6 Best Joomla Alternatives for Building Professional Websites

Joomla is still one of the best options for building websites, but if you don’t want to use Joomla for any reason, you should know that there are quite some good alternatives. First of all, Joomla is a well-known CMS that has been around since 2005.

It’s completely free and open-source, meaning that its source code can be modified at any time. As its popularity increased over time, it also gave birth to a huge community of web designers, programmers and other professionals that more or less contribute to the development of Joomla’s software.

This CMS is recommended for beginners and more advanced users as well. Although there are other CMS options that might be easier to begin with, Joomla is still used by thousands of professionals around the world for building a wide diversity of reliable websites.

However, easier is not always better so you need to compare them according to your needs before you pick one. One of the main advantages of using Joomla is that you can find pretty much everything you need for extending and improving your website.

There are so many extensions, fixes and themes available that you can always create the website you imagined. Of course, it takes a significant amount of time to get used to the whole system and learn more about how it works.

Depending on the type of website you want to start, you need to add and work with certain additional functionalities. If you want a serious personal or business website, the core Joomla CMS alone might not be enough for you, but it’s definitely worth the effort to learn how to use the extensions.

Now let’s talk about some other useful CMS as well as SaaS services that we recommend.

The Best 3 CMS as Joomla Alternatives

This one is another huge CMS that is really popular these days and it’s also considered as the most straightforward free option available by many. You can either use their hosting services or just simply add WordPress to your own hosting and then build your website.

In 2016, the self-hosted websites powered by WordPress already accounted for 20% of all websites on the Web according to the data back then. It’s indeed a good choice because you have way more control over your website, especially if you have some business goals while starting it.

By picking WordPress as a hosting option, you can start some sort of a simple website such as a personal blog and you can’t display ads or any commercial content. On the other hand, it’s free and you also get a subdomain along with it.

WordPress was initially a simple blogging CMS, but then so many features, plugins and updates have been added that it became a huge system used by many businesses around the world. It also has its own community with many people that are eager to fix the bugs, improve the platform and provide feedback on a daily basis.

Another great thing about WordPress is its versatility, making it the foundation of a wide variety of websites such as online shops, forums, portfolios, restaurants, blogs, and so on. It’s completely reliable and if you pick the right plugins to work with, you can surely do wonders with this CMS.

As the previous two CMS platforms, Drupal’s source code can be also freely modified and it relies greatly on its precious community of designers and professionals who keep supporting it in many ways.

Also, there are many experts available who can provide you with the required knowledge through the Drupal forums and it’s also very easy to find someone who can help in case you are stuck.

The Drupal plugins, along with the themes can all be downloaded straight from the Drupal community, meaning that it’s fully reliable and you always know what you get. This CMS provides you with top-notch user and menu management while it’s also optimal for creating responsive websites that are suited for any kind of mobile device.

If you want to start a website that is rather community based, like a social network for example, then Drupal is an outstanding choice for you. It’s very easy to set and manage your users as an administrator. You can control the access of your users and also create unique, custom roles if you want.

Drupal usually recommends you to use their latest version, since using an older one often times leads to compatibility problems. It’s one of the advanced ones when it comes to CMS, so you will obviously get along with it better with some knowledge in coding and web design.

Starting simpler websites as a beginner is not an issue at all, you can get used to it quite fast and the community helps a lot. If you plan on starting a complex and demanding website as a beginner, you should be ready to hire a Drupal professional who will make sure that it works at its full potential.

Concrete5 might not be as popular as its previously mentioned alternatives, but according to the recent reviews and feedback, people who try it are usually satisfied and don’t even think of another option. It’s mainly because this CMS is constantly improving and is designed to be user-friendly and logical in every aspect.

You can create complex, beautiful websites with little to no experience in web design. If you need a guide, there is an abundance of helpful documentation available that are created by the community. By combining the forums, guides and a little bit of experimentation, you can quickly get familiar with the interface.

There are not as many add-ons and themes available for Concrete5 than there are for the more popular platforms, but it’s still growing in popularity and it attracts tons of new designers that want to expand the market. The add-ons always get updated automatically and you can install them straight away from the dashboard.

Another awesome thing about them is that there are no add-ons so far that conflict with each other in any way, which is definitely not the case with other CMS platforms. In fact, they are often times more reliable than the plugins you can find for WordPress for example, which makes it more straightforward to use multiple add-ons at the same time.

All in all, we can say that Concrete5 is far better in terms of functionalities than one might expect based on the CMS rankings, so it’s definitely worth a try.

Top 3 SaaS to consider as Joomla Alternatives

Wix is quite a popular brand when it comes to the SaaS website builders in general. It all started around 2006 when they came up with a Flash-based drag and drop software, offering a straightforward solution for building websites. Their platform improved a lot since then, and now they have lots of marketing tools and other new features to work with, making it completely suitable for businesses.

Of course, a businessman who has no experience in coding usually wants the easiest and most effective solution and that’s exactly what you get with Wix. After their Flash era, they still wanted to keep it as simple as possible. One thing that might catch your eye is that their interface is not really appealing, but as you start working with the tools and elements, you will realize that it doesn’t even matter.

Everything works seamlessly in the editor, even their drag and drop function is surprisingly precise and reliable. Building up a complete website can be a long project and it’s not always obvious how to proceed, but Wix can always lend you its own set of guides and tools that can help you in your work. They also have a decent amount of top-notch, modern designs to choose from in their theme market.

As with every SaaS, your Wix website will be hosted on their servers, which is not a downside at all. It’s guaranteed by their professionals that your web pages will load within 2 seconds, even if there are huge amounts of content. Wix surely stands out as a user friendly website builder overall.

Weebly is another one of the top website builders that makes it much easier for businesses to create their own site. As you drag and drop the different website elements, the first thing you notice that it’s always clear how your website will look like during the process. It’s also quite helpful in terms of positioning and you can modify each element via an additional CSS module.

Their interface works in a way that definitely ensures a quicker learning process by providing info bubbles that pop up, giving you some useful tips. Weebly provides you with plenty of the up-to-date features that are required for the latest personal and business websites. These are all readily integrated into the platform.

However, there are always some other specific functionalities that you might need for your site and you can search for those in Weebly’s app store. If that doesn’t help you out, the platform still lets you add snippets of code as another way to set up new features. With proper coding, you can add pretty much anything that might help you out.

One of the main advantages of Weebly is that you can always count on their customer support. They have a great Knowledge Base and you can reach them via chat, email and phone as well. You don’t even need to find the guy that fixes the issue. Simply messaging the support team is enough for them to start troubleshooting.

When it comes to features and reliable support, Weebly surely has it all figured out.

WebsiteBuilder.com comes with a neat interface that is quite easy to get used to, while still being a great option for the more experienced designers who want to build complex websites. It’s one of the newest platforms since they launched it in 2014. Their menus and the whole appearance of WebsiteBuilder are nicely designed, and they also have a top-notch collection of themes.

You can either choose a category according to your needs, or just pick a blank template and start from the fundamentals. It’s not completely blank; all of them have a helpful framework that sets the main layout of your website. Many users choose this option to create a site in their own style.

There are a wide range of elements available but besides dragging and dropping them, you can apply many different behaviors and also customize them in great detail. In addition, every theme is divided into sections, starting with a header and ending with footer. This way, you can assemble your website by adding many different pieces and customizing them separately.

On the other hand, the loading speed provided by their hosts is outstanding. WebsiteBuilder gives you almost the same experience as any software that just runs on your PC, sometimes it’s even faster. The platform also offers plenty of options to bloggers, providing them with many specific designs.

By choosing WebsiteBuilder, what you get is a comprehensive platform that has no limitations at all and leaves it up to your creativity to create an awesome website.

Conclusion

None of these platforms is a bad choice; they all have their own pros and cons. You need to consider the overall features, customization options and reliability of these website builders separately according to your own goals.

To pick the best one, it’s always recommended to visit their website first, skim through a few of their pages and gather some information about the platform from their standpoint. Then, in order to compare them more realistically, you should read reviews and comments on online forums, written by users who have actually built their own websites on these CMS or SaaS platforms.

There is a lot of competition between these sites, so they always keep improving them with new updates and fixes to attract more and more users and add the newest popular features. Since they all have to keep up with the pace, you can’t really go wrong with our list of the top platforms.

After you gathered enough information, just pick the one you are most comfortable with and start working on your new website.