Joomla is more popular than SilverStripe by a long way but is it better? The answer is that it depends on what you need your website to do and your particular skill when it comes to writing code. SilverStripe is generally better in my opinion but only if you either know how to code in PHP or you have a developer on staff who can write PHP for you. If not then I think Joomla is better for you as it allows you to install plugins (new functionality) and themes without having to code.

My experience with Joomla:

A few years ago before I was freelancing I worked for a company whose site was built with Joomla. I worked with this site for approximately 1.5 years before rebuilding it in Silverstripe 3.6 so I have a unique insight into this topic having used both of them extensively.

Joomla is an older style of CMS which is built mainly to house a lot of content however, once it became popular it was made to be able to do many things via plugins and themes. In this way, it is quite similar to WordPress.

At the time when Joomla came to be popular blogging was all the rage and Joomla was designed to be able to create a large amount of content and organise it fairly well.

To this extent, it does well. Joomla has a 'Menu Items' area of its CMS where you can define menu structures and then associate those items (which are effectively links your users will click on to access your content) with articles that you have written.

However with time the kinds of websites on the net evolved to be more than just a place to house and navigate articles. We started to see, for example, apps based in the cloud and other kinds of sites which needed complicated graphical interfaces or to allow users to manage a lot of data in a user friendly way. New technologies arose to do these things and Joomla sort of got left behind. That being said it is still a decent choice for some circumstances. Let's look at those.

When is Joomla a good choice?

As I mentioned Joomla is still a good choice if you have the need for a lot of articles on your site. If it needs to do this and also some more complex things then other software can manage articles and deal with more complexity.

I also think that it could still be a good choice if you are not very skilled with writing code. This is because with Joomla (and WordPress) you are able to extend the functionality of the site without knowing how to code.

For example, you can find plugins to create forms or e-commerce functionality. Some plugins are paid and others are free. As Joomla is quite popular there are quite a lot of these out there to choose from.

When is Joomla a bad choice?

I would say that Joomla is a bad choice if you know how to write PHP. This is because you will likely, in this case, be editing the Joomla code to make it do various things. I found the Joomla index.php and system of components to be clunky and difficult to work with.

I also found the documentation of its framework to be insufficient and unfinished in many cases. It was very rarely useful to me. Granted it was an older version of Joomla.

I would also say that it's a bad choice if you have need of a site which does something slightly outside of Joomla's wheelhouse of housing large amounts of articles. For example, if you need to manage a lot of custom information from the CMS or connect to various API's or do anything highly customised then it could be like wading through mud working with Joomla.

Of help may be this article where I compare Silverstripe to WordPress. In my opinion and experience the decision making criteria over Silverstripe can take into account many of the same things for WordPress and Joomla.

When to use Silverstripe:

Silverstripe is a more modern framework for PHP developers and has a better CMS experience for non-developers.

I would suggest using SilverStripe if you know how to write PHP already or indeed if you have a developer in-house who can work on it. This is because Silverstripe is unlike WordPress and Joomla where you can't install themes and plugins via the CMS. As such if you want to tweak the theme or add a plugin, you can do this, but you usually do this via the command line using Composer Package Manager. These aren't skills that non-developers usually have.

I would also suggest using Silverstripe if you have very specific functionality. It is very good at doing custom themes and managing data either with the framework or via the CMS.

Silverstripe also has a CMS out of the box so if you need one of these then that is very useful. I have created quite a lot of information on how to use Silverstripe so check these links too.

1. If you haven't used the Silverstripe CMS before then check this article for a tour of a Silverstripe 4 website including all the regular features and examples of how to use customised coding solutions so you can see what's possible.
2. You can also play with a live Silverstripe 4 Demo Site I have put up. Here you can test run it before you build your own Silverstripe site. It is also the most extensive Silverstripe Demo Site on the web and this shows you more of its capabilities. You can learn about how to log in and start using this demo site here.