WordPress vs Drupal
Deciding Between WordPress vs Drupal
Perhaps your company has tasked you with discovering the best platform to use. Hopefully, this post will be equitable and help in your decision. We are one of the rare firms that embrace both, so unlike most articles that take a bias view for one or the other, we objectively lay out both, WordPress vs Drupal.
This question of which is better is similar to determining if a hammer or screwdriver better. The answer of course depends on the job at hand. Also, it is worth mentioning that a hammer and screwdriver really don't compare well. A hammer versus a hammer is easier to compare.
Websites and online platforms is like comparing WordPress and Drupal to cars. WordPress would be equivalent to a car. Drupal on the other hand is more similar to a factory that makes cars. See this difference? This is also why Drupal gets heavy criticism for being 'hard to use'. Can you imagine the frustration if ones expects to get in a car and drive away and you give them a factory to build their own? This effect is often why Drupal leaves behind a bad experience. Users get inside and don't understand how to build their own car, versus hop in one and start moving forward.
Why Drupal?
Drupal is going to be best for any system that has:
- Extended user login needs
- Custom workflows and processes (like CRM's, employee application portals, file upload systems etc...)
- Login only systems like intranets (think project management systems, or company wide intranets)
- Just the need for a robust and properly structured database (sometimes known as headless drupal, it just provides the database another language provides the interface)
Drupal is basically a system that gives you an interface and a database, to build your own custom relational database system as you need it. This is in contrast with systems like WordPress, which often achieves such functionality on a limited and paid basis through a commercialized plugin community. Our firm has produced fantastic systems with Drupal. Our own Project Management System is a custom built solution that works great for us all is built in Drupal. We couldn't find a third party project management system we liked so we just built our own with all the features we wanted. Drupal gave us wonderful building blocks to do that. WordPress on the other hand isn't going to work well for a project management system.
Drupal, in this author's opinion is NOT, I repeat NOT a good choice for a standard run of the mill websites in the absence of complex login needs. Drupal can most certainly be a standard website, but that is overkill. Because of Drupal's power it also has more overhead. The security updates are not as automated as WordPress and I would argue there are more site breaks after updates with Drupal than WordPress (on a percentage basis). Bottom line is more time is needed to do it right. Drupal is also a larger platform with more files and more complex systems and code. It will simply need more maintenance. Drupal maintenance fees can average around $100/month for someone else to deal with it. Often times it is higher.
To further complicate the issue Drupal's community is somewhat forked at the moment. Drupal 8 and Drupal 7 are both out now but are only similar in name. The code base the users came to love with Drupal 7 was over 95% rewritten with Drupal 8. With that kind of change it is hard to give the same label, but since Dries (Drupal's founder) owns the name the label follows. Otherwise BackDropCMS.com will be the continuation of the Drupal 7 code base (in a nutshell). Part of me is pleased to know this excellent and loved code base will still be supported. It hurts to know that the support for both Drupal 8 and BackDropCMS (Drupal 7) will be diminished since the community is effectively split.
Drupal 8
As of this article Drupal 8 has been out for several years and Drupal 7 is on end of life. Its continuation will be through BackDropCMS.com. For the rest of the world Drupal 8 is what is now getting downloaded. In our analysis of projects lately we have found Drupal 8 is like bringing a tank to a water gun fight. Doesn't make sense. The level of overkill and overhead is laughable, but seriously is there. Drupal 8's code base is about 3 times larger than Drupal 7, and like all open source starts there was a rocky one. They rebuilt Drupal 8 with Symphony at its core stressing Object Oriented Programming. Furthermore Drupal 8 (to do it properly) needs Composer installed on the server, and the user must know command line in order to install Drupal through Composer. Good luck finding common hosting that allows this.
Most of Drupal 8's internal interfaces are similar enough, but the what is under the hood is very different. This extra complexity and dependencies to even get Drupal on an environment to begin building has by design put it out of reach for most.
Why Would Drupal Do This?
To offer a product for high enterprise level solutions. That is the answer. Notice how this leaves out small to medium size businesses, which there are vastly more more of - what Drupal 7 served, thus the fork. Acquia is the company that benefits most from this, not a big surprise. With that said, don’t let this fact take away from Drupal 8 being incredibly powerful. Again, it was designed for heavy hitting needs, like sledge hammer to place a post it note heavy hitting. For our firm about 95% of the projects that come across our desk Drupal 8 is not needed. About 75% of them Drupal 7 is not needed. Most can be well served by WordPress. Now, this is more a statement about our company and the markets we serve, versus these platforms. However the effect will hold true. Drupal 8 is a focused weapon with great power, but with also great overhead and needs.
Why WordPress?
It is easier to define what WordPress isn’t good for, which basically matches the list of what Drupal is good at. This very long list doesn’t mean that WordPress is ‘better’, it simply means there are more scenarios among small and medium size businesses it can serve, and there are simply more of those businesses. There is nothing I’ve identified that WordPress can do that Drupal can not. There have been many things Drupal can do that WordPress can not. Most items on that list don’t speak to small or medium sized businesses.
What irritates me most about WordPress is that things that are easy to do in Drupal 7 are often times a paid plugin with WordPress. Worse, most of these paid plugins are recurring subscriptions. However, these fees and their low cost are often well worth the headache they spare you from. The other positive about paid plugins is there is profit. Where there is profit there are jobs. Where there are jobs there are people who are paid a salary to make the product your site relies on better. Drupal has a higher rate of module abandonment due to modules on Drupal.org CAN NOT be for sale. So, at the end of the day the paid plugin feature of WordPress does cut both ways.
WordPress will be fantastic for sites that need a basic to mildly complex system with easy editing tools. For the ones that fall into the mildly complex category that is where the sea of plugins both paid and free come in. WordPress is also making correct course corrections within its own community to compete with services like SquareSpace and Wix. For example, the Gutenberg project with WordPress (https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/) speaks to this direction.
As paid plugins go, other site building tools like Beaver Builder (https://bit.ly/2JIznv2) offer not only a drag and drop interface but a lot of functional chunks called modules (not to be confused with Drupal modules which are like WordPress plugins :o). These modules Beaver Builder gives you are effectively what the Views Module with Drupal will do.
Conclusion
If in doubt go WordPress. This will be the conclusion of many posts, but my reasons are somewhat different. Not because it is better, but because on a probability scale, it will likely serve your needs. Even if it doesn’t most times it can provide an affordable path to understanding what you truly need, and why WordPress won’t work.
Drupal 8 on the other hand focused its sights on very high end enterprise level complex solutions. WordPress has focused its sights on ease of use and competing with sites like SquareSpace and Wix. These paths couldn't be more opposed from each other. The benefit I find with this is that there is less overlap between the two, which should make a decision easier and clear cut. So the conclusion is both are incredibly worthy tools. You won’t be disappointed with picking one to use. You will only be disappointed if you don’t match the right platform with your needs.
The Future
The future I hope will eventually hold a platform that has Drupal 8 power with WordPress ease of use. Until then you have to pick a team, WordPress vs Drupal, and that choice will most certainly have future impacts for better or worse.
Still Need Help Deciding on WordPress vs Drupal?
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