Joomla or Drupal? So hard to tell these days…

Around these parts (read: yuppie Washington, DC), the trend for small nonprofits is to take Drupal and run with it. Tonight at our Netsquared meeting (newly hosted at Google DC) people pretty much obsessed about it and how it could be more aptly leveraged on behalf of Oneworld.net.

The thing is, while Drupal is all well and good, I’ve seen some great work with Joomla out there. Part of me is curious whether the reason Drupal is so big around here is simply because the community of people who know anything about tech started with it. And it consequently took on a life of its own from there.

The debate rages.

Ok… not quite rages, but at least it’s a good question. The answer as to which is better seems to be something to the effect of “it depends…”

Anyone “out there” have experience or strong feelings about either?

When it comes to nonprofits, the social sector, using technology and the like, it’s simply incredible that either tool is available for free to a small or young organization to build with. In many ways it’s Joomla and Drupal that form the heart of the hypothetical “on demand nonprofit” that can be supplemented with free operations-oriented tools from the likes of Salesforce and Google – which have been all the fashion of late.

Going back to Oneworld.net (a robust and growing organization/website to be sure) as an example; they are able to receive about 80,000 visits a month and aggregate news worldwide while implementing many social networking features. All with a staff of 4 who mostly don’t do tech. As they grow from here, they can do much more with other free tools and aggregated content on top of their Drupal base.

They probably could have done roughly the same things with Joomla, though. And thus it seems, the question remains.

Whatever the right answer for an organization, it’s important they choose what they will be built on wisely.
But how do you make that choice?