TYPO3 vs Jimdo

Website builders are here to make the task of creating, designing and maintaining a website with utter simplicity. With a host of features and services, TYPO3 and Jimdo are two leading names in the list of worldwide website builders. Both the platforms eliminate the need for highly advanced technical knowledge for creating amazing, usable websites for individuals and businesses.

However, the primary difference between TYPO3 and Jimdo lies in the fact that the first is a comprehensive Content Management System, while the second is a simple website builder. While both have their advantages, it is important to take a look at their features and services comparatively for a better understanding. But first, let us dive into a few basics.

What is a Website Builder? 

A website builder may be understood as a platform or software that allows you to design, publish, modify and maintain websites. You can use a website builder to draft a website aligned to your brand identity and objectives. Often, website builders come with an easy-to-use interface that eliminates the need for any advanced coding knowledge for creating websites.

Jimdo is one of the most popular website builders, which is best suited for a personal, freelancer or small business websites. With a range of interesting features and apps, Jimdo makes the entire process of creating and maintaining a website pretty easy for anyone. This website builder is, in fact, one of the fastest and simplest if what you need is a simple, straightforward website.

What is a Content Management System? 

Abbreviated as CMS, a Content Management System refers to a platform or software that you can use to create and manage digital content in its entirety. They are more flexible and certainly more diverse than website builders, offering pre-built frameworks with lots of room for customization.

Content management systems are different from website builders also in terms of scalability, for you can use these platforms to create more complex, hierarchical sites. Take TYPO3 for instance – it is the most secure CMS in the world, and the only dedicated CMS for large-scale enterprise solutions. Therefore, for corporations and business giants looking for greater scale and support, it is a CMS like TYPO3 that can live up to their expectations.

Before deciding which is more suited to your needs, we must detail the individual characteristics, pros and cons of both Jimdo and TYPO3 in a comparative fashion. The common parameters to gauge their performances in should be the values that you are looking for for your website: cost-friendliness, popularity, ease of use, SEO support and so on.

Just like any other popular website builder, Jimdo comes with a basic free plan and premium paid plans. The free plan comes with a set of basic features, a .jimdo.com subdomain, 500 MB storage and 2GB bandwidth. This is great for individuals who are thinking of creating a portfolio website, or freelancers and small businesses who are just starting.

The paid plans on Jimdo come in various packages, and range from $7.50 a month to $30 per month, billed annually. These paid plans offer additional features and greater storage capacities. The free plan is not mobile responsive, however, and comes with inevitable ads.

On the other hand, TYPO3 is a 100% open-source content management software for enterprises. Users can reap the benefits of this platform completely free of cost, with no legal obligations due to its GNU General Public License. The TYPO3 open-source CMS is free to download, customize, extend or redistribute.

There are going to be some changes, though, such as for domain and hosting. Also, if you want to put together an extraordinary website with complex functionalities, chances are you might have to spend some amount on premium extensions and templates. However, the core CMS of TYPO3 is absolutely free and will continue to be.

TYPO3 beats Jimdo yet again when it comes to overall market share. While Jimdo is used by 0.1% of all websites, TYPO3 has a market presence of over 0.5%. TYPO3 is more popular with large businesses because of its ability to handle their complex functionalities better. Its pricing and security play a major role in its escalating popularity within and beyond Europe.

Jimdo stands out from the crowd of website builders due to its simplicity and convenience. You can say this website builder has been created for beginners specifically, those who have no coding background whatsoever, and require an easier interface to work with.

Jimdo offers two tools for website building – the standard Jimdo Creator and the AI Tool mode. While the former comes with an impressive visual editor, the latter creates a website for you after you answer a series of simple questions about your website topic, target audience, industry, objectives and so on.

Compared to Jimdo, TYPO3 can come across as a more difficult platform to adapt to. It is tough to adjust to the platform in the beginning, for it comes with a dedicated internal language called TypoScript. Therefore, the platform is more suitable for people with some development skills, to begin with. However, with the immense versatility and configurability of this CMS, the absence of extreme simplicity is not a concern at all.

Jimdo is best suited for designing simple landing pages, portfolios and small business websites, and does a good task at that. With distinctive functionalities and toolsets to cater to the functions of such platforms, Jimdo does offer convenient design and layout support.

However, while it scores in terms of convenience, it gets beaten in terms of the number and types of features. If you want to go beyond basics, your options are limited. There are few variations to choose from and these differences are mostly with respect to navigation alone. Layouts can be altered to some extent, but the CSS cannot be edited. When using the AI feature, any design freedom gets further limited, because you are forced to use pre-built blocks.

On the contrary, TYPO3 offers much more freedom when it comes to design and layout. The platform offers a multitude of templates to make your task easier – some free and some premium. There is plenty of room for customisation as well. Content management follows a tree structure, which makes things far more organised.

Being a closed-source platform, Jimdo does not offer much when it comes to customisation. Only private members have access to advanced options for making any updates to the platform and its features.

On the other hand, TYPO3 is an open-source platform that developers all over the world customise from time to time. This enables easy and regular access to new features, tools and resources, completely free of cost.

The SEO features offered by Jimdo are elementary since the website builder is primarily meant for small businesses, landing pages, portfolios, and so on. You may add and edit meta tags, set up custom page URLs and access some additional features with premium plans.

TYPO3 beats Jimdo in this segment, for it was designed to meet the SEO needs of large-scale enterprises. The platform comes with a robust backend UI and native SEO feature that help your posts rank better. All SEO-relevant information is added to pages simultaneously, and several advanced options such as canonical tag customisation, OG tags, sitemap.xml for pages, robots.txt are available.

The blogging engine of Jimdo is quite functional and sufficient for small websites with less traffic. It simplifies the content drafting and publishing process to a great extent, with basic elements and features. However, the biggest downside is that you cannot schedule posts on Jimdo for publishing later. While the interface supports a multilingual feature, it is limited to eight languages only and needs more time to scale up.

TYPO3 fares much better by providing a one-stop solution for all your blogging and publishing functions. A dedicated TYPO3 Blog extension can be used to take care of core concepts. The CMS offers core multilingual support as well, which makes it easy to diversify and scale up your blogging game.

In terms of security, you can expect only the basics with Jimdo – SSL, GDPR compliance, and so on. It is in no comparison to TYPO3, which is the most secure CMS in the world. With regular updates and extensions, the content management system takes website security to the next level. A dedicated team of professional developers, the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) and an always up-to-date verification system are just some of its highlights.

Jimdo offers an impressive eCommerce engine that you can use to create and customize various types of small online stores. Besides product collection management, Jimdo offers features of shipping/tax settings, PayPal and Stripe integration, orders and cancellation, email marketing and web store promotion. You can pick a theme out of the various eCommerce templates available on Jimdo and kickstart a basic website instantly.

Talking about TYPO3 – it was created to handle more complex, hierarchical websites for corporations, organizations and large businesses. Therefore, TYPO3 comes equipped with several free extensions that make eCommerce management a glide. The freedom to choose any database management system further simplifies eCommerce solutions on the platform.

Jimdo lacks an integrated app store, therefore any extensions need to be sourced from third-party services. The platform enables integration with social media platforms, Eventbrite ticketing, Infogram infographics, and so on. You can also connect your website with Google Analytics for an active dashboard on relevant statistics and behaviour data.

TYPO3 has over 8000 extensions that help expand the functionality of the content management system and your website. Most of these extensions are available for free and are constantly checked, updated and improved by developers from across the world, thanks to the open-source core CMS of TYPO3. There are also paid premium extensions to choose from if you are looking for some more amazing features. What you can expect from TYPO3 extensions are great quality, high standards and industry best practices.

Sadly, Jimdo has no import/export functionality to offer at all, unlike TYPO3. The latter offers database access to support its export functions as well as built-in solutions to make content migration much easier. All your content gets uploaded on a buffer server, saving you from the pain of manually downloading pages, images, design elements, and so on. You can export your website any number of times while keeping the template choice flexible.

Both Jimdo and TYPO3 have compact communities, compared to giants like WordPress. These generally comprise forums, blogs, tutorials and helpdesks. The TYPO3 community, however, boasts of several professional developers who are in constant touch with the open-source core of the CMS. Therefore, they are ever-ready with solutions to problems, queries and trends.

Choosing between a simple website builder and a comprehensive CMS can seem confusing as long as you haven’t figured out what you want from your website, or what you get from choosing either. While Jimdo does its task fairly well for small businesses, individuals and freelancers, TYPO3 is the obvious choice if yours is a large enterprise with complex needs.

At the end of the day, TYPO3 fares much better in almost all aspects compared to Jimdo – more customization, SEO features, blogging support, heightened security, export functionality – and so on. No wonder, the significance of TYPO3 has expanded from its earlier concentration in Europe to different regions of the world. Some leading global corporations have opted for TYPO3 for establishing a sound, secure and flexible digital presence already.

TYPO3: Flexible and powerful

We are convinced that TYPO3 is the right choice and offer our customers a wide range of services related to the CMS. You can also count on our TYPO3 support and trainings so that you too can become a TYPO3 professional. We have even developed a solution on the basis of TYPO3 with which websites can be implemented particularly quickly, efficiently, cost-effectively and with a top design: Our sgalinski Website-Base, which is available as a website for a fixed price or as a subscription in the service model, with which you don't have to worry about anything other than the content of your website. For the TYPO3 Website-Base, we have also created extensive documentation for the response of a website, which can be used at any time and completely free of cost.