# Joomla to BaseHub migration > How to migrate from Joomla to BaseHub, with a side-by-side comparison and FAQs. --- ## Source: Joomla - **Type:** headless - **Official site:** https://www.joomla.org - **Last reviewed:** 2026-07-28 ## Key advantages Recommending Joomla in 2026 feels a bit like recommending Internet Explorer. But if you must use it, it does earn a few real points. The multilingual support is built in, so you run a five-language site without a pile of plugins. The access-control system is more detailed than most enterprise platforms, and the modular structure gives developers room to build complex, multi-section sites. If you have a big editorial team that needs genuinely granular permissions, Joomla holds up. If you are set on Joomla and we cannot talk you out of it, we will point you to an agency that still happily ships heavy old templates. Or sit down with us for half an hour, and we will at least make sure you do not regret the journey. ### Native multilingual support Joomla ships with multilingual features baked in, so you don’t need a plugin graveyard just to run a site in five languages. It handles translations cleanly and is one of the few CMS platforms that gets this right out of the box. ### Granular user permission system Its ACL system is its biggest bragging right. You can lock down roles, workflows, and access rules with a level of control that most CMS platforms still envy. ### Custom field capabilities Joomla gives you solid flexibility with custom fields, letting you shape structured content without hacking together a dozen extensions. It’s powerful enough for complex layouts and multi-section content. ### Active developer community The community isn’t massive, but the people who are there are dedicated, technical, and still shipping useful extensions and documentation. If you're deep in Joomla land, it’s a lifeline. ### Strong security foundation Kept patched, Joomla is stable and the core team takes security seriously, with regular updates. The catch is the "kept patched" part. The 2026 JCE editor exploit hit sites that fell behind, so the upkeep is on you. ### Modular architecture flexibility Its module-based layout system lets you build multi-section portals, dashboards, and content-heavy sites without bending the platform backward. If you know what you're doing, it’s flexible enough to scale. ## Key pain points Joomla sits in the same bracket as WordPress, except it is somehow even harder to explain to anyone under 40. If your C-suite still thinks "PHP developer" is a personality type, Joomla will make them feel right at home. You will also keep your hosting provider happy, because nothing about this platform is light or low-maintenance. The dev experience feels stuck in a pre-Composer, pre-type-hints era. Major upgrades are the real horror story. Joomla 3 and 4 both went end of life in October 2025, and moving up a major version tends to break extensions and templates badly enough that you rebuild the site anyway. The community is smaller than WordPress's, the documentation is hit-and-miss, and the admin panel feels like a government portal that accidentally became a CMS. Performance on shared hosting is shaky and the editing workflow is clunky. If you really, truly still want Joomla, we will point you to another agency, or sit down with us for half an hour and we will talk you out of your biggest digital regret. ### Steep learning curve Joomla makes even simple tasks feel like you’re onboarding into a new corporate ERP system. If you’re not already fluent in its quirks, prepare to lose a weekend (or three). ### Outdated coding standards Still clinging to older PHP conventions, missing modern practices, and generally stuck in a time capsule. If you enjoy fighting your own tools, you’ll love it. ### Complex migration process Upgrading versions feels less like an update and more like a full-blown rebuild. Random extensions break, templates combust, and you’re left questioning your career choices. ### Extension compatibility issues Half the ecosystem works… depending on your version, your template, the time of day, and whether Mercury is in retrograde. Reliability is not its strong suit. ### Limited template selection Unless you’re aiming for "government website from 2011," the design ecosystem doesn’t give you much to work with. ### Interface complexity barriers The admin panel still feels like an escape room puzzle. Everything is technically there, but actually finding or using it is another story. ## Target: BaseHub - **Type:** headless - **Official site:** https://basehub.com - **Pricing:** https://basehub.com/pricing - **Last reviewed:** 2026-07-28 ## Key advantages BaseHub CMS is generating buzz among developers for its fast, collaborative, and AI-powered environment. We really like the Notion style editor. Feels great to drop a / and you type in what you want. E.g heading, or bullet points etc. It's pretty good for creating and organizing content. Even for teams that are new to CMS platforms. Features like easy nested repeater fields, real-time branching for team workflows, and a built-in GraphQL API impress both solo makers and growing agencies. The platform’s Typesafe approach and AI-assisted writing tools help speed up the publishing process, while modern UI design keeps the learning curve gentle for newcomers. If you can handle the initial information overload when you first spin up an environment it's an incredible tool for collaboration and rapid site scaffolding. They also have a pretty good freemium pricing model (nodody has as good as Sanity) and strong documentation help projects get off the ground quickly, especially for Next.js and React use cases. Frequent updates and community engagement is high, and the core team that built it, are from a really nice design focused agency. So can't knock it that much. ### Intuitive Notion-style editor Drop a / to insert blocks. The Notion-style editor is intuitive: fast, light, and easy to navigate ### Effortless nested repeater fields You can nest and stack content structures. It’s one of the few tools where complex schemas don’t instantly become a crime scene. ### Real-time content branching Branching lets teams experiment, test ideas, and push updates without breaking production. Preview changes instantly, merge when ready, panic never. ### Ready-to-use GraphQL integration BaseHub ships with clean, auto-generated GraphQL APIs, so developers don’t waste hours wiring resolvers or schema stitching. Query, fetch, and ship. ### Typesafe SDK support You get fully typed responses out of the box, which means fewer runtime surprises and a smoother dev experience. Your IDE becomes your safety net. ### Collaborative team workflows Teams can work together without stepping on each other’s toes, with clean approval flows and role-based editing. It’s built for fast-moving content teams. ## Key pain points BaseHub is one of those platforms that feels like it was built by a developer, for a developer, and at no point did anyone ask, "Won't marketers need to be able to edit on the go?" Once you’re inside, it’s tables inside tables inside tables, like a Russian doll but somehow less fun. And as we’ve said before, we genuinely appreciate good engineering… but BaseHub often feels like someone shipped the database schema and called it a CMS. BaseHub is painful to use, in our opinion. Because the platform is still young, features sometimes glitch, real-time collaboration hiccups, and localization or migration workflows can get messy fast. Documentation gaps and unpredictable branching only add to the frustration. If you're determined to build on BaseHub, we can walk you through the safest path… or at least help you avoid the inevitable "why is this breaking again?" moments. ### Occasional feature glitches New features sometimes ship a bit wobbly, so expect the occasional "why is this suddenly broken?" moment. ### Not yet enterprise-ready It’s great for small teams, but big orgs will hit walls fast. Workflow maturity and stability just aren’t there yet. ### Limited third-party integrations If you rely on a rich ecosystem, BaseHub won’t meet you halfway. You’ll be wiring a lot of things yourself. ### Localization support gaps Multi-region content teams will feel the pain quickly as language handling still needs serious tightening. ### API rate limiting constraints Push it too hard and you’ll hit rate limits faster than you expect, which can block larger deployments. ### Sporadic stability issues Real-time collaboration and branching can hiccup under pressure, making scaling workflows frustrating. ### No self-hosting option BaseHub is SaaS-only. There is no self-hosting path or on-premise deployment. Your content lives on their infrastructure. ## Frequently asked questions ### Is Joomla free? Yes. Joomla is open-source software under the GPL, so there is no licence fee and you can download Joomla 6 and self-host it for nothing. The real cost is everything around it. You pay for hosting, for any commercial extensions and templates you bring in, and for the developer time that keeps it patched and upgraded. Treat the price tag as hosting plus extensions plus maintenance, not a SaaS subscription. On a busy site those running costs add up fast, which is the part most "Joomla is free" claims quietly skip. ### What are Joomla's main limitations? Three things bite. First, major upgrades are brutal. Joomla 3 and 4 both reached end of life in October 2025, so anyone still on them is running unpatched software, and moving up a major version often breaks extensions and templates badly enough to feel like a rebuild. Second, the extension and template ecosystem is small next to WordPress, and maintainers keep drifting away. Third, the developer experience is dated and the admin panel is hard to navigate, so editor productivity suffers. Security upkeep is on you too, as the JCE editor exploit doing the rounds in 2026 reminded plenty of sites. ### Can I migrate from Joomla to Sanity? Yes, and it tends to be cleaner than a Joomla version upgrade. Joomla stores everything in MySQL, so we script the content extraction, map your articles, categories, and custom fields into a Sanity content model, and rebuild the frontend in Next.js. For a typical site of 500 to 2,000 pages, budget 6 to 12 weeks. The extraction takes a few days. The rest goes on the new frontend, replacing whatever your extensions used to do, and mapping 301 redirects so you keep your search rankings. The payoff is no more PHP version juggling and no near-rebuild every time the platform bumps a major version. ### Joomla vs WordPress vs headless, which should I pick? For a content site you want to keep cheap and simple, WordPress wins on ecosystem size and the sheer number of developers who know it. Joomla's honest edges are native multilingual and its access-control system, so it makes sense if you genuinely need granular permissions across a big editorial team. But both are PHP monoliths that tie your content to your frontend. If you care about performance, want a modern build with React or Next.js, and plan to push content to a web app, a mobile app, and a few other places at once, go headless. We pair Sanity with Next.js for exactly that, and it is where most teams leaving Joomla end up.