BenchRank
#30 in CMS & PublishingUpdated 2026-08

Joomla!

by Joomla · Open source, volunteer-built CMS for web sites and online applications

BenchRank score

38.5 — BenchRank score out of 100

Screenshots of Joomla!

Homepage · Joomla!

Homepage of Joomla!

Overview

Joomla! is an open source content management system for building web sites and online applications. Sites are assembled from the core plus extensions and templates, of which over 10,000 are listed. Stated features include search engine friendly and mobile friendly output, unlimited design, multilingual support and multi-user permission levels.

Best for
Site builders wanting a free, self-installed CMS with a large extension and template library
Pricing
No prices are shown; the pages describe Joomla! as free and open source, alongside a 'Sponsor Joomla! with $5' donation link.
Runs on
Web

Strengths and trade-offs

Strengths

  • Free and open source, in development since 2005
  • 10,000+ extensions and templates listed on extensions.joomla.org
  • Multilingual, with language packs in 76 languages
  • Multi-user permission levels included

Trade-offs

  • Built entirely by volunteers; no paid support option shown on the site
  • Frequent security and bugfix releases to track and apply
  • Two active major lines (5.x and 6.x) to plan upgrades around
  • Its own budget post says finances need action, so funding is uncertain

How Joomla! markets itself

A structured read of the promise, proof and page design on Joomla!’s captured homepage.

Homepage capture

“The Flexible Platform Empowering Website Creators”

  • Angle: Outcome / benefit-led
  • Hero: Abstract graphic

Pricing

Published plans and prices from Joomla!’s own pricing page.

How this score is made up

Each dimension is scored out of 100 and combined into the headline score using fixed weights.

  • MCP support

    Whether an agent can drive the product through the Model Context Protocol, and how much setup that takes.

  • Documentation

    Publicly reachable docs — coverage, freshness, code samples and machine readability.

  • Agent friendliness

    How readable the site is to an automated client: llms.txt, structured data, server-rendered content, crawler access.

  • Customer sentiment

    Third-party ratings, shrunk toward the catalogue mean by review volume and corroborated across independent sources.

  • Changelog

    A public, dated record of what shipped and when — the clearest signal that a product is still alive.

  • Marketing site structure

    Whether the site answers a buyer's questions: clear positioning, the pages that matter, and accessibility.

  • Page speed

    How fast the site loads for real visitors: Chrome UX Report 75th-percentile LCP, INP and CLS, with a Lighthouse mobile run standing in where a site has too little traffic for field data.

  • Operational trust

    Status page and incident history, security disclosure, compliance and data-processing documentation.

Measured, but not part of the score

Useful to know, but not a mark for or against the product — so these do not affect the ranking.

  • Openness

    Source availability, self-hosting, data export and open standards. Scored and shown, but not part of the composite — paid SaaS is not worse for being paid SaaS.

  • Maintenance

    Release cadence and repository activity. Scored and shown, but not part of the composite — it is only measurable for open repositories.

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Where this comes from

The Joomla! pages BenchRank reads when it scores the product — its documentation, release notes, status and security pages, and its repository where there is one.

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