With 2023 now here, I believe the new year warrants a fresh assessment of the best content management systems. Commonly referred to as CMS for short, these systems power most personal and business online endeavors. In recent years, more and more people and businesses are trying to represent themselves in the online space. As such, the demand for trustworthy and reliable content management systems is also increasing. This is mostly due to the dominance of content over other forms of online communication. WordPress and Drupal are two of the most well-known and very commonly used content management systems in the world. So in this context, I will cover the pros and cons of both platforms. Next, I’ll conclude with a Drupal vs WordPress head-to-head comparison.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Drupal
Let’s start the WordPress vs Drupal discussion by covering the pros and cons of Drupal. Drupal CMS is generally considered to be an effective WordPress, which means it usually plays a secondary role compared to WordPress. Here are the main advantages and disadvantages of Drupal.
Drupal Advantages
Various permissions
Drupal has an in-depth permission layering system that allows administrators to grant different types of customizable permissions to different team members. This makes it a great option for large teams with many different skill sets that require different permissions and privileges.
Base-level multi-language utility
Many other CMS options come with English as the only available language, which makes working with them difficult for multicultural teams. To deal with this, other CMS options usually require adding a language plug-in, but with Drupal CMS, many prominent languages are supported in the base version.
Advanced content management
Drupal has sections dedicated to each type of content, and each of these sections comes with appropriate customizations for that particular type of content. If your website has many different content formats that require compatibility and customization, then Drupal CMS is perfect for you.
Customization
Speaking of customization, Drupal is incredibly rich in allowing you to customize the content itself and the content type. Its base version has various tools and supported formats. Again, other CMS options may have higher ceilings with add-ons, but the base version of Drupal CMS has it.
Drupal Disadvantages
Difficult to use
If there’s one problem with Drupal, it’s its clunky and messy UI. Drupal’s UI can be a real pain for the starter to wrap their heads around. Despite having solid UI and coding experience to handle Drupal properly, you can make the most of this error, as the challenging learning experience will help you in your online work!
Too Many Updates
Much like Windows 10 and its constant stream of updates that make users notoriously mad at it, Drupal also seems to have a problem with untimely large update chains. It’s can be frustrating, especially if you are not equipped to download them continuously.
Compatibility issues with large websites
As your website grows, and more content is added from different variations, the Drupal CMS’s contributed modules, which are required to run large websites, can suffer from compatibility issues. This isn’t a problem if you’re just starting out, and even if you have a medium to the large website you should be fine. But it’s a problem for really big websites.
Resource intensive
Remember when I mentioned that Drupal is not perfect for beginners? One of the ways this manifests itself is by slowing down performance if properly configured. Unsurprisingly most newbies don’t know how to do this and will probably suffer performance tanking at times.
Advantages and Disadvantages of WordPress
Now it’s time to look at the other side of the WordPress vs Drupal coin. Drupal is older than WordPress. This makes WordPress a Drupal alternative for experienced users. Let’s go through the pros and cons of WordPress.
WordPress Advantages
User-Friendly
Much of WordPress’ success is due to the fact that it is incredibly user-friendly and allows anyone with basic online skills to create and host their own website. The UI is beautifully designed for everyone to understand everything easily.
Advanced Compatibility
As the world’s most popular CMS, WordPress is already compatible and integrated with most payment gateways, secondary online services and other third-party-related tools. A good example of this combination is the hosting platform. It’s very unlikely that you’ll be stuck trying to use WordPress with other related programs.
Large online community and documentation
Again, WordPress’ status as the most popular CMS in the world, makes it a large online community. This has led to considerable online coverage of WordPress tutorials and general troubleshooting threads in online forums. So overall WordPress is more accessible.
Good templates and design tools
WordPress has many pre-configured website templates that you can choose from and then use the design tools to suit your own website needs. This ease of content management and website design as part of a single package is a significant reason for WordPress’ success.
WordPress Disadvantages
Plug-in dependent
As mentioned during our Drupal CMS evaluation, most other CMS options require plug-ins to cover many aspects and needs. WordPress takes this to the extreme. It’s a running joke in the community that every new WordPress task requires at least a few additional plug-ins. So if you are looking for a Content Management System ( CMS ) with an all-in-one approach, WordPress is not for you.
Intensive management
This is more of a double-edged sword than a straight con. WordPress is user-friendly and it has a good UI that makes everything easy. But instead, it almost completely leaves the user to manage everything themselves. It’s a good bet if you have experience doing this. But if you don’t, all kinds of problems will happen and you’ll have to run to damage control all the time.
Security
WordPress security issues are somewhat related to the previous con I mentioned. WordPress has the potential to make a CMS as secure as it can get. But as a bare-bones CMS, it can be a bit sloppy when it comes to security.
Poor SEO coverage
While other CMS options offer plenty of analytics and SEO coverage tools to keep your web pages relevant in search engine indexes, WordPress again delegates this to other plug-ins to handle. SEO is very important for your website’s visibility, and this is definitely an issue.
Drupal vs WordPress Differences
With a general understanding of the pros and cons of both Drupal and WordPress, it’s time to do a head-to-head comparison of Drupal vs WordPress. This WordPress vs Drupal CMS comparison is divided into five different categories and a winner will be announced in each. Ultimately, I would consider which one best suits your needs.
Security
The most important issue in any CMS comparison is security and Drupal vs WordPress is no exception. Drupal, in general, has a really good base level of security and is considered one of the most secure CMS options in the world and a trusted WordPress alternative. WordPress also has a good security core, but again, its reliance on plug-ins creates problems. These plug-ins can both be used to make it potentially more secure than Drupal, but can also lead to new security holes. So in general, Drupal takes this category as the more reliable CMS.
SEO
The next section of our Drupal vs WordPress comparison is ( SEO ) or Search Engine Optimization for short. SEO directly affects your search engine index positioning and consequently, your online reach and visibility. As mentioned during my WordPress evaluation, WordPress has a poor base-level SEO coverage utility. However, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. WordPress can become the absolute best CMS for SEO with the right configuration and plug-ins. Drupal comes with better base-level SEO coverage utilities than WordPress. However, despite having some plug-in options, it doesn’t have the same possibilities as WordPress.
While SEO is about individual effort and potential improvement, Drupal’s higher base-level support for SEO doesn’t make as much sense for security. So this round goes to WordPress in my opinion, despite its flaws.
Performance
If we ignore the security side, the performance index is probably a much more important aspect of the Drupal vs WordPress comparison. Measuring performance in a CMS is difficult. Because the performance output varies from one CMS to another as the size of a website’s content increases. Here again, we can see the built-in performance issue. If WordPress is configured correctly, it can have the best online loading speed with millisecond loading times a real possibility. However, WordPress can also be shaky if not enhanced with plug-ins and the right options.
Drupal has had great performance since its inception. But just like I mentioned earlier, as your website loads more content, there may be instances of performance degradation. However, most websites never reach that level. So between Drupal and WordPress, which has better overall performance? In general, the answer is Drupal CMS.
Flexibility
In this Drupal vs WordPress comparison, flexibility is defined as the number of possible utilities that a CMS offers to help you build, customize and grow your website to increase its performance indicators. Let’s start with Drupal. Drupal again doesn’t disappoint with it is base-level features. It has a solid amount of plug-ins to help beginners and features a great level of compatibility and flexibility within its base version. However, after a certain point, Drupal’s steep learning curve deters the user. So to bypass this threshold, a user needs to have a bit more advanced coding knowledge. Not only does the base version of WordPress has a ton of templates and features, but it is the undisputed most supported and adaptable CMS option when it comes to flexibility and compatibility. So which is much more flexible, WordPress or Drupal? For me, the answer is very much clearly “WordPress“, with its huge plug-in cohort and much advanced third-party compatibility.
Easy to use
Ease of use and user-friendliness are the final metrics where we are going to compare Drupal vs WordPress. Ease of use is a major factor, especially for new users who are just starting to host their own websites. These users need to quickly get their hands on a CMS that allows them seamless and easy content management.
As long as we are talking about basic functions and tasks, Drupal is easy to use. However, once things slowly start to get more advanced, the difficulty of managing them using Drupal also increases. Drupal definitely has a tough learning experience, especially for advanced work. That’s not bad, because you can use the learning experience in your website-running journey. However, it doesn’t make it any easier.
WordPress on the other hand is a new user’s dream. Everything from setup to configuration, UI is designed to be as easy to understand as possible. WordPress allows new users to hold hands and set up their website, design it, and manage their content on a single platform. This is the main reason behind its universal success and prominence.
So if you are new to CMS in general, should you go for WordPress or Drupal? To me, it’s clear that WordPress is the ultimate winner in this category.
Conclusion
So now that we’re done with the WordPress vs Drupal comparison, should you go for Drupal or WordPress when hosting on a VPS or other web hosting? WordPress wins the head-to-head comparison, and as such, I believe it is the overall better option for hosting and managing your website content, especially for new users.
Drupal is a great WordPress alternative if you have much-advanced coding knowledge and are looking for a very lightweight CMS with a focus on security and performance.
