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At a glance, WordPress and Drupal seem similar. They are both open source content management systems with their origins in the early 2000s. Both are written in the PHP programming language and supported by a dedicated community of users and developers.
However, Drupal and WordPress are built for different audiences. They offer distinct user experiences and are better suited to some users and projects than others.
In this article, we’re going to help you decide whether Drupal or WordPress is right for your project, whether you’re considering moving from Drupal to WordPress or choosing a CMS for a new website or ecommerce store.
WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system. Originally a blogging platform, it has evolved to power everything from personal blogs to online stores to corporate websites.
For over 20 years, the guiding principle behind WordPress has been to democratize publishing with a user-friendly platform for people with minimal technical knowledge. As such, it has an intuitive interface and a large ecosystem of plugins and themes that users can combine to build essentially any type of website.
Drupal, in contrast, is intended to provide a complete framework for building custom websites and applications. Rather than make online publishing accessible, Drupal’s goal is to streamline the development process for web professionals and organizations with complex web publishing requirements.
Drupal has a significantly smaller user base than WordPress, but several high-profile organizations build their website with it, including the White House, Tesla, and several NASA departments. Enterprise organizations and government agencies choose Drupal because it’s ideal for scenarios that require heavy customization, sophisticated content structures, or advanced user permissions for potentially thousands of users.
The most frequently emphasized difference between WordPress and Drupal is how hard they are to learn and use. WordPress is a more beginner-friendly platform. Its admin dashboard is designed so non-experts can write and publish content, install themes, and configure settings. Gutenberg’s block editor lets users create custom pages with pre-built blocks in a drag-and-drop interface. Day-to-day tasks can be accomplished with no knowledge of coding.
Drupal, in contrast, has a much steeper learning curve. It’s an enormously powerful content management system, but it rewards users who invest the time to learn the Drupal approach. The admin interface is designed for complex, custom content management. It supports fast and productive workflows for expert content specialists and developers, but non-experts often struggle with its interfaces, taxonomies, and organizational principles.
Over the years, Drupal has become more user-friendly, but it is still an expert tool that trades simplicity for deeper control. WordPress offers a more constrained environment, but it is accessible to writers, editors, and marketers.
Extensibility is a major strength of both platforms. Drupal and WordPress can both be customized far beyond their core installation. However, the ecosystems that have grown up around them are different, both in how they are implemented and in their size.
Most WordPress customization occurs via its plugin and theme ecosystem. WordPress currently hosts more than 60,000 free plugins and 13,000 free themes. Developers also create and sell premium plugins with more advanced features. Plugins cover a massive range of features from SEO to contact forms to learning management systems to ecommerce stores with WooCommerce. If you need a particular feature, it’s likely that a developer has already created a plugin for it.
Drupal integrates more advanced features into the main application than WordPress, such as custom content types. Like WordPress, it also has a module and theme ecosystem for adding additional features. In total, there are around 50,000 Drupal modules. However, they are often tied to specific CMS versions. The number of high-quality, actively maintained modules for the most recent version is in the low thousands.
Where Drupal excels is in the creation and display of custom content models. It allows users to deeply customize its data structures and behaviors. You can create custom content types with fields, define custom taxonomies, and query and display content in any way. In this sense, Drupal is out-of-the-box more flexible than WordPress. But, as we’ve mentioned, this flexibility needs to be wrangled by an expert.
Both content management systems are open source. Users are free to change the code, add new code, and write their own plugins and themes. Unless your organization has in-house development expertise, you are likely to find that custom development is often easier and more affordable in the WordPress ecosystem. That’s a function of WordPress’s popularity. There are many more WordPress developers than Drupal developers.
WordPress and Drupal are free. You can launch as many WordPress or Drupal sites as you want without paying for the software. However, there are costs associated with running and hosting a site. Whichever content management system you choose, you will need to buy a domain name. Beyond that, these are the main expenses you will pay to keep a site up and running.
You will find hosting at a wide range of price points for both content management systems. They can be hosted on cloud platforms and low-cost shared hosting platforms, but in both cases, you won’t get the best performance, security, or stability without a significant time investment.
If you’d prefer your hosting provider to manage the technical aspects, premium managed hosting is available for Drupal and WordPress. Because Drupal tends to be used by very large multinational enterprise websites, Drupal hosting is priced accordingly. Managed WordPress hosting, which provides many of the same advanced features, is typically less expensive.
With the help of a managed WordPress hosting provider, there is little cost involved in setting up a WordPress site beyond the hosting fee. As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, you could have a WordPress site up and running by the end of the day with a high-quality, free or premium theme and a range of plugins.
With Drupal, things are a little more complicated because there are fewer pre-made themes, fewer modules, and the initial setup isn’t as straightforward. You will likely require development and content management expertise to get your site into a state where you can begin to publish.
Managed hosting includes maintenance costs. A premium WordPress hosting provider takes care of the underlying infrastructure, WordPress updates, and performance optimization. This eliminates the need for dedicated technical staff or expensive maintenance contracts. The best managed hosting plans also include automated backups, malware scanning, and automatic scaling.
In contrast, managing Drupal typically requires more hands-on technical work, which increases costs. Drupal’s complex architecture and extensive customization options mean that updates and maintenance often require developer intervention. Unlike with WordPress, Drupal major version upgrades can be disruptive, requiring substantial changes and developer attention.
WordPress is ideal for small to medium-sized businesses that want to build marketing websites, blogs, news sites, and ecommerce stores. It’s often also chosen by enterprise organizations for lead generation sites, documentation sites, marketing sites, and in other scenarios where the flexibility and complexity of a solution like Drupal would be overkill.
Drupal is worth considering for large-scale, complex, or highly customized websites. It’s ideal for organizations with strong technical teams. For example, Drupal may be a better option if you’re building a government portal, a large university website, or a community platform with tens of thousands of users.
Pressable’s managed WordPress hosting provides a secure, reliable, high-performance foundation for WordPress sites and WooCommerce stores. We take care of the technical side so you can focus on growing your business. Every hosting plan includes automatic scaling, a global content delivery network, and our easy-to-use control panel.
Discover our full range of WordPress hosting features or schedule a demo to learn more.
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