Drupal vs WordPress: Which CMS Is Right for Your Project?

There are several points that needs to be taken into consideration when you are comparing Drupal vs WordPress. WordPress has a user friendly interface and Drupal has a vast features that attracts more and more users to it. It is obvious that due to simple and easy usage interface WordPress has won the market, but at the same time, Drupal is more flexible and robust. Below we outline the main differences between the two platforms.

What comes with Drupal’s increased complexity and decreased user friendliness is excellent additional functionality over WordPress. Where WordPress is less flexible and makes some assumptions about the way you want things to work, many find value in the simplicity and ease of getting a working website running. Others find value in the range of extra functionality that can be built into Drupal without making drastic changes.

One of the first notable things is Drupal offers the ability to have multiple content types or templates with more functionality than WordPress. Though WordPress allows this to an extent with Post Types, Drupal has a lot more to offer in this regard.

Another good feature of Drupal if the more advanced permissions system, allowing for multiple permission levels. It’s more suited to larger websites with multiple access levels needed. With WordPress, you can have a few preset roles, but with Drupal you can set up any number of user groups and individually control access permissions to each component of Drupal.

In general, Drupal offers more because it was made for more advanced developers to get the most out of it.

For themes, WordPress has more of offer. The selection of both Paid and Free themes is second to none, and since it is currently much more popular for smaller websites than Drupal, getting a full featured theme for your site is very easy. They are easy to install and configure, making a WordPress website a cheap yet effective way to get a good website off the ground.

There are Drupal themes as well, however making a Drupal theme is much more involved and most people using Drupal are making a completely custom site anyway, so the market is not as large.

WordPress also has a large selection of easy to install plugins to extend its functionality. Drupal has this in the form of ‘modules’, but a developer will need to add these to your Drupal installation. They are often expensive.

If something user friendly is what you need, either for a client or the developer, WordPress is the clear winner here. Learning how to both develop and user Drapl is much harder, especially for smaller projects. If you development skills are limited, or your client wants a small to medium website that’s easy to edit themselves, WordPress is the answer. Drupal is more suited larger project which will be updated by a development team.

There’s also the support you get online. Somewhere around 75 million sites use WordPress, so there’s a large community helping out less experienced people figure out their problems. If you have a question, it’s probably easy to bring up an already answered thread with the same problem. With Drupal, there are much less inexperienced people developing for it, and less community help. In many cases, you may have to hunt down a good spot to ask a Drupal related question and wait for an answer if you can’t find what you’re looking for in the documentation, which is less easy to follow for new developers than the WordPress documentation.

Security is of course of utmost importance when setting up a site. Drupal has a lot more to offer in terms of Security. Drupal offers enterprise level security, and many government websites have elected to use it. WordPress, on the other hand, is often the center of attention for security problems – mainly from 3rd party plugins. Since such a large portion of the internet uses WordPRess, it’s also more of a target.

While both WordPress and Drupal can be downloaded and installed for free, there will still be certain costs related to building your website on either platform. First, Drupal modules are often expensive because they are geared for enterprise clients. Drupal is also simply more expensive to get developers for – it’s more complex and there’s less developers that specialize in Drupal as compared to WordPress.

In summary, Drupal is more flexible and robust and suited to larger projects, while WordPress is more user friendly, potentially cheaper and perfect for small to medium sized websites. If you need WordPress or Drupal development services, CodeClouds has the expertise you need with 18/5 support to back it up!