Joomla vs WordPress vs Web-Based Editors:
Choosing a Platform That Grows With You
For many businesses, the website is no longer a brochure — it’s infrastructure. The tools you choose today will define how secure, scalable and adaptable your digital presence is tomorrow.
When you’re launching a company website in 2025, you’re not just picking “something that looks nice”. You’re choosing how your business will handle security, data, content workflows, and integrations over the next five to ten years.
In most conversations, three types of platforms come up: web-based editors (Wix, Squarespace, Shopify and friends), WordPress, and Joomla. On the surface, all of them allow you to publish pages, add images, and write blog posts. Under the surface, however, the trade-offs are very different.
At Dive The Web Creations (DTWC), we work primarily with Joomla because it consistently delivers what serious small and medium-sized businesses actually need: security, stability, and strategic flexibility.
Web-Based Editors
Web-based editors like Wix, Squarespace and Shopify are perfect for quick experiments, personal projects or very small businesses. They trade flexibility for speed and convenience.
WordPress
WordPress is the most widely used CMS in the world. It’s extremely flexible, but that flexibility comes from a huge plugin ecosystem that needs careful curation, updates and security discipline.
Joomla
Joomla is the quiet powerhouse. Less noisy than WordPress, less restrictive than web-based builders, and designed with security, access control and multilingual structures in mind.
At a Glance: Which Platform Fits Which Business?
Before diving deeper, here is a high-level comparison focused on the reality of running a small or medium-sized business online.
| Criteria | Web-Based Editors | WordPress | Joomla |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time to launch | Fast | Moderate | Moderate |
| Security exposure | Platform-managed | High via plugins | Lower, structured |
| Ownership & vendor lock-in | Strong lock-in | Self-hosted | Self-hosted |
| Scalability & complexity | Limited | Good, but messy | Strong & structured |
| Multilingual support | Dependent on platform tier | Plugins required | Core feature, first-class |
| User roles & access control (ACL) | Basic | Basic in core, plugins for more | Advanced & granular |
| Best suited for | Solo entrepreneurs, very small sites, experiments | Blogs, content-heavy sites with in-house webmaster skills | SMEs, NGOs, tourism & service businesses with long-term plans |
Web-Based Editors: Fast Launch, Fast Limits
Web-based editors are fantastic for getting something online quickly. If you’re testing an idea, setting up a personal portfolio or launching a simple, single-service business, their drag-and-drop builders and templates are extremely attractive.
- Strengths: instant deployment, no server management, simple editing, predictable billing.
- Limitations: vendor lock-in, limited control over performance, and constraints on integrating deeper business logic such as ERPs, CRMs, membership systems or custom booking workflows.
As soon as your organisation needs more than “a nice homepage and a contact form”, you start to hit the edges of what these platforms want you to do.
WordPress: The Giant With Clay Ankles
WordPress dominates market share and has done an incredible job at democratising publishing. Its plugin ecosystem is enormous and, in capable hands, it can power very sophisticated sites.
- Strengths: thousands of themes and plugins, a huge community, excellent blogging tools.
- Challenges: security issues often come from outdated or poorly written plugins, themes that bundle their own builders, and conflicting scripts. Performance and stability require ongoing optimisation and maintenance.
If your team has a dedicated technical person focused on updates, audits and clean plugin choices, WordPress can serve you well. If not, your digital foundation can start to feel fragile as the site grows.
Joomla: The Quiet Powerhouse for Serious SMEs
Joomla doesn’t shout as loudly as WordPress in the marketing world, but it quietly powers a huge range of professional websites: tourism operations, NGOs, membership organisations, federations and SMEs that need structure rather than improvisation.
It offers enterprise-style features — robust access control, built-in multilingual support, and a strong extension ecosystem — without sacrificing performance or security.
1. Security-aware architecture
Joomla’s architecture encourages cleaner solutions: fewer plugins doing too many things, and more reliance on a strong, well-maintained core. That automatically reduces the attack surface. In practice, Joomla sites tend to be targeted less by mass automated attacks than equivalent WordPress sites.
2. Built for teams and organisations
Its Access Control List (ACL) system is one of the strongest in the open-source CMS space. You can safely give different roles to staff, partners, contributors or agencies without compromising sensitive parts of the back-end.
3. Multilingual by design
For European or international businesses, multilingual capability isn’t a luxury — it’s a requirement. Joomla treats multilingual as a core feature, not an afterthought or plugin.
4. Structured growth instead of plugin chaos
Joomla’s extension ecosystem is smaller, but that’s often an advantage. You’re working with components, modules and plugins that follow the CMS’ logic, instead of stacking random building blocks on top of each other. The result is a site that can grow without collapsing under its own complexity.
So Which Platform Should a Growing Business Choose?
If you just need an online business card, a hosted editor is fine. If your main focus is blogging and content marketing and you already have internal technical skills, WordPress is a familiar route.
But if you are building:
- a multilingual SME with multiple services or locations,
- a tourism, diving or hospitality brand with bookings, memberships and repeat guests,
- an NGO or association that needs clear roles, governance and secure access,
then Joomla gives you a more durable foundation. It’s less about trend and more about long-term fitness for purpose.
