WordPress vs Drupal | What are the differences?

Overview

WordPress

Stacks99.7K

Followers41.4K

Votes2.1K

GitHub Stars20.6K

Forks12.9K

Drupal

Stacks11.2K

Followers4.0K

Votes360

Drupal vs WordPress: 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, WordPress is detailed as "A semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability". 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.

Drupal and WordPress belong to "Self-Hosted Blogging / CMS" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Drupal are:

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.

On the other hand, WordPress provides the following key features:

Flexibility
Publishing Tools
User Management

"Stable, highly functional cms" is the top reason why over 63 developers like Drupal, while over 397 developers mention "Customizable" as the leading cause for choosing WordPress.

WordPress is an open source tool with 12.6K GitHub stars and 7.64K GitHub forks. Here's a link to WordPress's open source repository on GitHub.

Stack Exchange, MIT, and PedidosYa are some of the popular companies that use WordPress, whereas Drupal is used by MIT, Tesla Motors, and Mint. WordPress has a broader approval, being mentioned in 5281 company stacks & 1353 developers stacks; compared to Drupal, which is listed in 684 company stacks and 158 developer stacks.

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Advice on WordPress, Drupal

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.

69.1k views69.1k

Comments

Krish

Nov 19, 2021

Needs adviceon

Next.js

Firebase

WordPress

Hi Stackers, We are planning to build a product information portal that also provides useful articles and blogs. Application Frontend is going to be built on Next.js with Authentication and Product Database helped by Firebase. But for the Blog / Article we are debating between WordPress/GraphQL plug-in or Strapi.

Please share your thoughts.

293k views293k

Comments

Xander

Founder at Rate My Meeting

Mar 30, 2020

Decided

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.

243k views243k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

WordPress	Drupal
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.	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.
Flexibility;Publishing Tools;User Management;Media Management;Full Standards Compliance;Easy Theme System;Extend with Plugins;Built-in Comments;Search Engine Optimized;Multilingual;Easy Installation and Upgrades;Importers;Own Your Data	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
GitHub Stars 20.6K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 12.9K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 99.7K	Stacks 11.2K
Followers 41.4K	Followers 4.0K
Votes 2.1K	Votes 360
Pros & Cons
Pros 417 Customizable 368 Easy to manage 356 Plugins & themes 259 Non-tech colleagues can update website content 248 Really powerful Cons 13 Hard to keep up-to-date if you customize things 13 Plugins are of mixed quality 10 Not best backend UI 2 Complex Organization 1 Do not cover all the basics in the core	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
ClickTale Clicky Disqus Formstack GoSquared HipChat Hipmob KickoffLabs KISSmetrics LiveChat	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to WordPress, Drupal?

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

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

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

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

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.