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Drupal vs Ghost: What are the differences?
Developers describe Drupal as "Free, Open, Modular CMS written in PHP". 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. On the other hand, Ghost is detailed as "Just a blogging platform". 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.
Drupal and Ghost belong to "Self-Hosted Blogging / CMS" category of the tech stack.
"Stable, highly functional cms" is the top reason why over 63 developers like Drupal, while over 40 developers mention "Beautiful" as the leading cause for choosing Ghost.
Ghost is an open source tool with 30.3K GitHub stars and 6.55K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Ghost's open source repository on GitHub.
According to the StackShare community, Drupal has a broader approval, being mentioned in 685 company stacks & 162 developers stacks; compared to Ghost, which is listed in 60 company stacks and 39 developer stacks.
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.
So many choices for CMSs these days. So then what do you choose if speed, security and customization are key? Headless for one. Consuming your own APIs for content is absolute key. It makes designing pages in the front-end a breeze. Leaving Ghost and Cockpit. If I then looked at the footprint and impact on server load, Cockpit definitely wins that battle.
10 Years ago I have started to check more about the online sphere and I have decided to make a website. There were a few CMS available at that time like WordPress or Joomla that you can use to have your website. At that point, I have decided to use WordPress as it was the easiest and I am glad I have made a good decision. Now WordPress is the most used CMS. Later I have created also a site about WordPress: https://www.wpdoze.com
Pros of Drupal
- Stable, highly functional cms73
- Great community59
- Easy cms to make websites43
- Highly customizable41
- Digital customer experience delivery platform21
- Really powerful16
- Customizable15
- Flexible10
- Good tool for prototyping10
- Enterprise proven over many years when others failed8
- Open source7
- Each version becomes more intuitive for clients to use7
- Well documented7
- Headless adds even more power/flexibility7
- Lego blocks methodology6
- Caching and performance4
- Powerful3
- Built on Symfony3
- Can build anything3
- Views2
- API-based CMS1
Pros of Ghost
- Beautiful44
- Fast34
- Quick/simple post styling29
- Open source19
- Live Post Preview19
- Non-profit19
- Seamless writing16
- Node.js6
- Fast and Performatic5
- Javascript5
- Simplest4
- Handlebars3
- Wonderful UI3
- Full Control3
- Magic2
- Clean2
- Headless CMS1
- Self-hostable1
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Cons of Drupal
- Steep learning curve1
- DJango1