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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Platform as a Service
  4. Cloud Content Management System
  5. Contentful vs Drupal

Contentful vs Drupal

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Contentful
Contentful
Stacks838
Followers955
Votes70
Drupal
Drupal
Stacks11.1K
Followers4.0K
Votes360

Contentful vs Drupal: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Contentful and Drupal

Contentful and Drupal are both content management systems (CMS) that allow users to create and manage digital content. However, there are several key differences between the two platforms that set them apart.

  1. Architecture: Contentful is built on a modern, headless architecture, while Drupal follows a traditional monolithic architecture. This means that Contentful separates the backend and frontend, allowing for greater flexibility and scalability. Drupal, on the other hand, combines both the backend and frontend, making it more suitable for smaller projects or those with simpler requirements.

  2. Ease of Use: Contentful provides a user-friendly interface and intuitive content model, making it easier for non-technical users to create and manage content. Drupal, while flexible and powerful, has a steeper learning curve and may require more technical expertise to fully utilize its capabilities.

  3. Customization and Flexibility: Drupal offers extensive customization options and a wide range of modules, making it highly flexible and adaptable to specific project needs. Contentful, on the other hand, focuses on providing a streamlined and developer-friendly experience, offering less customization options but ensuring ease of integration with other systems and technologies.

  4. Hosting and Maintenance: Contentful is a fully cloud-hosted CMS, meaning that the hosting and maintenance of the platform are handled by Contentful's infrastructure. Drupal, on the other hand, requires users to set up their own hosting environment and take care of maintenance themselves, which can be more time-consuming and requires technical expertise.

  5. Community and Support: Drupal has a large and active community of developers and users, which translates into a wealth of resources, documentation, and community-driven modules. Contentful, while growing, has a smaller community and may have fewer readily available resources for support and troubleshooting.

  6. Pricing: Contentful follows a subscription-based pricing model, with different pricing tiers based on factors such as the number of content authors, asset storage, and API usage. Drupal, being open-source, is free to use, but users may incur costs for hosting, maintenance, and any commercial modules or integrations they choose to use.

In summary, Contentful and Drupal differ in their architecture, ease of use, customization options, hosting and maintenance requirements, community support, and pricing models. The choice between the two platforms depends on the specific project requirements and the technical expertise and resources available.

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Advice on Contentful, Drupal

Kamaldeep
Kamaldeep

CEO at Zhoustify Agency

Nov 13, 2020

Decided

I usually take a slightly different tack because the technical level of people I usually am dealing with is lower. I tend to be pitching to decision makers and not tech people. A bit of my standard answer is below.

Wix and Squarespace are proprietary systems meant for unsophisticated users who want to build their own websites quickly and easily. While they are good for that specific use case, they do not offer any way to move beyond that if your needs arise. Since they are proprietary closed systems if you need something more advanced at some point your only option is to start over.

WordPress is an Open Source CMS that allows much more freedom. It is not quite as simple to setup and create a new site but if you are talking to me then you are not looking to build it yourself so that is really a non-issue. The main benefit of WordPress is freedom. You can host it on virtually any decent web hosting service and since it uses PHP and MySQL you can have virtually any developer take over a project without problem.

I believe in open source because of that freedom. It is good for me as a developer and it is good for my clients. If something were to happen to me or my company you would have no problem finding another qualified WordPress developer to take over the site in a totally seamless fashion. There would be no need to start from scratch.

Additionally the extensible nature of WordPress means that no matter what your future needs, WordPress can handle it. Adding things like e-commerce and custom quoting systems are just two examples of advanced solution's that I have added to WordPress sites years after they were first built.

WordPress is used by tiny one person businesses all the way up to major websites like the NY Times and I think it is right for this project as well.

69.2k views69.2k
Comments
Kamil
Kamil

Product Manager at Wooclap

Jul 17, 2020

Needs adviceonGoogle DocsGoogle DocsGatsbyGatsby

Hi StackSharers, your help is dearly needed as we're making a move to which we will commit for the next few years.

Problem: As our Marketing team gets growing needs to publish content fast and autonomously, we're trying to add a CMS to our stack.

Specs:

  • This CMS should have fairly advanced marketing features: either natively built, and/or be open source, so we can either find third parties' plugins suiting our needs or build our own plugins homebrew.

  • "Advanced marketing features" like these: Non-devs should be able to handle content autonomously, Should have a non-dev friendly interface, should allow creating a library of reusable components/modules, should show the preview before publishing, should have a calendar with all publications, should show the history/tracking, should allow collaborating (Google Docs like), should display characters limit optimized for SEO.

Solution: We're considering an SSG + Headless CMS combination. We're fairly confident for the SSG (Gatsby), but we're still uncertain which CMS we should choose.

122k views122k
Comments
Maxim
Maxim

Web developer

Apr 14, 2020

Needs adviceonSanitySanity

Hi Community, Would like to ask for advice from people familiar with those tools. We are a small self-funded startup and initial cost for us is very important at that stage. That's why we are leaning towards Sanity. The CMS will be used to power our website and flutter cross-platform mobile applications.

108k views108k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Contentful
Contentful
Drupal
Drupal

With Contentful, you can bring your content anywhere using our APIs, completely customize your content structure all while using your preferred programming languages and frameworks.

Drupal is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications. It’s built, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of people around the world.

Platform agnostic headless CMS; GraphQL and REST APIs; Fast delivery with global CDNs; Images API; Language and framework agnostic; Extensible web interface; CI/CD-ready; Flexible data; App Marketplace integrations; App Framework for building your own; Scheduled publishing, teams, tasks & comments; Localization with fallbacks
Categorize with taxonomy, automatically create friendly path urls, create custom lists, associate content with other content on your site, and create smart defaults for content creators;Manage content with an easy-to-use web interface. Drupal's flexibility handles countless content types including video, text, blog, podcasts, and polls with robust user management, menu handling, real-time statistics and optional revision control.;Users can be assigned one or more roles, and each role can be set up with fine-grained permissions allowing users view and create only what the administrator permits.;You can have tight control over who can create, view, administer, publish and otherwise interact with content on your site.;Build internal and external-facing websites in a matter of hours, with no custom programming.;Drupal's presentation layer allows designers to create highly usable, interactive experiences that engage users and increase traffic.;With more than 16,000 available modules, the vast majority of your site's requirements can be addressed with Drupal core and available add-on modules.
Statistics
Stacks
838
Stacks
11.1K
Followers
955
Followers
4.0K
Votes
70
Votes
360
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 30
    API-based cms
  • 17
    Much better than WordPress
  • 11
    Simple and customizable
  • 5
    Images API
  • 3
    Free for small projects
Cons
  • 5
    No repeater Field
  • 5
    No spell check
  • 4
    No free plan
  • 3
    Slow dashboard
  • 2
    Enterprise targeted
Pros
  • 75
    Stable, highly functional cms
  • 60
    Great community
  • 44
    Easy cms to make websites
  • 43
    Highly customizable
  • 22
    Digital customer experience delivery platform
Cons
  • 1
    DJango
  • 1
    Steep learning curve
Integrations
Algolia
Algolia
imgix
imgix
Bitbucket
Bitbucket
Saleor
Saleor
Twilio
Twilio
Mailgun
Mailgun
Cloudinary
Cloudinary
GraphQL Playground
GraphQL Playground
commercetools
commercetools
Google Cloud Platform
Google Cloud Platform
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Contentful, Drupal?

WordPress

WordPress

The core software is built by hundreds of community volunteers, and when you’re ready for more there are thousands of plugins and themes available to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine. Over 60 million people have chosen WordPress to power the place on the web they call “home” — we’d love you to join the family.

Strapi

Strapi

Strapi is100% JavaScript, extensible, and fully customizable. It enables developers to build projects faster by providing a customizable API out of the box and giving them the freedom to use the their favorite tools.

Ghost

Ghost

Ghost is a platform dedicated to one thing: Publishing. It's beautifully designed, completely customisable and completely Open Source. Ghost allows you to write and publish your own blog, giving you the tools to make it easy and even fun to do.

Wagtail

Wagtail

Wagtail is a Django content management system built originally for the Royal College of Art and focused on flexibility and user experience.

OctoberCMS

OctoberCMS

It is a Laravel-based CMS engineered for simplicity. It has a simple and intuitive interface. It provides a consistent structure with an emphasis on reusability so you can focus on building something unique while we handle the boring bits.

Twill

Twill

Twill is an open source CMS toolkit for Laravel that helps developers rapidly create a custom admin console that is intuitive, powerful and flexible.

Sanity

Sanity

Sanity is a headless, real-time CMS where the editor is an open source React-based construction kit and the backend is a graph-oriented cloud datastore with a globally distributed CDN.

ProcessWire

ProcessWire

ProcessWire is an open source content management system (CMS) and web application framework aimed at the needs of designers, developers and their clients. ProcessWire gives you more control over your fields, templates and markup than other platforms, and provides a powerful template system that works the way you do

Typo3

Typo3

It is a free and open-source Web content management system written in PHP. It can run on several web servers, such as Apache or IIS, on top of many operating systems, among them Linux, Microsoft Windows, FreeBSD, macOS and OS/2.

Directus

Directus

Let's say you're planning on managing content for a website, native app, and widget. Instead of using a CMS that's baked into the website client, it makes more sense to decouple your content entirely and access it through an API or SDK. That's a headless CMS. That's Directus.

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