Are you planning to develop a good CMS based website? Well, both these frameworks are famous but you need to know each and every corner of both of them in order to go with your startup well. There is no doubt that everyone knows that WordPress is a little more famous than Drupal. According to the survey, out of the top 1 million websites using a content management system of some sort, over 14% use WordPress, and only 1.3% use Drupal.

But still, we would take a dive into the full information in order to know what exactly is better for a startup as we know that every fact has its both good and bad sides. 

WordPress and Drupal address content types using significantly different strategies. This is one of the biggest differences between the two systems and affects the available feature sets, ease of migration, plugin development, and site architecture.

Before getting a deep dive, let’s know little about WordPress and the Drupal.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is an open-source PHP-based content management system created by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little and released in 2003. According to CMS Usage Statistics, WordPress holds the largest part of the CMS market share across all brackets, although this may be driven in part by its popularity among small businesses, Internet marketers, and bloggers. WordPress is associated with, although not owned or managed by Matt Mullenweg’s company “Automattic.”

What is Drupal?

Drupal is an open-sourced PHP-based content management system created by Dries Buytaert and released in 2000. According to CMS Usage Statistics, Drupal is the second most popular CMS across most market segments, but it runs a distant second to WordPress. Drupal is associated with, although not owned or managed by, Dries Buytaert’s company Acquia.

Now, it’s time to discuss the role and benefit of WordPress and Drupal on the basis of certain parameters. So after going through these parameters, we may come to know which is better for your startup. Let’s have a look at them:

Costs

We will start off with costs. Since both platforms are free and open-source, you would think WordPress and Drupal are on equal footing here. Both cost nothing, right? End of story. This is only partially true. While setup costs very much the same (hosting and domain fees), the price tag of building and maintaining your website with these two systems can be very different down the line.

WordPress

One thing that WordPress has going for it is its large community that contributes a lot of free stuff to the platform like themes and plugins. While not all available components are superb, there are thousands of excellent plugins that enable users to build and run feature-rich websites without paying a dime. Add that to the hundreds of affordable premium plugins with even more features and you end up with a low-cost solution for creating powerful and dynamic websites. 

Another advantage of the platform’s position as a front runner in the CMS industry is that professional help for WordPress websites is very easy to come by. A bigger ecosystem means more fish in the pond. Platforms like Fiverr, Elance, Upwork, and others have loads of WordPress developers available for hire. Plus, WordPress professionals tend to charge less for their services than developers for other platforms since it has a relatively low threshold and requires less time to become proficient. As your WordPress site grows in size, you can add additional server power for an incremental cost. All these benefits have increased the demand of WordPress development companies in India.

Drupal

While Drupal is less hungry in terms of hardware, the bad news is that professional help for the system tends to be more expensive. 

In addition, Drupal’s complexity makes it more likely that you will need to hire someone or learn how to wrestle with the platform, which can be a large time and financial commitment. Time is an issue overall since time is money and Drupal development often takes longer than building websites with WordPress. 

Combined, these issues are some of the reasons people estimate that Drupal websites cost up to 10 times more than WordPress. On the other hand, prices for premium modules (the Drupal equivalent to plugins) and themes are similar to WordPress products, so there isn’t much difference there.

Ease of Use

How easily people can control and make changes to their new website by themselves is often a deciding factor for choosing a platform, especially for less tech-savvy users. Ease of use is, therefore, an important consideration for any content management system.

WordPress

User-friendliness is one of WordPress’s strongest suits. The platform is super easy to learn and use, starting from its famous five-minute install. As if that wasn’t enough, many hosts now offer one-click WordPress installations, making it even more convenient to get started. 

Even better, with managed WordPress hosting, users don’t have to deal with the technical details at all and can completely concentrate on creating content and running their business. In addition, the WordPress back end is designed with beginners in mind. It makes creating content, posts, and pages as easy as working with a word processor and updating the system and its components a matter of one click.

Drupal

Installing Drupal is similarly easy: download, upload to your host, run the installation script, and you’re done. The platform also offers distributions, which are pre-packaged with modules and extensions that let you create certain kinds of websites faster. Also, Drupal includes many important customization options out of the box and sports a responsive admin interface that enables you to take care of your site from mobile devices. 

On the other hand, the system is clearly not made for beginner users and demands a certain level of technical knowledge. The back end is fairly complicated and users need basic proficiency in HTML, PHP, and other programming languages to make any meaningful changes outside of the content. 

This includes upgrading the CMS, which needs to be done manually and requires developer skills. For that reason, Drupal is less suitable for a layperson who likes to do things by themselves. You will either need to invest a lot of time in learning or pay someone for their help. 

Performance

Website performance and page loading time matter both to visitors and search engines. Any content management system worth its salt is, therefore, well advised to optimize this area as much as possible

WordPress

WordPress has evolved from its roots as a blogging platform to become a suitable business tool for high-volume enterprise websites. While it previously lagged in the performance category, WordPress

is now trusted by many of the largest sites in the world due to the ability to build lightning-fast websites with page loading times under a second. 

There are times, however, that WordPress can sometimes be bogged down with too many plugins and content and become resource hungry. Yet, as with many things, that’s only true if you don’t know what you are doing. Through proper site maintenance and by taking measures to speed up WordPress (from caching to managed hosting) users have many possibilities to build high-performing websites. The fact that behemoths like The New York Times, TechCrunch, and TED happily use WordPress should put any doubts about its performance capabilities to rest.

Drupal

Drupal is technically advanced and is less hungry for system resources than WordPress. This helps keep costs down and also means Drupal can be used to create websites that support thousands of pages and simultaneous readers. However, taking advantage of Drupal requires advanced knowledge to take full advantage of the platform’s possibilities. The uninitiated will have a hard time getting things to work that way

Security

The internet can be a security nightmare, making website safety a topic that’s high on everyone’s agenda. Let’s see how the two platforms fare in this regard. 

WordPress 

Security is often cited as a weakness of the WordPress platform and a look at past security problems suggests this assessment could be true. However, this perspective is skewed. First, due to its success, the WordPress platform is a much more lucrative target for hackers with many more potential sites to break into.

Secondly, security problems in the past were almost exclusively due to faulty WordPress components like plugins, not the WordPress core software. The dedicated WordPress security team does an excellent job keeping the platform safe by working with leading experts and hosting companies, performing regular safety audits, and monitoring incoming issues. 

In case a vulnerability is detected, they can also swiftly push out security updates that by now get applied automatically for all websites that don’t explicitly turn this feature off. 

Thus, most often users are the weak link in the security chain. By learning how WordPress gets hacked and how to avoid it, users can significantly minimize the risk of their site being compromised.

Drupal

Security is one of Drupal’s strong suits. Discovered vulnerabilities are posted on the official Drupal website and patched as quickly as possible. Individual users can also get detailed security reports to see how safe their site is. 

There’s a reason Drupal is the CMS of choice for the White House and The Economist and why the platform is sometimes represented as the more secure alternative of the two. Yet, Drupal is not without its problems in this area. In 2014 the community was rocked by what was dubbed “Drupalgeddon” after a SQL injection vulnerability was discovered that resulted in a number of websites getting hacked. Still, the platform’s reputation is well deserved.

Final Words

So these are some of the parameters which are making us understand the nature of WordPress and Drupal. I hope after going through the whole blog, you are very well aware of the fact that both these platforms are having their own advantages and disadvantages. 

So it is up to you that on the basis of your requirement, you can contact a good CMS development company in India that can fulfill your requirement keeping in mind the budget at the same time.