When is Drupal the right tool for the job?
It doesn't do everything, and isn't always the appropriate tool. This is our guide to key strengths and weaknesses, with key notes on when to choose or not choose Drupal as your solution.
An Open Source CMS owned and supported by a global community
Drupal is an open-source CMS used to build digital experiences, including websites, online stores and web applications. It offers extensive flexibility, scalability and customisation, making it attractive for those seeking a bespoke online platform.
With its first release in 2001, Drupal has been a major player in the CMS landscape for twenty years, influencing global online ambitions at enormous scale and bringing early adoption to editor-first functionality, web accessibility priorities and deep multilingual support.
Open Source: A software license, which makes the source code public available (open) for anyone to use, modify or distribute at zero cost. Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla are all Open Source CMS with thriving communities of contributors supporting their further development, with those community users also using the platforms to provide products or functionality to their own clients.
No licensing costs means no annual subscriptions, no surprise price increases and no tie-in to a specific supplier. This leaves more of your budget available to actually invest into your site and business.
Kit car flexibility
Built from the ground up for customisation, Drupal is the kit car of the CMS world. It’s built for you to hot swap almost any component and make changes. WordPress, for comparison, is a car you buy from a garage. You can choose the paint (i.e. the theme) and certain options - you could even add an aftermarket spoiler later - but it’s still a Ford Focus underneath, and it would be incredibly difficult to just change the air conditioning unit for a completely different better one.
This flexibility is what attracts people to the Drupal platform, and that will only increase as the Drupal CMS developments mature, providing greater ease of access to common functionalities and customisations.
“Pronounced "droo-puhl," the name derives from the English pronunciation of the Dutch word "druppel," which means "drop"”
https://www.drupal.org/about/history
Anything is possible - not everything is sensible!
What Drupal is for
Go through https://www.drupal.org/case-studies to see the huge array of businesses, universities, charities and governments choosing to use Drupal to build their online experiences.
They chose Drupal for its ability to host:
- Beautiful interactive experiences
- Data handling processes
- Product databases
- Headless content services
What Drupal is not for
Tools that could be built quickly on another small and light platform probably should be built as such. We have built a number of things over the years in Gatsby, Python, Casper.js, React and more.
Basic sites that don’t require customisations or high levels of functionality. WordPress has a significant market share of blogs because they’re all essentially similar, and the level of time investment people are willing to make for their blog is quite limited.
Similarly, Wix and other SaaS website providers have done well by making basic customisation and functionality available to wider audiences. Yet amongst medium to large organisations, Drupal serves a high percentage of sites because it provides the long-term stability and functionality that is needed.
Small businesses that don’t want to maintain a bespoke web platform probably don’t want a Drupal site.
Where Drupal excels
Media handling: The built-in Media Library stores all your images, videos, YouTube and Vimeo links and private documents ready for easy access across the site. You don’t need an external DAM, though you can plug one in relatively easily.
Custom or complex fields and data architectures: Drupal’s Field UI allows you to create and customise content types and their fields on-the-fly, making quick builds and small changes simple for those with the permissions to do so.
Full editorial freedom, or restriction: There are a range of content building options available with Drupal, spanning from the full-freedom WYSIWYG builder to the fully-tied-down configurations where you enter your text and choose the display options. You choose what you need, and then build around those requirements.
International or multilingual content: Translations in Drupal have been fully supported since the original early versions, and latest Drupal can also support external translation managers with AI translation generation.
Custom endpoints: Custom is Drupal’s favourite word! It’s built for custom. Building custom pages and endpoints and data processes is what Drupal is built for, and it excels at it.
Commerce: When standard out-of-the-box commerce doesn’t cut it, Drupal will let you rework and redesign almost any aspect of the customer journey. From product displays and interactions, through to setting up payment providers ahead of the competition.
Security: Open Source does not mean insecure. It means a whole community of people casting eyes on the code regularly, contributing feedback, thoughts and conversations. The Security Initiative further puts Drupal Core and most contributed modules under regular formal scrutiny. As a result, Drupal is generally considered a highly secure platform. Additionally, it supports a range of user login mechanisms including two-factor authentication and passkeys (webauthn).
Comparison time
Including Wordpress, SAAS builders and Laravel
Here we set Drupal alongside the most likely alternatives:
WordPress: For lower-complexity sites, many will consider whether Drupal is a worthwhile upgrade.
SaaS sites: Software As A Service (SaaS) companies like Contentful, Duda, Wix, Sitecore, Squarespace and others provide a fast and simple setup process, with a large amount of common functionality ready to go. Deeper customisation of content, business logic, admin processes and API interactions are limited.
Laravel: A PHP framework often chosen for building bespoke and custom web applications.
| Drupal | WordPress | Laravel | SaaS Providers | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Commerce | Yes - Open Source | Yes - Free or paid Modules & services available, most by paid subscription |
Yes - Free or paid Modules & services available, most by paid subscription |
Yes - paid |
| Customisation | Good | OK | Good | OK |
| Multilingual support | Excellent | Poor | Good | Good |
| Can run Headless | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Value for money | Good | OK | Good | Good |
| Platform tie-in | None - Open Source | None - Open Source | Open Source | Tied in |
| Subscriptions | None - Open Source | Modules and plugins come in various freemium and subscription options |
Paid development tools, add-ons and modules | Platform subscription. Plans for large sites can be expensive. Paid add-ons and modules. |
Drupal as an advantage
For larger businesses, the subscription and contract costs associated with many platforms quickly spiral into ££££££, and that makes Open Source solutions like Drupal highly attractive - especially given the favourable feature comparisons.
Small and medium organisations may shy away from having ongoing support contracts for customisations and changes, but should both be aware that this ultimately gives them greater control of their platform, and that recent developments in the Drupal ecosystem will bring faster development timescales and greater user control over the next few years.
Laravel as an advantage
Laravel has seen great success as a powerhouse behind web apps and mobile apps. The ability to build a custom application rapidly is highly attractive, but a key differentiator to Drupal is Drupal's ability to let the administrator manage almost everything through the UI (and in multiple languages!). If you don't need a CMS or similar backend for your application, you may well benefit from minimising that effort and building a Laravel application rather than a Drupal installation.
WordPress as an advantage
Drupal has long been in decline among novice users and medium-complexity sites. The WordPress offering was strong; ease of use, minimal administration, subscriptions for extra functionality plugins. The Drupal CMS movement, and following initiatives, should see Drupal fight back for some of the moderate complexity installations - faster installs and easier builds via the UI, automatic updates and improved editorial workflows should see its appeal broaden. Until that comes through, WordPress certainly has ease-of-use advantages for sites without highly complex needs.
SAAS as an advantage
Online site builders have taken the world by storm, even overtaking WordPress usage in some key metrics. The speed, cost and ease of use have enormous appeal to the basic and medium complexity site builders. Where the subscription cost is not prohibitive, and limitations on customisations and extensions are not an issue, building with a SAAS platform can be a winning solution. Businesses wanting deeper integration with their systems and processes, however, will find Drupal attractive.
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