RedGiant have been doing a study into how WordPress and Joomla compare, and have produced a nifty info graphic to help you decide which is best for you.

You can read the series over on sitepoint, with the final crunch-time decision here.

I haven’t got a lot of experience with Joomla! so I was interested to read Mark Atkinson’s points on it all – basically saying that WordPress is great for simple content sites (or blogs) but Joomla! is better if you want anything more complicated. Personally, I’ve always opted for WordPress for simple content sites, but then something built on a MVC framework such as CodeIgniter for anything more complicated. So maybe that’s a step too far / too big a jump and I should consider Joomla! as a middle ground – sites that need more than just content, but don’t need the additional planning and development of a custom build.

I guess my problem with Joomla! stems from having had a play with it a few years ago and just not finding it all that intuitive in admin, and from seeing a few poor examples set up. It seemed like all Joomla! sites looked like Joomla! (just checked their website – and I am right to keep bothering with the exclamation mark!) sites – you could spot them! Whereas WordPress sites can look pretty fancy and only be identified by the familiar “/wp-content/†when you view the source code. But that probably just depends on the designer/developer and how far they bother to go with it.

Also I think when I was looking at some basic examples done by friends-of-clients who weren’t necessarily all that experienced, I was looking at them for SEO potential and wasn’t seeing it – but that tallies with Mark’s comments that WordPress just jumps out of the box with SEO alive and kicking whereas it takes a bit more effort with Joomla!. It can do it, maybe not as well as WordPress but it can, but you’ve got to wind it up and get it going.

I also had a couple of clients come to me with Joomla! sites that they were looking to ditch – one because they found it hard to use and knew they’d prefer WordPress, so I gave them a WordPress. And one who felt they’d outgrown Joomla! and wanted a custom build, so we used CodeIgniter. For those people the decision had already been made so it just down-played Joomla! to me even more.

But maybe I’ve just heard bad reports unfairly! And so I’ll make 2013 the year I investigate Joomla! again.

Meanwhile, check out RedGiant’s beautiful infographic on the subject and let us know which you’d opt for:

WordPress vs. Joomla!