Both Mambo and Joomla are FREE CMS applications which offer full feature set and easy customization. These two sytems are quite similar yet they do have some differences.

History:
Mambo is the older of 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 are also a long list of add-on components and modules, which you may add to it and enhance its capabilities (e.g. forum, shopping cart, gallery, etc).

Joomla is more than 1 year old and contains all the benefits of 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.