Drupal vs. WordPress: Choosing the Right CMS for Your Business

WordPress occupies a dominant player on the CMS market, with around 32% of all websites using it for their content management. Just to demonstrate how popular WordPress is, its next closes competitor, Drupal, occupies just a 1.9% market share. Even though there is such a stark comparison as far as usage is concerned, the two CMS systems have a lot in common. In this article, we will take an unbiased overview of each content management system in order to give you a better idea of which one to choose for your business Drupal or WordPress.

Why You Should Choose WordPress

WordPress has been around for more than 10 years now and has managed to become the most popular CMS on the market. Users love it because it is very easy to install and user-friendly in general. It is easy to maintain your website once you have WordPress up and running because it offers an extremely intuitive interface, thus allowing you to customize your site in all kinds of ways. WordPress has all sorts of plugins available to help you manage your content, which adds even more usability. It is a good choice for both beginners and industry veterans because it is simple, and it has all sorts of action-packed features for advanced users to take advantage of.

Why You Should Choose Drupal

Drupal is free and open-source and can also be used to create complex websites. It can be cumbersome to get used to all of the taxonomies. For this reason, Drupal would be a good fit for professionals who can develop web solutions and some coding experience. It offers a wide array of extensions, but they are not as easy to use as the ones provided by WordPress. In addition, it takes a little longer to install and offers half the free themes as WordPress. Still, usability is a significant factor, and given how easy it is for people to use WordPress, it is evident why it is such as a dominant player on the market.

WordPress vs. Drupal: Similarities

We mentioned some of the difference between WordPress and Drupal, so now let’s take a look at the similarities:

• They are both open source
• Both are built with a bundle known as LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)
• Use command-line interfaces to connect with REST API
• They have an active community of users who regularly hold events on the latest development of each platform

While each of them has their niches and pros and cons so which one is the best for you? While every business will have its own unique needs and requirements, let’s take a look at some situations when these CMS platforms will be useful for you.

WP vs. Drupal: Which One to Choose?

You should approach this decision as if you were choosing a place to live. It might be convenient to choose a hotel room since everything is already done for you, but can you customize your room? Not much space for maneuvering in this regard. You could buy a house which will give you all kinds of options to make it your own, but you will have to start with the very basics such as foundation, drywall, etc. Therefore, think about your wants, needs, and tradeoffs. What are you willing to sacrifice in order to obtain something you absolutely need? The tradeoffs that you should be considering here are between convenience and control.

WP will be a good choice if you need a fully customized solution. There are some features that come standard or install some plugins to make your site look however you would like it to. Also, if you need something to get started fast without having a technical background, you should choose WP as well. This would be the right choice for creating a blog on your website since it is elementary to add and manage content.

Drupal will be a good choice if you know how to code in order to get customization. If you have an idea of how your site will look, but it will require lots of extensions to achieve it with WordPress, then Drupal is for you. More importantly, it has robust security. To give you an idea of just how secure it is, whitehouse.gov was built with Drupal. WordPress has had its share of hacking attacks, and the wide array of extensions it offers can all be gateways for cybercriminals as well.

In case you were wondering about costs, both are free to download, but you will incur expenses if you need to hire outside help to develop your site. Usually, the Drupal developers will be more expensive, simply because there is less of them. Having said this, Drupal has made development a little bit easier by incorporating Symfony, which is something PHP developers are very familiar with.

Conclusion

Be sure to identify your needs and the controls you are willing to give up achieving the convenience you are looking for. If you are not creating something overly complicated, and you do not have a team of developers to help you out, it would be better to stick with WordPress. However, do not choose WordPress just because it is trendy. You should study both platforms and select the one that best fits your needs.