Mambo and Joomla are full-featured CMS applications, which offer rich feature set, easy customization and are FREE to use. When you look at them you can see that they are quite similar. And you may wonder what is the difference between them and which one to choose for your website.
Mambo is the older of the two - Joomla is actually a fork of Mambo and is thoroughly based on it. Somewhere at the end of 2005 Mambo developers chose to separate from the core Mambo team and founded a new CMS application called Joomla! /djuumla/. Since then, both tools started separate evolution, though there aren't any major differences between them yet.
Mambo CMS is a great tool that offers excellent options when it comes to content management. There is also a long list of add-on components and modules, which you may use on it and enhance its capabilities (e.g. forum, shopping cart, gallery, etc).
What about Joomla? Well, Joomla is more than 1 year old and contains all the benefits described for Mambo. It has large supporting community and contributers from all over the world. The addons built for Mambo were immediately optimized for Joomla and we can say that currently Joomla tools outnumber Mambo's.
So, which one to choose: Mambo or Joomla?
At SiteGround* we host thousands of websites based on Mambo or Joomla. Both tools provide great capabilities and are excellent solutions for creating and managing a website. Recently, more customers choose Joomla before Mambo. Developers say Joomla code is clearer and more understandable than Mambo's. That is because Joomla started at a later period where newer technologies were available.
