10 ways Drupal is cost effective for Enterprise and Small Business
Drupal delivers value
If you’re a CTO, CMO or Decision Maker, you need to understand these key benefits.
Whether you're choosing to move to Drupal or to leave Drupal, it's worth ensuring you're aware of the ways Drupal can deliver value.
Below are ten key ways that Drupal has brought clear benefits for our clients, and many others around the world.
Drupal comes with a lot of features
Out of the box, you get a lot of functionality with Drupal - and that can bring decent cost savings vs. other platforms where those features require additional plans, products or subscriptions.
Things like automated image cropping, easy user management, content modelling via the UI were core features long before they were standard on other platforms - yet it’s easy to take so much of the base platform functionality for granted.
For things that don’t come in the box, there’s custom development and there’s a community-driven world of contributed modules.
Open Source = No license fees (or vendor lock-in)
Drupal is an Open Source project, which means there is no cost or license for using it. Your monthly costs are your hosting and your support and development. There are no expensive bolt-ons, up-sells or platform costs. Everything you pay gets you something.
Compare that quickly to most SAAS platforms, where a large busy site will be paying £thousands per month just to be online (and the more content you have, the more you pay), and bespoke development is more difficult. Then tot up your add-ons, plugins and additional subscriptions, too. Many companies are paying £100,000+ per year to run their website site, and would make huge savings by running on Drupal instead.
And you’re not locked in at ComputerMinds, either. If you needed to take your site to a different agency, you can easily take the whole project - database, code and all - and set it up elsewhere without having to start again.
There’s a huge collection of Drupal modules available - and they cost nothing
With thousands of modules on Drupal.org, there’s coverage for an enormous range of widely-used and specific functionality. Most modules are 100% free to use, unlike other platforms which are dominated by freemium and subscription models. You could save hundreds of pounds per year - and a lot of subscription management faff.
You just need a team with the domain knowledge to get the modules you need, configure and customise them.
Excellent administrative interfaces making training a breeze
The administrative and editorial experiences in modern Drupal are top notch. Clear, simple interfaces with intuitive structures mean you can spend less time training staff and more time doing important things.
A little investment in building custom workflows could further save time, streamlining key actions and helping you build your content quicker, stay agile and go to market faster.
Permissions and roles allow for independent working
The highly granular permissions system means that you can give people exactly the permissions they need to do their job, and leave them to it. No more chasing admins in other departments to get things done! Reduced dependency on IT teams means more time working on important content.
AI integrations are ready to save you time
Drupal is not just ready for an AI future, it's actively innovating an exploring what it means to integrate AI throughout a CMS.
There are already numerous AI modules waiting to plug your site in to the future, connecting Drupal's APIs with AI local and remote AI services to power your creative solutions. The limit isn't Drupal - it's knowing how to use Drupal + AI to solve your real business use cases.
Example: It’s possible to require Alt text on all your media - but utilising AI integrations you can simply outsource the image descriptions to an AI service and review them later. Reduce time spent manually tagging by up to 99%!
Multilingual ready
Since the very first versions, Drupal has supported multilingual content. At this point, it supports a range of translation strategies and mechanisms including local translations and external translation managers with automatic AI translation.
Thousands of businesses, organisations and charities use Drupal to cross the language barrier and take their work global. It's been a serious work horse for translated content and has a trusted reputation for performance reliability alongside technical flexibility.
Full-featured translation capabilities reduce localisation time, pushing your global expansion faster than ever before!
SEO optimisation and metadata come for free
Internet basics like Page Titles, OpenGraph tags and hreflang tags are quick and free to get working for standard use cases, plus clever use of built-in tools and processes can automate much of your SEO metadata.
Don’t spend hours copy and pasting article teasers unnecessarily - get your site set up to do things the smart way so you can concentrate on more important issues.
All this comes together to keep your pipeline running and your PPC spend low.
Integrate with your DAM, or just use the Media Library
DAM pricing scales up very quickly, especially for larger users on fancy packages, so if you're not using all the big features you could be paying significantly over the odds.
If you already have a DAM (Digital Asset Manager - a platform that stores and manages your imagery and media), you can probably plug in a module and get Drupal talking to it quite quickly.
And if you don’t, you probably won’t need one! Drupal’s built in Media Library can handle most Media functionality out of the box, with contrib modules ready to extend it further. Save thousands (annually!) by avoiding unnecessary additional services and subscriptions.
Smaller businesses could save £6000 a year, or larger businesses in excess of £10,000!*
Save £6000 a year
Obviously there are a wide range of providers, products and package options. As of our research in July 2025, the costs for basic/business/medium plans across a selection of providers were as below.
Note that some also have setup fees (not indicated here).
| Provider | Annual cost |
| resourcespace.com/pricing | £8970 |
| intelligencebank.com/pricing | $6804 |
| kontainer.com/pricing | €7740 |
| thedigitalprojectmanager.com/project-management/digital-asset-management-pricing [Standard, 10 users] | $2400 |
| assetbank.co.uk/pricing | £5949 |
| Average | £6478 |
Save £10,000 a year
Depending on the needs you have and the package you're paying for, this figure could be an enormous understatement!
Our research in July 2025 looked at pricing for Enterprise packages for larger organisations, and came up with these prices below.
Note that some also have setup fees (not indicated here).
| Provider | Annual cost |
| resourcespace.com/pricing | £15,870 |
| intelligencebank.com/pricing | $14,700 |
| kontainer.com/pricing | €23,940 |
| thedigitalprojectmanager.com/project-management/digital-asset-management-pricing [Enterprise, 25 users] | $18,000 |
| assetbank.co.uk/pricing | £19,499 |
| Average | £18,400 |
Multisite installations
Question: What costs more than an expensive product license?
Answer: Ten expensive product licenses! One for each brand!
With a multisite Drupal setup you could bring that estimate down by up to 80%
Where you need additional websites with essentially the same functionality, you can run multiple sites off the same codebase. It can be significantly cheaper than building whole additional sites, and maintenance overall will cost less per site too.
e.g. Building and running 5 sites as a multisite would reduce costs by 70% vs. 5 full design and build projects with individual site maintenance plans.
The perfect solution for CMOs overseeing multiple brands or regional markets!
Let's talk
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