Joomla is still a real, actively maintained content management system, Joomla 6.0 and 5.4 both shipped in October 2025, and the project keeps issuing security patches on a regular schedule. Despite that, Joomla now accounts for just 1.1 percent of all websites and 1.6 percent of the CMS market, compared with WordPress's 40.2 percent and 58.8 percent, respectively, according to W3Techs data from September 2026. That gap is the actual story worth paying attention to.

Brands are not leaving Joomla because it stopped functioning, they are leaving because better options caught up while Joomla's core experience stayed largely the same. A platform can remain technically capable and still lose ground simply because the businesses using it stop feeling like the fastest or most flexible option available, and that gap between capability and actual adoption is exactly what the numbers above are showing.

This guide covers design flexibility, maintenance and security, SEO usability, total cost of ownership, and exactly when Joomla still makes sense, using real current data from both platforms rather than either company's own marketing language.

What's Actually Driving Brands Away From Joomla?

The security picture is the clearest signal. Joomla's security centre lists roughly 350 archived advisories, patches are issued on a monthly cadence, and CVE-2023-23752, an access-control flaw, sits in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, confirming it has been used in real attacks rather than staying theoretical. Monitoring data from mySites.guru shows Joomla 3 sites, a version that has been end of life since August 2023, are five times more likely to be hacked than sites running Joomla 6, and there are still more than 30,000 of those Joomla 3 sites live today.

That last number is the real problem. W3Techs shows 52.2 percent of all live Joomla installs still run version 3, meaning most of the platform's own user base has not moved off an unsupported, higher risk version. A brand evaluating Joomla today is not just evaluating the current release, it is evaluating a platform where staying current is clearly difficult enough that most users have not managed it.

How Does Design Flexibility Compare Between Framer and Joomla?

Joomla's design system runs on templates, Cassiopeia is the current default, and Joomla 6 added more built-in styling options to it, but the underlying model is still a template applying structure to your content rather than a blank canvas you shape freely. Free template selection is limited, and reviewers consistently note this constrains what a site can look like compared to more open alternatives, a business wanting a distinctive visual identity is working within someone else's structural decisions from the start.

Framer works from a genuinely open canvas instead, any element can be placed, sized, and animated without inheriting a predefined section structure. That difference shows up most clearly on a homepage or landing page meant to look nothing like a template. Joomla's system was built to make many different sites consistent and maintainable, Framer's was built to make one site look exactly like nothing else.

How Do Framer and Joomla Compare on Maintenance and Security?

Joomla 6 requires PHP 8.3 at minimum, with 8.4 or higher recommended, along with a current MySQL, MariaDB, or PostgreSQL version, meaning a business running Joomla is also implicitly running a small server maintenance operation. G2 reviewers describe updates as risky in their own right, noting extensions can break a site during an update with no safe mode to fall back on, which means the same update meant to fix a security hole can introduce a new outage.

Framer removes that maintenance layer entirely, hosting, PHP versions, and server-level patching are not the business's problem to manage because there is no server-side stack exposed to manage in the first place. A business without a developer on staff is choosing, with Joomla, to either hire one or accept the security and update risk of not patching promptly, neither option exists as a real decision point with Framer.

That distinction compounds over time rather than staying a one-time consideration, a Joomla site needs someone checking for new advisories, testing extension compatibility before every update, and applying patches promptly on close to a monthly cadence for as long as the site stays live. Framer's model simply removes that recurring obligation from the business's plate entirely, which matters more the longer a site actually stays in production.

How Do Framer and Joomla Compare on SEO Setup and Usability?

Joomla's core SEO capability is genuinely solid, clean URLs, meta controls, a schema editor, and sitemaps are all present, but usability around those features is a real complaint. The SEO title field sits at the bottom of a buried options panel, and meta descriptions live under a separate Publishing tab entirely. There is no built-in title templating, canonical control typically needs a plugin, and reviewers point to fewer beginner-friendly SEO resources existing for Joomla than for more popular platforms, with a paid extension like Route66 often recommended as Joomla's closest equivalent to a modern SEO plugin.

Framer's SEO panel puts page-level title, description, and social preview controls in one place by default, with no separate tab to hunt through and no paid extension required to get there. For a marketing team without a dedicated technical SEO specialist, that difference in daily usability matters more than either platform's theoretical capability ceiling.

How Does the Total Cost of Ownership Actually Compare?

Joomla's core software is free under its open source license, but the real cost shows up around that core rather than in it, hosting typically runs 3 to 50 dollars a month depending on provider and tier, premium templates run anywhere from free up to roughly 89 dollars per license, and higher quality extensions, especially for ecommerce, forms, and SEO, are frequently paid or subscription based since ecommerce itself is not built in natively. Layer developer time on top of that for setup, troubleshooting, and applying updates safely, and reviewers explicitly describe Joomla as suited to developers or technically comfortable business owners rather than someone wanting a simple, self-serve site.

Framer's pricing is flat and site-based instead, no hosting bill to separately manage, no PHP developer required to keep the lights on, and no patchwork of paid extensions needed to reach baseline functionality most businesses actually need. The sticker price comparison, free core software versus a paid site tool, inverts once every real cost is counted rather than just the license fee.

Is Joomla Still the Right Choice for Any Business?

Joomla genuinely still earns its place in specific situations, native multilingual support has been built into its core since version 1.6, with no third-party plugin required the way WordPress typically needs one, and its granular access control list system handles complex, tiered user permissions that would otherwise require several plugins to replicate elsewhere. Government agencies, educational institutions, and membership organizations with real role-based content restrictions are the cases where that architecture is doing genuine work rather than sitting unused.

A brand or marketing site is a different situation entirely, the buyer there is not choosing a platform for granular permission hierarchies, they are choosing one for how fast a distinctive design can go live and how little ongoing technical overhead it demands afterward. Neither platform is wrong on its own terms, the honest answer depends on whether the actual requirement is institutional access control or design speed and brand differentiation.

A Real Example: Coggno's Enterprise Rebrand

Coggno, a roughly 40 page enterprise training platform, needed a full rebrand rather than a simple refresh, a much larger scope than a typical small business site and one that justified a correspondingly larger investment. The project reflects exactly the kind of business that benefits from an open canvas rather than a template ceiling, a large enterprise site with real brand requirements has very little use for a rigid structure built to keep many unrelated sites looking consistent with each other.

The result was a site built specifically around Coggno's own brand requirements rather than adapted from a pre-built structure, proof that scope and complexity do not have to mean fighting a platform's built-in constraints along the way.

A Real Example: DA Hauliers' Clean and Low-Complexity Rebuild

DA Hauliers, a logistics company in Kenya, needed to look modern and sleek without the complexity of a full SaaS style build, a smaller, more focused project than Coggno's enterprise scope. The rebuild proved that a lower complexity project does not have to mean a weaker result, a clean, modern site delivered without the overhead a heavier platform would have introduced for the same outcome.

Between Coggno's large enterprise scope and DA Hauliers' smaller, focused rebuild, the same underlying pattern holds either way, an open canvas scales down to a simple, fast build just as well as it scales up to a large one, without switching tools or fighting template constraints at either end.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Joomla Still a Good CMS in 2026?

For specific use cases, yes, Joomla's native multilingual support and granular access control genuinely still fit government and membership sites with complex permission needs. For a typical brand site, its template constraints make it a harder sell than newer, design-forward alternatives.

Why Are Businesses Moving From Joomla to Framer?

Design flexibility, lower ongoing maintenance, and simpler SEO setup are the three most cited reasons. Joomla's template-based structure, PHP patching burden, and buried SEO controls all add friction that an open canvas platform with native SEO tools does not carry.

Is Joomla Really Free to Use?

The core software is free under its open source license, but real costs stack up quickly around it, hosting typically runs 3 to 50 dollars a month, premium templates and paid extensions add more, and most businesses also need developer time to maintain and update the site safely.

Does Joomla Have Built-In SEO Tools?

Yes, clean URLs, meta controls, a schema editor, and sitemaps are all included natively, but usability is a common complaint, the title field sits at the bottom of a buried panel, and many businesses end up adding a paid extension just to get modern, day-to-day SEO usability.

How Secure Is Joomla Compared to Modern Platforms?

Joomla issues security patches close to monthly, but over half of live Joomla sites still run the end-of-lifed Joomla 3 version, which monitoring data shows is five times more likely to be hacked than the current release, a gap that reflects a real patching burden on site owners.

Is Framer Easier to Maintain Than Joomla?

Yes, Framer is hosted with no server, PHP version, or plugin compatibility to manage, while Joomla requires ongoing attention to hosting requirements, extension updates, and monthly security patches to avoid the real risks that come with falling behind on any of them.

Conclusion

Joomla and Framer are not failing at the same job, Joomla still does real work for multilingual and permission-heavy institutional sites, while its template constraints, patching burden, and buried SEO usability make it a harder fit for a brand that wants a distinctive site built quickly and maintained with minimal overhead. Coggno's large-scale rebrand and DA Hauliers' clean, low-complexity rebuild both show what that shift actually looks like in practice. The right choice comes down to which of those two problems your business is actually trying to solve.

Ready to see what your brand could look like off a template? Start your Framer rebuild with V3 and let's talk through what a real redesign would take.