WordPress vs Drupal: A Brutally Honest Comparison (the CMS battle continues)

About WordPress

When it comes to content management systems, there are two names that stand out: WordPress vs Drupal. Each has its own loyal community, a long list of popular websites that it powers, as well as a wide range of features and functionality.


It is common knowledge that WordPress is easier to use and more popular, as compared to Drupal that has a smaller community and a steeper learning curve. But apart from that, what really separates the two? In this article, I shall attempt to compare WordPress vs Drupal across a given set of fields.

 

Let’s have a quick introduction to the two players in this comparison. Obviously, both are content management systems. That means they give you a self-hosted solution to create and manage all of the content on your website.

So how do they stack up as content management systems?

WORDPRESS

WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system. Originally launched as a blogging platform back in 2003, WordPress now powers 29% of all websites and controls a massive 59.8% of the known content management system market.

Some notable examples of famous entities using WordPress for all, or part, of their web presence are:

Whitehouse.gov
Sony Mobile
University of Washington
Mercedes Benz
TechCrunch
The New Yorker

 

DRUPAL

Drupal has been around for even longer than WordPress, though it lacks WordPress’ gaudy market share. Originally launched in 2000, Drupal powers 2.3% of all websites and has a 4.6% share of the content management system market.

Some notable websites running on Drupal are:

University of Colorado
State of Colorado
The Economist
Dallas Cowboys
Nasa.gov

 

ADVANTAGES OF THE PLATFORMS

 

Let’s now compare their advantages to see how they stack up.

 

WORDPRESS ADVANTAGES

Ease of getting help – WordPress’ massive global community means that it’s easy to find support for any issues that you run into.
Lower development costs – WordPress offers more “out of the box” solutions and WordPress developers are usually more affordable than Drupal developers
Ease of use – WordPress is significantly more user-friendly, especially for non-developers.
Extensibility – WordPress’ third-party theme and plugin communities make it similarly easy to extend WordPress without the need for custom development. Some people even claim that, with the right extensions, WordPress can do anything that Drupal can do.

 

DRUPAL ADVANTAGES

Core support for multilingual sites – in Drupal 8, multilingual functional is baked into the core, whereas WordPress sites need to turn to third-party plugins.
Taxonomies for handling lots of data – Drupal’s taxonomy system is more flexible than WordPress, which can make it ideal for handling lots of content.

Custom content types and views – while WordPress does offer custom post types, most people consider Drupal’s custom content types to be a bit more flexible.
Access controls/user permissions – whereas WordPress single-site ships with 5 basic user roles, Drupal has a built-in access control system where you can create new roles with individual permissions.