Drupal vs. Medium

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Drupal
Score 7.0 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
Medium
Score 9.4 out of 10
N/A
Medium is a blogging and web publishing platform from the company of the same name in San Francisco, California.
$5
per month
Pricing
DrupalMedium
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Medium Member - monthly
$5
per month
Friend of Medium - monthly
$15
per month
Medium Member - annually
$60
per year
Friend of Medium - annually
$150
per year
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DrupalMedium
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
DrupalMedium
Considered Both Products
Drupal
Chose Drupal
Drupal supports lots of devices like Mac, Windows, Linux etc. easily, and it is an open source product so there's no cost required. Lots of other products require purchasing, costing a high amount. The support system of Drupal is also good in comparison to other products. The …
Medium
Chose Medium
There are a handful of other blogging platforms available. The biggest difference between Medium and others is how streamlined it is. It's straight to the point and is excellent at showing related content, be it your own or another users. There's no new design to navigate …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
DrupalMedium
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Drupal
3.2
66 Ratings
87% below category average
Medium
-
Ratings
Role-based user permissions3.266 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
Drupal
7.9
63 Ratings
3% above category average
Medium
-
Ratings
API9.358 Ratings00 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language6.654 Ratings00 Ratings
Web Content Creation
Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Product A and Product B
Drupal
5.9
69 Ratings
27% below category average
Medium
-
Ratings
WYSIWYG editor2.262 Ratings00 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness9.366 Ratings00 Ratings
Admin section4.069 Ratings00 Ratings
Page templates4.868 Ratings00 Ratings
Library of website themes3.959 Ratings00 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design10.063 Ratings00 Ratings
Publishing workflow9.367 Ratings00 Ratings
Form generator4.064 Ratings00 Ratings
Web Content Management
Comparison of Web Content Management features of Product A and Product B
Drupal
5.7
68 Ratings
26% below category average
Medium
-
Ratings
Content taxonomy10.063 Ratings00 Ratings
SEO support2.363 Ratings00 Ratings
Bulk management10.059 Ratings00 Ratings
Availability / breadth of extensions3.062 Ratings00 Ratings
Community / comment management3.162 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
DrupalMedium
Small Businesses
Divi
Divi
Score 10.0 out of 10
Squarespace
Squarespace
Score 8.5 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Image Relay
Image Relay
Score 9.5 out of 10
WordPress
WordPress
Score 8.5 out of 10
Enterprises
RWS Tridion Sites
RWS Tridion Sites
Score 9.0 out of 10
Quora Blogs
Quora Blogs
Score 8.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
DrupalMedium
Likelihood to Recommend
3.2
(78 ratings)
10.0
(8 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.2
(18 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
3.0
(10 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Availability
9.7
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.9
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
5.0
(4 ratings)
9.5
(3 ratings)
In-Person Training
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
6.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
5.1
(4 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
8.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
DrupalMedium
Likelihood to Recommend
Drupal.org
Well, I'm definitely biased, I've been working with Drupal for 12+ years, and I can say it's appropriate for any size/scale of a project, whether it's a small catalog website or a huge corporation. If I want to dial it down to a specific use case, Drupal is best what most customers/clients that have high-security standards, and need to have extensive editorial experience and control over their website's architecture. Due to its core design, Drupal can connect with each part of its own and any external third-party resources quite easily. For a less-suited scenario, I might say that if you don't have enough budget to get proper work done, sometimes just using WordPress with a pre-designed theme might sound better to you, but if you have the budget and the time, always go with Drupal
Read full review
Medium.com
If you are vanity publishing and just want to see your stuff on the web, it is very, VERY easy to get involved with. Of course, your writing is not likely to stand out if you don't have a clear plan. The more I use it, the more I like it. The user interface is extremely well-done. I kinda wish my WordPress-based blogs had editors that were that easy to use.
Read full review
Pros
Drupal.org
  • Content Types... these are amazing. Whereas a more simplistic CMS like Wordpress will basically allow you to make posts and build pages, Drupal 8 gives you the ability to define different types of content that behave differently, and are served up differently in different areas of the website.
  • Extensibility... it scales, ohhhh does it scale. They've really figured out server-side caching, and it makes all the difference. Once a page has been cached, it's available instantly to all users worldwide; and when coupled with AWS, global redundancy and localization mean that no matter where you're accessing the site, it always loads fast and crisp.
  • Workflows... you have the ability to define very specific roles and/or user-based editorial workflows, allowing for as many touchpoints and reviews between content creation and publication as you'll require.
Read full review
Medium.com
  • Content categorization and grouping.
  • The option to make some money from sharing your passion and teaching.
  • Moderating content manually to not promote AI-generated content and boosting very authentic and impactful posts.
Read full review
Cons
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
Read full review
Medium.com
  • The payment wall can be confusing.
  • Hard to get traction if you're trying to go viral with an article.
  • Sometimes content gets buried too easily.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
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.
Read full review
Medium.com
No answers on this topic
Usability
Drupal.org
It's a great CMS platform and there are a ton of plugins to add some serious functionality, but the security updates are too complex to implement and considering the complexity of the platform, security updates are a must. I don't want my site breached because they make it too difficult to keep it up to date.
Read full review
Medium.com
By comparison, most online editors are clunky. The Medium editor is amazingly powerful and still easy to use.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
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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Medium.com
No answers on this topic
Performance
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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Medium.com
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
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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Medium.com
Medium is supported across android, iOS and the web. While it may not have all the languages supported, English is certainly an option and with a pricing model that ranges from free to $5 for a subscription, you can't go wrong whether you're a small or large business. Everything is hosted in the cloud so it is very accessible
Read full review
In-Person Training
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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Medium.com
No answers on this topic
Online Training
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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Medium.com
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
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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Medium.com
Medium is dirt easy to use. The hard part is figuring out if it is worth the effort to include it as part of our content-marketing strategy.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Drupal.org
Drupal is community-backed making it more accessible and growing at a faster rate than Sitefinity which is a proprietary product built on .NET. Drupal is PHP-based using some but not all Symphony codebase. Updates for Drupal are frequent and so are feature adds.
Read full review
Medium.com
There are a handful of other blogging platforms available. The biggest difference between Medium and others is how streamlined it is. It's straight to the point and is excellent at showing related content, be it your own or another users. There's no new design to navigate between posts, everything is where you expect it to be letting you focus on the post.
Read full review
Scalability
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.
Read full review
Medium.com
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Drupal.org
  • Drupal has allowed us to build up a library of code and base sites we can reuse to save time which has increased our efficiency and thus had a positive financial impact.
  • Drupal has allowed us to take on projects we otherwise would not have been able to, having a further impact.
  • Drupal has allowed us to build great solutions for our clients which give them an excellent ROI.
Read full review
Medium.com
  • Good way to raise awareness of our content with @mentioned influencers
  • Good way to link back to your original content
  • Aside from publishing your own content Medium is a great news site in its own right. If you're looking for relevant industry news or other content, check in daily to see what's going on with others in your industry.
Read full review
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