by yourself on your own server, or as a subdomain of wordpress.com. You can also pay to use a custom domain with WP hosting.
Pro Open source
Anyone can view the code of WordPress since it's under a libre/open source license.
Pro RSS feeds for everything
Including tags and categories.
Pro Post-level privacy controls
Each post can have a different access level.
Pro Highly customizable templates
Joomla allows for heavily customizable templates to be changed from the admin interface without needing to hack.
Pro Powerful and user-friendly admin interface
Admin interface is constantly being iterated on to remove unnecessary legacy features and to streamline the interface. Resulting in a very clean and easy to understand interface that also offers a wide range of options.
Pro More than 8000 extensions
Which can be found here.
Pro Easy to pick up
Pro Great for social networking and commerce sites
Joomla has both a good native support and a great list of extensions that make creating either a social networking or a commerce site easy.
Cons
Con A bit of bloat and complexity
WP has grown past being just a blogging platform and as such it's not as lightweight as it used to be. It also considerably more complex due to many more customization options compared to other solutions.
Con Dated
The code is a mess, uses dated conventions, and relies on dated technology.
Con Insecure
It's common-place for a Joomla-based website to be defaced, often very quickly. This is most often due to the low quality of extensions.
Con Extensions are scarce, badly maintained & rarely good
If it's not part of the default Joomla installation, quality extensions are rare. Joomla has a extensions library, but it is full of abandoned, dated or bloated components, modules and plugins.