Contentful vs. Drupal

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Contentful
Score 7.5 out of 10
N/A
Contentful is a cloud based CMS solution that provides the ability to manage content across multiple platforms.The editing interface allows for managing content interactively and provides developers the ability to deliver the content with the programming language and template framework of their choice.
$0
Drupal
Score 7.1 out of 10
N/A
Drupal is a free, open-source content management system written in PHP that competes primarily with Joomla and Plone. The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains basic features such as account and menu management, RSS feeds, page layout customization, and system administration.N/A
Pricing
ContentfulDrupal
Editions & Modules
Lite
$300
per month
Community
Free
Enterprise
Custom
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
ContentfulDrupal
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
ContentfulDrupal
Features
ContentfulDrupal
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Contentful
7.3
8 Ratings
12% below category average
Drupal
8.2
71 Ratings
0% below category average
Role-based user permissions7.38 Ratings8.271 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
Contentful
8.0
9 Ratings
3% above category average
Drupal
7.2
67 Ratings
7% below category average
API8.38 Ratings6.562 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language7.76 Ratings7.858 Ratings
Web Content Creation
Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Product A and Product B
Contentful
7.7
10 Ratings
1% below category average
Drupal
6.5
75 Ratings
18% below category average
WYSIWYG editor7.34 Ratings6.068 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness8.56 Ratings7.872 Ratings
Admin section8.08 Ratings6.675 Ratings
Page templates7.64 Ratings5.674 Ratings
Library of website themes7.52 Ratings5.765 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design7.75 Ratings7.269 Ratings
Publishing workflow8.09 Ratings7.573 Ratings
Form generator7.01 Ratings5.970 Ratings
Web Content Management
Comparison of Web Content Management features of Product A and Product B
Contentful
8.0
9 Ratings
8% above category average
Drupal
6.1
74 Ratings
19% below category average
Content taxonomy8.08 Ratings6.868 Ratings
SEO support7.07 Ratings5.869 Ratings
Bulk management7.75 Ratings5.765 Ratings
Availability / breadth of extensions8.56 Ratings6.467 Ratings
Community / comment management9.01 Ratings6.066 Ratings
Best Alternatives
ContentfulDrupal
Small Businesses
ManageWP
ManageWP
Score 10.0 out of 10
ManageWP
ManageWP
Score 10.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
RWS Tridion Sites
RWS Tridion Sites
Score 9.0 out of 10
RWS Tridion Sites
RWS Tridion Sites
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
RWS Tridion Sites
RWS Tridion Sites
Score 9.0 out of 10
RWS Tridion Sites
RWS Tridion Sites
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
ContentfulDrupal
Likelihood to Recommend
8.3
(10 ratings)
7.4
(79 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
1.0
(19 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(12 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.7
(3 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
8.9
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
1.0
(5 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
6.0
(2 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
5.1
(4 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
ContentfulDrupal
Likelihood to Recommend
Contentful
Contentful is well suited for folks who want a simple, clean, easy-to-use interface for a JAVASCRIPT website. If you do not want a javascript website you should look [elsewhere].
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Drupal.org
Overall, I would give my rating of Drupal a 7/10 because there is an easy user experience for those without a website background but there is some technology work required to build more website capabilities that aren't as user-friendly. Drupal is specifically well suited to update content (like changing Relationship Manager cards when there is employee turnover), post announcements (putting up a holiday banner to let our customers know the dates we will be closed over Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc., and creating a sophisticated website hierarchy of pages (for our firm, several dropdowns depending on if you're looking for personal banking, business banking, investment banking, about us, etc.).
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Pros
Contentful
  • Clean, modern interface (not clunky and outdated, like WordPress)
  • High degree of flexibility (I can structure data any way my clients need)
  • Enables headless frontend (i.e. I can build any frontend I want without having to change my CMS)
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Drupal.org
  • It has excellent security features and consistent updates.
  • It allows for extensive customization with the integrated themes and core code, especially when you first install it. This allows our dev team to get creative with marketing initiatives.
  • There is a large online community of Drupal users that consistently help answer any questions and issues
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Cons
Contentful
  • The new Contentful "branches" feature looked promising (it appears to mirror a git-like repository) but it requires the CLI, which isn't necessarily practical for teams that aren't current CLI users. It would be nice if the management of this feature were available via the UI (without that it causes more confusion than anything).
  • The Contentful data modeling method makes for a bit of an awkward SDK developer experience in some strongly typed languages like Java. Most things that you might need can be accomplished, but it feels like the experience could be smoother.
  • It would be nice if there were a way to migrate data between spaces (e.g. from your staging space to production).
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Drupal.org
  • Security and new release notifications are a hassle as they happen too often
  • Allowing them to write PHP modules is a big advantage, but sometimes integrating them is a small challenge due to the version the developer is working on.
  • Steep learning curve, but worth it
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Likelihood to Renew
Contentful
No answers on this topic
Drupal.org
The time and money invested into this platform were too great to discontinue it at this point. I'm sure it will be in use for a while. We have also spent time training many employees how to use it. All of these things add up to quite an investment in the product. Lastly, it basically fulfills what we need our intranet site to do.
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Usability
Contentful
No answers on this topic
Drupal.org
As a team, we found Drupal to be highly customizable and flexible, allowing our development team to go to great lengths to develop desired functionalities. It can be used as a solution for all types of web projects. It comes with a robust admin interface that provides greater flexibility once the user gets acquainted with the system.
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Reliability and Availability
Contentful
No answers on this topic
Drupal.org
Drupal itself does not tend to have bugs that cause sporadic outages. When deployed on a well-configured LAMP stack, deployment and maintenance problems are minimal, and in general no exotic tuning or configuration is required. For highest uptime, putting a caching proxy like Varnish in front of Drupal (or a CDN that supports dynamic applications).
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Performance
Contentful
No answers on this topic
Drupal.org
Drupal page loads can be slow, as a great many database calls may be required to generate a page. It is highly recommended to use caching systems, both built-in and external to lessen such database loads and improve performance. I haven't had any problems with behind-the-scenes integrations with external systems.
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Support Rating
Contentful
No answers on this topic
Drupal.org
As noted earlier, the support of the community can be rather variable, with some modules attracting more attraction and action in their issue queues, but overall, the development community for Drupal is second to none. It probably the single greatest aspect of being involved in this open-source project.
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In-Person Training
Contentful
No answers on this topic
Drupal.org
I was part of the team that conducted the training. Our training was fine, but we could have been better informed on Drupal before we started providing it. If we did not have answers to tough questions, we had more technical staff we could consult with. We did provide hands-on practice time for the learners, which I would always recommend. That is where the best learning occurred.
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Online Training
Contentful
No answers on this topic
Drupal.org
The on-line training was not as ideal as the face-to-face training. It was done remotely and only allowed for the trainers to present information to the learners and demonstrate the platform online. There was not a good way to allow for the learners to practice, ask questions and have them answered all in the same session.
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Implementation Rating
Contentful
No answers on this topic
Drupal.org
Plan ahead as much you can. You really need to know how to build what you want with the modules available to you, or that you might need to code yourself, in order to make the best use of Drupal. I recommend you analyze the most technically difficult workflows and other aspects of your implementation, and try building some test versions of those first. Get feedback from stakeholders early and often, because you can easily find yourself in a situation where your implementation does 90% of what you want, but, due to something you didn't plan for, foresee, or know about, there's no feasible way to get past the last 10%
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Alternatives Considered
Contentful
Easy to use and much more organized as a single platform versus multi. The layout is clean and easy to read and we don’t have to worry about certain users safe guarding data or content then losing it when they leave the company. It’s a one stop shop for imagery
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Drupal.org
Drupal can be more complex to learn, but it offers a much wider range of applications. Drupal’s front and backend can be customized from design to functionality to allow for a wide range of uses. If someone wants to create something more complex than a simple site or blog, Drupal can be an amazing asset to have at hand.
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Scalability
Contentful
No answers on this topic
Drupal.org
Drupal is well known to be scalable, although it requires solid knowledge of MySQL best practices, caching mechanisms, and other server-level best practices. I have never personally dealt with an especially large site, so I can speak well to the issues associated with Drupal scaling.
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Return on Investment
Contentful
  • There was no negative impact as such.
  • Positive impact is increase in sales.
  • More work is delivered due to reusability and other features within a time and less manual effort.
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Drupal.org
  • Given the endless possibilities that Drupal can have, we tend to have great support going on when we get a website launched
  • It has become much much faster and easier for us to launch a new project due to reusability
  • Configuration management in Drupal helps greatly with CI/CD, saves us costs
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ScreenShots

Contentful Screenshots

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