Drupal vs. Joomla for Fund-Raising Platform (Social Network)

We have got a request to develop a social network for fund-raising platform recently and the customer was interested in considering Joomla social network as a technology for this job. Our Drupal social network team has gained an extended experience for CMS-based development; let us share pros and cons for Drupal vs Joomla for an enterprise solution. How to create a social network – to build a social network with Drupal or to create a social network on Joomla? 

What’s Needed

The future platform should be a fundraising network that helps to collect funds and donations for sports events. Extended 3-rd party integrations including social sharing capabilities, payments and event management capabilities required. 

Drupal vs. Joomla Technology Overview

Our choice suggested for customer review: Drupal.
Challenges: complicated data structure and workflow, high load expected, requires scalable architecture, requires easy options to support and extend and update and improve it quickly in future. Should be secure and have a full set of SEO capabilities. Let’s start the comparison of differences.

We choose Drupal for the following reasons:

• 32 000+ modules with an extended community support available for free from Drupal.org.

• Extremely Flexible (allows to add new modules upon request, has a vast majority of functions just out of the box comparing to paid extensions under Joomla, with limited to no support, also it’s easy to deliver custom functionality on top of modules already existing on the market).

• Developer Friendly (That really helps to transfer project from one dev team to another when you need to make changes in a year or so after project released).

• Strong SEO Capabilities (Helps you to make on-site SEO, including short links, etc)

•  Enterprise Friendly (Helps to deliver complex functionality based on the modules available for free)

•  Stability (very important for multi-tiered architecture).

Let me share just some more details:

1. The vast majority of extensions for Joomla 3 are not available for free.

2. Drupal supports Enterprise level systems under high load: with hundred thousands of pages of content (multiple requests to database) and hundred thousand of users requests (multiple users). You probably know that a vast majority of US Universities run their multisites on Drupal.

3. Users (especially corporate users) have a lot of concerns regarding personal data and business information. Drupal is a secure solution (comparing to Joomla where there is a lack of security for SQL injections).

4. Drupal has full SEO capabilities (vs Joomla, which has the lack of SEO capabilities), there is an essential issue for promotion.Drupa

5. If you will review CMS structures and inner logic, Drupal is much better fit for social sites, community platforms, networks, portals etc due to the options available for setting up user roles with different user permissions, there is a module for chatting, for sending emails and for custom e-commerce, there is an option to set up a complex configuration for custom products (let’s say you sell rings or clothes you can create a very sophisticated functionality for such an app based on Drupal).

6. Provides better options for 3d party API integration, there are a lot of modules, so it’s easy to integrate social networks, payment pay gates, 3rd-party CRM, and others which are vital for social platforms.

7. Extended options for search, Drupal provides embedded tools for creation advanced search functionality (search by content, autosearch, search by first 3 letters of the word, search by template, with an extended filtering by any node existing inside the system).

8. Drupal provides better tools for multilingual and multicurrency solutions.

9. For any social platform, there are a lot of extensions to be added to the standard CMS functionality. Drupal will be much more stable than Joomla (the more components/plugins/modules you install in Joomla, the more unstable the resource becomes)

10. Strava integration – available via already existing modules for Drupal

11. Drupal community is larger and it’s always easy to find someone to support your project and make new plugin

12. Drupal 8 is based on Symfony 2 framework would be following the best practices of that framework.

We recommend Drupal for your social networking project. If Drupal admin part seems too complex, we can offer to use a special theme for admin part to simplify it.

The White House website is written on Drupal. This is one of the main benefits of it :).

Read also: Drupal vs Custom PHP for Social Network

P.S. Looking to hire a Drupal developer? Please contact us and we will explain how to help you solve your challenges, about the advantages/disadvantages of each solution and what kinds of social networks we can make for you.