Likelihood to Recommend It seems with the release of Joomla! 4 that the weak areas have all been covered. Its always been good for the mid-level small to large business, the blogging was WP, and the large-scale enterprise was probably bespoke. But the new interface is so simple it seems pointless using WP when Joomla! is as easy and can then grow as big as you like. The Workflows feature which allows you to set up work pipelines easily is going to be a boom to any larger enterprise sites. Couples with the new API which I got to see at one of their user groups, is amazing. They were creating articles on one site then another site was taking the feed directly for just certain categories. Really blows your mind what you could do with that and the new workflows.
Read full review Laravel is ideally suited for fluent PHP developers who want a framework that can be used to both rapidly prototype web applications as well as support scalable, enterprise-level solutions. I think where it is less ideal is where the client has an expectation of using a certain CMS, or of having a certain experience on the admin side that would perhaps be better suited to a full CMS such as Drupal or WordPress. Additionally, for developers who don't want to write PHP code, Laravel may not be the best solution.
Read full review Pros We use Joomla to build our websites and web applications because of its incredible intuitiveness and tools to make everything more manageable. Its working environment is quite comfortable for my development team, and its web design resources significantly speed up our work when carrying out web development projects. It allows you to use blocks to create and visually manage websites and divide them into different categories without programming knowledge. Read full review Many libraries available which simplify integration of SaaS APIs within your application (eg, MailChimp, Mandrill, Stripe, Authorize.net) Pre-packaged tools to facilitate common tasks when building applications (eg, User Authentication and Authorization, Background Jobs, Queues, etc) Support for a broad set of technologies out of the box (eg, PostgreSQL, MySQL/MariaDB, MemcacheD, BeanstalkD, Redis, etc) Read full review Cons Because Joomla's user community is smaller than WP, it lacks as many choices from 3rd party developers, meaning it can be a little more difficult to find the right extension for what you need to accomplish Along the same vein, most of the best 3rd-party software for Joomla! is paid Simple features such as Add to Menu and Cache cleaners should be adopted as part of the Joomla! core, though they are available as extensions Joomla! could use a simpler and easier URL rewriting process Read full review Significant learning curve. You cannot be an expert in a week. It takes many experimentations to properly understand the underlying concept. We ourselves learned it by using it on the job. Too much to soak in. Laravel is in everything. Any part of backend development you wish to do, Laravel has a way to do that. It is great, but also overwhelming at the same time. Vendor lock in. Once you are in Laravel, it would not be easy to switch to something else. Laracasts (their online video tutorials) are paid :( I understand the logic behind it, but I secretly wish it would be free. The eloquent ORM is not my recommendation. Let's say you want to write a join, and based on the result you wish to create two objects. If you use Laravel to do automatic joins for you, Laravel internally actually makes two calls to database and creates your two object rather than making one join call and figuring out the results. This makes your queries slow. For this reason, I use everything except eloquent from Laravel. I rather write my own native queries and control the creation of objects then rely on Laravel to do it. But I am sure with time Laravel will make fewer calls to DB. Read full review Likelihood to Renew I gave it a rating of 10 because I just love how Joomla! works, how it is set up and how it handles many users. Also it is very fast, and there is no overload on the MySQL database or servers ever.
Read full review Usability Joomla! 3.x is easily installed either manually or via a script provided by your host. It contains most of the tools needed to begin creating websites right from the start. Those features that it doesn't have are easily installed via links and buttons from the thousands of extensions available in the community
Rita Lewis Freelance Web Designer and Content Strategist
Read full review Performance Today's Modern Joomla performs very well and is robust and durable. The pages load faster than they ever did in the past and Modern Joomla's integration into other software or systems has become seamless. Modern Joomla sites will last long and will stay running forever.
James Fauria Webmaster \ Web Developer for the City of Pomona
Read full review Support Rating Between the core Joomla developers who are excellent at answering questions and providing support, you have a whole community of developers who work with Joomla and are happy to help fellow developers out answering questions and supporting the Joomla project. Out of the many communities I am involved in for open-source software, Joomla's community is by far the best.
Read full review Online Training It is good if you know Joomla! if not it can get a bit confusing
Read full review Implementation Rating Joomla has gone through tremendous growing pains. It is now better than ever. But before, when it was going from 1.5-2.5, the templates and plugins would break over and over again. If you don't understand what Joomla was trying to do back then, you might have a bad attitude toward it. Today, those pains are over and things don't break like they used to during that time period.
James Fauria Webmaster \ Web Developer for the City of Pomona
Read full review Alternatives Considered We tested other platforms like WordPress , Magento and some local CMS. But Joomla offered us better resources for generating content. Joomla is a CMS suitable for many types of projects, especially if you have several people editing content at the same time. It allows you to maintain visual standardization and offers many options for working with images. With its ability to control access to different articles, categories or even different components, it is a great tool, even if they are managed by different people. Read full review Supporting unit testing is bigger plus point in Laravel than any other framework. Developing with Laravel is much easier. Other frameworks have value in market, but Laravel has taken the lead in popularity among PHP developers in recent years. The large community supports you if you have problems. Using Laravel, integration became easy with third-party libraries, but it was costly too.
Read full review Return on Investment Joomla has reduced our costs of rolling out a new website because it uses less developer time and can be rolled out by individual users as needed. Joomla has a lot of extensions and add-ons that make it easy to create and implement advanced solutions quickly. Read full review Laravel allows us to rapidly prototype and build complete, scalable applications internally, which saves us time and allows us to have internal tools that fit out precise needs. We use Symfony for a similar purpose, but Laravel is an even higher-level framework that we find saves us substantially more time when building many types of web applications. Laravel solves many of the underlying concerns of building a large application (such as authentication, authorization, secure input handling) in the right ways. It saves us from handling those low-level concerns ourselves, potentially in a way that could take a lot of time or sets us up for issues in the future. It's tough to assign an ROI to this, but I'm sure it has prevented issues and saved time, which both have an impact on our financial situation. Read full review ScreenShots