Drupal vs WordPress : Choosing the CMS for your website
If you're thinking of creating a website, you've probably already heard of two of the CMS les plus populaires: Drupal and WordPress. While both offer a wide variety of features, it can be difficult to determine which is the best choice for your project. In this comparison, we'll look at the pros and cons of each.
Drupal and WordPress: the two giants of the web
Drupal and WordPress are two popular CMS for website creation. Drupal is often seen as the tool best suited to corporate or large-scale websites which require more customization, an advanced level of security, as well as content management that often proves complex.
For its part, WordPress is often chosen for its ease of use and user-friendliness. It's aimed more at people with no technical knowledge, which traditionally makes it a popular option for blogs, showcase sites or small e-commerce sites.
Drupal in a nutshell...
Drupal is therefore, an open-source content management system (CMS) that allows you to create, manage and publish all kinds of content on a website. It's a platform that's both flexible, powerful and customizable. Drupal is, in particular, recognized for its ability to manage complex, high-traffic websites such as government sites, social media sites, or e-commerce.
Drupal offers a wide variety of services: content management tools, advanced security, or multilingual. It also offers a library of themes and modules that are easyto use and allow an even higher level of customization for those who want it.
Drupal also boasts a large community of developers worldwide who provide regular updates, security patches and a few helping hands when needed.
Wordpress in a nutshell...
WordPress is also a simple open-source system, user-friendly and easy to use for creating websites. It's a very popular option, especially for creating small to medium-sized sites. So it's ideal if you want to launch your blog or a showcase site.
Like Drupal, WordPress offers a range of services that let you customize the look and functions of your site. It also offers a verywide library of free and/or paid themes and plugins that further enrich the already rich existing offering. Wordpress also boasts a large community of developers.
Similarities and differences between Drupal and WordPress
Although Drupal and WordPress are both popular CMSs, they present significant differences in terms of functionality, complexity and capabilities.
One of the main differences between the two platforms is their complexity. Drupal is often considered more difficult to get to grips with, particularly for non-technical users. Drupal requires knowledge of PHP, but also mastery of databases and network architecture.
To note, Drupal Layout Builder can make this approach much easier!"Using WordPress may not require any lines of code, and its interface is simpler to get to grips with.
Generally, the size of projects differs. Despite these differences, Drupal and WordPress also share many similarities. Both CMSs offer numerousthemes and pluginsthat let you play with the look and functionality of the website. They're also both open-sourceand backed by active, dedicated development communities.
Drupal and Wordpress in numbers: the comparison
Because sometimes making a choice and a decision proves tricky, here are some figures and statistics that should enable you to form your own opinion on the subject.
Market share: Wordpress wins the game
The HTTP Archive organization publishes its Web Almanachreport every year. This is a survey that studies the entire ecosystem of content management systemsand observes, year after year, the evolution of their characteristics.
What do we learn in the latest report? Among all websites using an identifiable CMS worldwide, sites using WordPress are overwhelmingly in the majority. (This is the case every year, it's a real underlying trend.)
Here's the breakdown of CMS market share worldwide over the year 2022:
- Thus, WordPress accounted for 35% market share in 2022
- Followed by CMS Wix (2%),
- Joomla (1.8%),
- Drupal (1.6%) and
- Squarespace (1%).
In this report, HTTP Archive highlights WordPress' flawless growth and observes an increase of 1.4% over 2021 on mobile and 0.2% over 2021 on desktop. For their part, Drupal and Joomla continue to lose market share, while Squarespace remains stable and Wix is growing.
The number of websites using Drupal vs WordPress
If we consider the number of websites worldwide, the picture is obviously similar: 38,539,556 are designed using Wordpress, compared to 581,347 using Drupal. In France, it's 956,114 Wordpress sites versus 27,654 Drupal sites.
On the other hand, if we consider only the 100,000 most consulted sites in the world, the proportion dips slightly. 30% of the market is created with Wordpress and 6.7% with Drupal. These statistics tend to confirm that Drupal is used by businesses for ambitious, high-traffic projects.
A Comparison of the Number of Themes and Plugins available
Continuing with the numbers, at the beginning of 2022, over 8,500 different themes are available on Wordpress and over 70,000 plugins on WordPress.org! For its part, in its official directory, Drupal lists over 49,000 plugins and more than 2,500 themes.
That said, if you only include those compatible with version Drupal 9.x, that number drops to 8 000 modules and 250 themes. So it looks like victory once again for Wordpress, having said that, we must remain cautious.
In fact, the offer at Wordpress is now plethoric and users (with a rather non-tech profile) now seem to be rather in trouble when it comes to choosing a particular plugin. Sometimes, too much choice harms the decision!
What are the advantages of Drupal over other CMSs?
Drupal is a CMS with many advantages for creating professional websites. Let's take a look at some of them here together.
Flexibility and scalability
One of Drupal's main interests is its flexibility and scalability. In fact, you can use existing modules or develop new ones adapted to your website and to a use that corresponds exactly to your expectations. Drupal is also a scalable solution. It so easily adapts to all site scales, throughout the site's growth.
It's often used for website factories, which allow you to create a large number of pages toenhance natural search engine optimization (SEO), or to create mono-product or niche online stores. Drupal enables real economies of scale.
Advanced security
The statistic is painful but 90% of hacked CMS worldwide are WordPress sites. Obviously, this has to do with the market share of WordPress... but not only. Drupal is often considered to beone of the most secure CMSs today. Drupal pays particular attention tosecurity, it is regularly updated to resolve existing vulnerabilities and loopholesand prevent future ones.
One of Drupal's key advantages in terms of security is its ability to limit the risk of attacks. Drupal includes security features such asform validation, permissions management, and prevention of XSS and CSRF attacks, which help reduce the risk of security breaches.
Drupal also offers strong authentication and member management to restrict access to certain parts of the site to specific people. You can also add modules forprivacy protection, RGPD compliance and fraud prevention.
Advanced customization
Drupal is often regarded asone of the most customizable CMSs. You have total control over the design and functionality of their site. The open API allows experts to add their own code (which they usually really appreciate).
Customization is also on the content management side which can afford to be complex and hierarchical.
Finally, Drupal offers great flexibility for third-party integrations, such as marketing tools, conversion analysis and tracking tools, and e-commerce tools.
Advanced content management
As we've begun to see, content management is one of the areas where Drupal excels. You can easily manage large volumes and create content types specific to your business or industry.
For example, an e-commerce site can create specific types for its products, for category pages, for brand pages, etc.
Drupal also offers a wide variety of customizable fields, allowing you to create specific fields. They can include, for example, text fields, selection fields, image fields, date fields, and more. Finally, Drupal offers content version control capabilities, allowing editors totrack changes made or revert to previous versions if necessary.
Why choose WordPress as your CMS?
But Wordpress is not to be outdone! It too has many advantages, but we'll see that they're different from those offered by Drupal.
Easy to use and install
Wordpress is known for its quick and easy handling, which is what makes it one of the most popular CMS in the world. To use the basic functions, no training or skills are required. All you need is to be comfortable with digital tools.
In fact, the Wordpress interface is intuitive and easy to understand, even for novices. One of Wordpress's strengths is the ease with which it's possible to install and configure a website. What's more, Wordpress offers live editing, so you can see changes made in real time.
Lower costs
Another advantage of Wordpress is its competitive price. Indeed, Wordpress is a free open-source software that can be installed on any web server. This means you don't have to pay any licensing fees to use the platform.
In addition, Wordpress provides a large number of free themes and plugins that allow you to customize your website without having to hire a web developer or designer. So, sure, you'll still have to pay for hosting, but it's hard to make a more attractive proposition.
A large community of developers and users
Wordpress's large community of developers create a vast library of free and premium themes and plugins that meet almost every need. Sometimes, there's even too much choice!
Wordpress also has a large online support community, with many forums, blogs and websites dedicated to solving problems and getting help from other users. You'll find answers to their questions, tutorials and guides to help you better understand how the platform works.
An attractive design but limited customization
Wordpress also features a simple, intuitive interface, but customizing it still takes a few weeks of getting the hang of it! With more than one user/editor, access management becomes trickier.
However, this doesn't detract from Wordpress's ease of access, which is perfectly suited to novices and non-techies alike.
Examples for different types of website
As you can see, both solutions are interesting tools. The choice will therefore depend on your project. Let's see which one is right for each.
Drupal, the solution for large-scale e-commerce sites
Drupal is an excellent choice for e-commerce sites. In fact, it has a wide range of e-commerce modules, which means you'll be able to add online sales functionality. Drupal is robust and offers an efficient experience for customers and sellers alike.
Features such as order and inventory management, shipment tracking and payment options are compelling. Drupal also offers easy integration with major payment platforms, such as PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.net and many others.
Wordpress for small-scale showcase sites
The design of showcase sites which generally consist ofless than 10 pages in total (sometimes just one or two!) suits Wordpress perfectly. In just a few days, you'll be able to achieve a highly satisfactory result in your brand's colors. By following one or two free online training courses, you can quickly make your showcase site more complex.
Drupal for intranets and site factories
As we've seen, Drupal is a scalable solution that allows you to create multiple pages on the fly. So it's the ideal tool forsite factories that don't have big adaptation needs in both form and function.
The intranets are also very well designed in Drupal : the management of everyone's rights is optimal and companies that formulate this need generally have the teams in-house.
Wordpress for business applications and the backend
Because Wordpress is aimed first and foremost at non-tech people, it's particularly well suited to business applications as well as backend design. Easy to get to grips with, this CMS offers a rapid learning curveand can even be fun (yes, yes!)
What about marketing and multilingualism?
The two solutions are not lacking in interest on various levels. Let's now consider their respective propositions from the angle of marketing and multilingualism.
Drupal for advanced marketing features
Drupal will suit businesses and organizations that needn advanced, high-performance marketing tools.
If, as part of your project, you need to track on a daily basis different KPIs, cohorts of leads, or buyers,if you also want access to specific and precise datathen Drupal is the way to go.
This tool will enable you to acquire a specific knowledge of your target or customers.The integration of tools like Salesforce offers wide-ranging possibilities for your marketing teams.
WordPress for ease of use in marketing
Wordpress is not totally lacking in this respect. You can easily set up simple operations. In concrete terms, you'll be able to create a newsletter, obtain qualified leads, track your sales performance or your shopping cart abandonments, for example.
However, if you want to go further, you may quickly be limitedand have to use more expert plugins.
Drupal for advanced multilingual management
Multilingual management in Drupal is not a topic. It's native, simplified and perfectly adapted. If your project is international, then go for it.
WordPress for limited multilingual support
Multilingual support is less intuitive with Wordpress. You'll have to rely on plugins of relatively variable quality. So, if your project involves rapid deployment in more than 2 or 3 languages, you may be limited by the tool's capabilities.
Ease of migration, costs and maintenance
How much scope and flexibility will you enjoy by choosing Drupal or Wordpress? That's what we're going to look at now.
What's the migration process from Drupal or WordPress
The ability to switch tools is an important point to consider when choosing your tool. Contrary to what we tend to think when launching a site, it's not a detail and should be taken into account. Both Wordpress and Drupal offer the necessary features.
- On the Drupal side: you'll need to go through various modules that are : Migrate, Wordpress Migrate (to migrate to Wordpress), Migrate Extra (for url management) and Pathauto.
- On the Wordpress side: s, you'll need to use the Drupal2Wordpress plugin. In both cases, it's an xml import. Migration is always a delicate stage, but both tools make it relatively easy.
What are the implementation and maintenance costs for Drupal and WordPress
Wordpress side: cAs we've seen in this article, one of the major advantages of this CMS is its low cost (as long as the dimensions of your project remain reasonable.).
In this situation, there's no need to call in an agency or specialist. Maintenance and upkeep are done as you go, and updates can even be automated.
On the Drupal side: it's basically just as simple, although it may be preferable to call on technical profiles to maintain your website on a day-to-day basis.
In this case, then, the costs will be proportional to their services. On an ambitious project, Drupal may nevertheless prove a better deal than Wordpress, insofar as the intervention of an expert on code he didn't design is also more delicate.
The future of Drupal and WordPress, what should we expect?
Development trends for Drupal and Wordpress
Drupal and Wordpress both enjoy a rich news cycle, with new versions released regularly. Nevertheless, we note that usage of Wordpress continues to grow, while that of Drupal is tending to stagnate.
However, Drupal experts benefit from better remuneration, which creates a real form of traction that guarantees its development over time.
So, how do you choose?
It's time to make a decision!
Determine the final choice based on the needs of your project
As we've seen, there's strictly no best solution - that would be too simple! It all really depends on your original idea and vision. If you want to create a showcase site or a small online shop to sell your own products, Wordpress should be fine and you can always migrate if your site grows.
Inversely, if the stakes are high and ambitious from the outset, then choosing Drupal from the outsetof your project might prove more worthwhile.
Some tips for optimal use of Drupal or WordPress
First of all, well done. By reading this article in its entirety, you now have a first, fairly complete overview of how to use Drupal or Wordpress.
If you choose Wordpress, don't hesitate to take a few training courses when you launch, as this can give you a good foundation from the start. You'll find everything you need on their site.
If you're choosing Drupal without having an advanced technical profile, in that case, the best advice is probably to call on one or more experts on the subject from the outset. They'll be able to help you confirm your choice and give you the first essential pointers. We'll be happy to help!