After pitting it against Squarespace and Wix, our WordPress comparison series once again continues. This time, it’s Drupal’s turn to go head-to-head with the platform.

For anyone weighing up their CMS options ahead of building, redesigning or migrating a business website, it’s worth keeping in mind that the decision affects much more than just website development. It influences how quickly marketing teams can publish content, optimise pages for search, integrate marketing technology and scale their digital presence, too.

The same is true of WordPress and Drupal. Both are established, open-source CMS platforms, but they differ in a variety of ways. Drupal is blessed with powerful enterprise functionalities, but the trade-off lies in its complexity, for example. Elsewhere, WordPress’ accessibility and flexibility might suit some, but might not be a fit for your goals. 

While it’s never as simple as “which is better, Drupal or WordPress?”, we’ll help you make the choice that’s right for you and compare each platforms’ usability, SEO, security, flexibility and other capabilities to help you make the right choice.

Quick links

• Performance & Hosting
• Security
• Integrations & Marketing Technology
• Ease of Use
• Scalability
• Web Design & Customisation
• SEO Capability
• Choosing WordPress or Drupal
  

Drupal vs. WordPress Comparison

Two of the most popular CMS available, Drupal and WordPress have their respective champions. But which platform you opt for depends on your business needs. We’ll break down the key functionalities of both for you below…

Performance & Hosting

WordPress

For WordPress to work, you’ll need to choose a hosting provider. The good news is there are plenty to choose from, but be sure to do your due diligence beforehand since hosting quality can vary. Caching, CDN support and image optimisation all help with site performance, and there’s no shortage of performance plugins to integrate into your setup if you want to streamline site health further. 

Drupal

Drupal’s highly configurable settings make it well suited to developers of large-scale websites in need of consistency from development to live site. It’s possible to customise access, define workflow states, track changes across website versions – and more – all without writing custom code. Like WordPress, Drupal also excels in its caching capabilities, so performance remains streamlined. But overall, it’s a platform that requires more technical expertise to fully benefit from, compared to WordPress’ out-of-the-box user friendliness.

Verdict

Both platforms are excellent from a performance point of view. However, WordPress beats out Drupal for having a much broader range of managed hosting and optimisation solutions available.

Security

WordPress

With regular core updates, security plugins, SSL and two-factor authentication, there’s a vanguard of options and capabilities WordPress uses to keep your site safe. The large security ecosystem also means that additional measures are always being developed. However, WordPress’ popularity makes it a large target for hackers. As such, keeping plugins and themes updated and protected is vital – and that responsibility falls on the user.

Drupal

Drupal’s strong reputation for security more than precedes the platform. With its own dedicated security team and granular permissions to keep access limited, the platform’s security capabilities are nothing short of enterprise-level. And for added peace of mind, its security features are also regularly updated.

Verdict

When they’re properly configured and maintained, both WordPress and Drupal remain fully secure. Drupal’s architecture and granular levels of permission are bound to make it an attractive choice for organisations with demanding security requirements, but with the right hosting, configuration and maintenance, WordPress more than holds its own security-wise. For us, this one’s a tie. 

Integrations & Marketing Technology

WordPress

If strengthening your site’s marketing capabilities is what you’re after, then WordPress’ integrations can pack on some serious muscle. Really, it’s a case of take your pick: CRMs and email marketing platforms, analytics platforms, Ecommerce systems, social media tools and customer data platforms can all be easily integrated into a WordPress site. Better yet, its integrations require very little, if any, developer assistance.

Drupal

If you have more in the way of developer resource, the Drupal’s technical requirements might make more sense. With strong API capabilities and opportunities to develop a headless CMS for limitless scope for custom coding, it’s a little less user friendly in the hands of non-technical teams. But with developers involved, its enterprise-ready integrations can optimise a site’s marketing functions in some really powerful ways.

Verdict

Drupal is capable of sophisticated integrations, but for speedier, more user-friendly integrations, WordPress makes it easier for marketing teams to add additional marketing tech to their websites.

Ease of Use

WordPress

A lot of WordPress’ appeal lies in how straightforward it is to use. Overall, users don’t require a ton of technical knowledge to get to grips with it, especially with its intuitive dashboard and familiar publishing workflow. Marketers can assemble professional-looking pages using its visual, block-based page editors in a remarkably easy way, while multiple marketing teams can manage content independently of each other with no issues.

Drupal

In comparison, Drupal’s learning curve is a steeper one. Like we mentioned in the integration section, mastering it needs far more technical knowledge, so making more advanced changes may require developers to get involved.

Verdict

For those with the patience, time or dev resource, Drupal can offer considerable control over a website. But where ease of use is concerned in the Drupal vs. WordPress face-off, we’re giving this one to WordPress for giving non-technical marketing and content teams easily handle the management of a website.

Scalability

WordPress

WordPress’ ease of use makes it a great go-to for small businesses. Once those businesses start to grow, the platform’s strong scalability functions can easily streamline that growth. Whether it’s a move into Ecommerce or your expansion requires multiple websites for sub-brands, WordPress can handle scaling simply. As for larger sites and businesses, its enterprise deployments take care of those with complex needs, such as the additional scaling, security and customisation of multinationals and educational institutes for example.

Drupal

Better suited to large organisations (we’re talking NASA-sized here), government websites, enterprise portals and sites that attract a high volume of traffic, Drupal’s scalability architecture offers some support, and then some. Favoured by sites where the content structures and user permissions are complex, Drupal lets businesses scale content, traffic and teams all at the same time too, catering to millions of users, huge editorial workflows and real-time content with ease.

Verdict

Both platforms can scale significantly, so really this one comes down to your business’ size. Drupal has long been the choice for organisations with complex enterprise architectures, but WordPress’ scalability capabilities are impressive in their own right. We’re calling this a tie, with a caveat that WordPress tends to be the preferred option by many businesses.

Design & Customisation

WordPress

With thousands of themes, a plethora of page builders and full access to its code, WordPress can be highly customised to suit your business’ needs and visual identity. Its impressive level of integration can make use of design plugins for even more customisation too.

Drupal

Drupal also offers a high level of customisability, with flexible architecture and custom themes to realise design needs. Another area where its extensive developer control can pay off, its powerful content modelling allowing devs to structure content logically, display related content dynamically and make any visual or navigational elements more intuitive. For sites with a lot of content and pages to navigate across the digital experience, that’s a huge positive.

Verdict

Again, the outcome here depends on your business needs and resources. While both platforms are highly customisable, Drupal is better suited to sites with complex content structures. WordPress still boasts advanced design and customisation, but it’s a lot more accessible for marketing teams who don’t need – or have – developer resource to handle it for them. Another tie: WordPress for accessibility, Drupal for highly complex requirements.

SEO Capability

WordPress

WordPress and SEO go hand in hand. This being WordPress, there are extensive tech SEO plugins you can integrate into your site. But it’s already loaded with search-enhancing tools, from control over your metadata to XML sitemaps for faster indexing. Schema markup, canonical URLs and redirect management, meanwhile, improve both your search performance and site experience further, turning your site into an authoritative presence across your sector.

Drupal

Likewise, Drupal features strong technical SEO capabilities similar to WordPress, including configurable metadata, structured content and URL control. However, it will again require developer expertise to make use of such features. For marketers looking to do this themselves, Drupal might not be the best choice.

Verdict

While both platforms can support sophisticated SEO strategies, we’d recommend WordPress just for it’s more marketer-friendly SEO functionalities.

Choosing WordPress or Drupal

So which one would you choose? Let’s summarise the results of the Drupal vs. WordPress showdown more succinctly for you below.

We’d Recommend WordPress If…

WordPress is well suited for marketing teams looking to reduce development dependency so they can manage their own website. As such, WordPress offers the flexibility of a CMS without a steep learning curve. Its extensive library of plugins and marketing platform integrations empowers marketers to further optimise their site – especially if they expect the site to scale and evolve over time.

Generally, WordPress is a strong utility player, serving as the better all-round CMS for most marketing-led organisations.

We’d Recommend Drupal If…

First things first, is Drupal like WordPress? Well, yes and no. They’re both powerful in their own right and offer similar functionalities. However, Drupal serves organisations in need of a more specialised CMS to serve things like complex content structures, complex digital experience and portals that require specific, sophisticated permissions. As such, an experienced internal development team will be needed. If you have plenty of technical resource, they you’ll be better able to leverage Drupal’s powerful potential.

Drupal to WordPress Migration

If your business is currently using Drupal, but you’ve decided to migrate to WordPress, then BANC can support you across the migration process. Our experts have helped clients from a variety of sectors build bespoke WordPress sites tailored to specific business needs. Get in touch with us here for more info.