Is Drupal the David that brings down the Goliath of WordPress?

It’s time for the battle of giants folks! In the world of Content Management Systems, three, Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla, stand out amongst the rest. In this piece, I will compare Wordpress and Drupal and see who trumps whom!

Wordpress is a true behemoth in terms of number of installations and websites. But do the numbers tell the entire story? Could Drupal be the prodigy that everyone will eventually come to love?

Let’s discuss the features of these two CMS and try to find out the winner!

Ease of Use

When it comes to the ease of use, remember that it all depends on the technical skills of the users. Wordpress started out as a simple blogging platform and evolved into a proper CMS, as the user base grew. As such, it was aimed at people who were new to website development. As a result, it is a simple solution that users could pick up and start creating websites.

When it comes to Drupal, the CMS is a lot more complex and usually requires the users to have basic knowledge of PHP, HTML, CSS and jQuery. It has a much steeper learning curve than Wordpress because the primarily audience of the CMS is enterprise users who need a robust solution for high performing databases and websites.

Scalability

Drupal is the clear winner in the any scalability related debate. Drupal performs significantly better than Wordpress when the size of the website increases and the user generated requests scale up. The main reason of this high performance is the simple fact that the Drupal core is built to offer a high level of performance.

Customizability

Although both Wordpress and Drupal are customizable, thanks to their huge library of add-ons and themes, Drupal goes a step ahead by allowing users to tinker with its core code for extreme flexibility. SInce WordPress is oriented more toward lay users, it restricts access to several critical areas of the core. All this means that Drupal users could customize the platform exactly to their requirements. WordPress users on the other hand, have to make do with the available customization options.

SEO Friendliness

Drupal is more SEO friendly than Wordpress because of the native caching functionality that results in excellent page load time (a crucial factor in search engine optimization). Drupal could also manage huge volume of content effectively and usually support more content types than WordPress. In the world of SEO, content is the king and Drupal has a unique SEO edge over WordPress because of better content management options.

Security

Security is where Drupal has a clear advantage over all other CMS. Being built for enterprise level users, Drupal has enterprise level security built right into the core. In contrast, most of the WordPress security features are implemented via third-party plugins. This mean that a WordPress installation, right out of the box is very vulnerable to attacks. When it comes to security, Drupal is a clear winner.

Upgrades

Though both Wordpress and Drupal are updated rather regularly, the process of applying the updates differs quite a bit. While updating or upgrading a Wordpress website is seamless, Drupal updates do require several manual tasks. This is because Wordpress updates include both database updates and updates to the code, while Drupal only contain database updates and not the code.

Cost

This factor should be pretty clear to you by now. Simply put, Drupal is more expensive to run and maintain than Wordpress and has a steeper learning curve than WordPress. In practical terms, this means that the cost of hiring a Drupal developer is much higher than WordPress.

The Verdict

In the end, both Drupal and Wordpress are great Content Management Systems in their own right. For people who are just starting out with their websites and blogs, Wordpress is usually the best option. However, when it comes to making a website your own with high degree of customization, Drupal is unbeatable. Drupal also takes the lead when you know your website will grow and flourish.

That’s my two cents on the matter. Post your comments on the topic below!