Mambo vs Joomla

Joomla is a fork of Mambo. That is to say, what is now Joomla started off as being Mambo. Mambo was originally released by Miro International. Many of the developers of Mambo didn't like the direction that Miro were taking with the Mambo Foundation and decided to take their efforts and codebase elsewhere.

ZDNet quotes 20 key Mambo developers as saying:

"We believe the future of Mambo should be controlled by the demands of its users and the abilities of its developers... The Mambo Foundation is designed to grant that control to Miro, a design that makes cooperation between the foundation and the community impossible...We, the community, have no voice in (the foundation's) government or the future direction of Mambo"

The result of this split was Joomla. You can find more information about Joomla here.

We think that Joomla is better supported than Mambo (particularly by third party addons) and is likely to continue to be so in the future, and would recommend it over Mambo to our customers. However, we are also happy to install Mambo on your account if you wish.