Pros And Cons Of Top CMS Platforms For Websites

Choosing A Website Platform - The Pros And Cons Of The Leading CMS WordPress

A CMS is a Content Management System. It is an application that enables you to manage and publish web content. You create content in different formats such as video, image, audio, text or a combination of several formats. 

Also, a CMS is not necessarily the same as a website builder. Website builders are for users who don’t have any coding knowledge. It is a drag and drop editor where all features are pre-coded for you. A CMS requires coding knowledge to create content. 

You can use a CMS to create content for any type of project, beyond blogging. The best CMS features content taxonomy options, ease of publishing content, page editing, ability to customise the content and an active community to get support for security patches, access to updates and more. 

What Are The Pros And Cons Of The Top CMS? 


WordPress.org – 18 Million Websites 

With over 18 million websites hosted on WordPress, it’s clear to see why it’s the leading CMS in the world. WordPress is 100% free. Note that WordPress.org, the CMS is not the same with WordPress.com, the blog hosting service. As an open source software, it is free for anyone to download and install. You can customise WordPress based on your needs. You only pay for the domain name, web hosting, premium themes and plugins. 

Pros of WordPress

• 100% free mobile friendly platform 
• User-friendly CMS 
• Complete control of your website files and data 
• Ability to move your website when and where you want 
• Access to the largest base of plugins, support, extension, themes and add-ons 
• Easy to customise 
• Ability to integrate third-party tools for your email marketing, CRM, SEO, payment gateways and lead generation. 

Cons of WordPress 

• The open source nature of WordPress makes it attractive to hackers 
• No built-in drag and drop website builder 
• Requires coding and technical skills to use 
• Some themes contain generic code that affects the speed of your website 

Joomla! – 2.5 million websites 

Joomla is a free open-source CMS. It is great for building websites that can be managed quickly and easily. You can log in to the backend of your website to manage content as you please. It has more complex site development options when compared to WordPress. 

Pros of Joomla! 

• Open source platform where you can distribute or modify the code without fear of licensing fees 
• E-commerce extensions to manage your content and products in one place. 
• Non-developers can understand and use Joomla! with ease 
• Powerful admin interface that is user-friendly and easy to customise 
• Free video training classes 
• Lightweight PHP framework 
• Supports over 70 translation packs 
• Core function to monetize your site with ads 

Cons of Joomla! 

• Places a greater demand on server resources. It is suited to mid-sized websites. 
• Insufficient resources such as plugins, templates and modules to create a desired experience. 
• Compatibility issues that make it difficult to gain access to the full functionality of some plugins. 
• Not as developer-friendly as Drupal and not as easy to use as WordPress 

Drupal – 772,000 Websites

Drupal has developed into a complex open source CMS. Famous brands on Drupal include Sony Music, MIT, Harvard, MIT and Ubuntu. The attraction is that Drupal uses a sophisticated programming interface, more advanced than the average CMS. It also includes a report generating tools for admins. While Drupal doesn’t require knowledge of programming to use, it is generally used by advanced developers. 

Pros of Drupal 

• Open source CMS 
• Excellent for an advanced developer 
• Standard features such as RSS-Feeds, account registration and maintenance. These are sufficient to create a basic website, forum, community website and blog. 
• Flexibility to create and manage a range of content types such as polls, video, text, podcast and more. 
• Create dynamic Drupal designs as against downloaded templates and themes. 
• Facilitate interaction and integration with search engines 
• Scalable and stable system, even with a large number of users 

Cons of Drupal 

• All the best modules (plugins) on Drupal are not free 
• Lack of themes of sufficient graphics quality 
• Requires a deeper understanding of web development than Joomla! Or WordPress 
• The long learning process that makes it more difficult to use than WordPress 
 Consumes resources if not properly tweaked 

TYPO3 – 425,000 Websites

Typo3 is an open source CMS created in 1997. Sonician describes it as the most complex open source CSM online. You have the ability to write an extension to extend an existing extension. It offers flexibility only experienced developers can take advantage of. Popular websites hosted on Typo 3 includes Ford Motor Company, General Electric, Stanford University, The New York Times and Samsung.

Pros of TYPO3 

• Enhanced diversity and modularity that makes it the best option as a script for company page and large news sites. 
• Thousands of extensions that can be quickly installed and expanded with additional discussion boards, image galleries and internet shop. 
• Control over page layout when you add tables, forms, images, text and multimedia 
• Robust features to help business with content creation 

Cons of TYPO3 

• Requires knowledge and training on Typo 3 CMS to take full advantage 
• No automatic updates 
• Greater demands on server parameters due to expandability and modularity of the CMS 

CMS Conclusion 

In many ways, these CMS can’t be directly compared because they have different features suited to different kinds of websites. Consider your budget, website requirement, need to integrate content with data from our sources. WordPress is good for a basic website with a limited budget. The rest are better options for businesses that require more complex solutions.

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