I found Joomla to be easier to work with (as a non-programmer) and also that I had more options for tools and accessories.

I have no problem recommending it.

Have started a couple of years with joomla and moved forward to drupal and I am more than happy with the decision. Biggest reason for this is with drupal I can built things the way I want using a combination of modules instead of using one joomla module that does something in the direction of what I want but never exactly what I want.

So as more and more people generally start having their OWN web site instead of going to a system like Blogger, LifeJournal, MySpace etc. more and more start using Open Source CMS as a consequence. Thus they read about Joomla’s relative ease of use and jump right on it.

What is not displayed in the Google Trends curve is - as I said - the target group. Less and less developers nowadays go for Joomla, they will head for other, more flexible solutions - like Drupal. Certainly there are less developers then general folks who want to go and set up a web site today. So clearly, this Google Trend does not reflect how “effective” or useful Joomla is or is not over Drupal, but how many people searched for it and clicked on the link to their web site.

Drupal has a completely different learning curve and it has been argued a lot that it has a too high learning curve (for the programming-illiterate). Sure, Drupal improved tremendously: it is dead-simple to install it, dead-simple to add modules etc. But people are simply overwhelmed by the richness of the various modules available for Drupal and they start thinking: oh my, will all of this be compatible to each other, because on other systems, compatibility of third party modules IS a SERIOUS issue. They will initially not know that through the high Drupal coding standards and the overall API rules, there are very very few to no module incompatibilities at Drupal. Also, other systems like Joomla offer huge packages, like “Forum” or “Shopping-Cart”. Drupal does that too, of course, but some things are accomplished by a mix of modules that require at least some information about these modules. One typical example being the most important combo of CCK and Views (and maybe even Content Template and various CCK and Views enhancements). Instead of installing a “Weblink” component, you could use CCK and Views and build your weblink section in whatever way YOU want to. But you will need to learn how CCK and Views generally do their business, while with Joomla you download your Weblinks Component and you have it (that it is stiff as a rock and won’t interface with almost anything - not even the site search - is an aspect most “common folks” will easily ignore.

We have been using Drupal for 3 years as our main development tool. There is NOTHING that compares to Drupal. We can only recommend Drupal for nearly ANY web project.