Drupal vs. MODX

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
MODX
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
The MODX Digital Experience Platform provides everything you need to build, host, and maintain amazing websites your way. The vendor says that with MODX CMS and cloud hosting, users have complete control over their creative vision and the experiences they deliver, without restriction or compromise. They can focus more on building great digital experiences, and less on hosting and maintaining. If you ever need help, MODX Professionals are available worldwide and direct support from…
$0
Pricing
DrupalMODX
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Free
$0
Base
$39
per month
Pro
$99
per month
Business
$349
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DrupalMODX
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional DetailsPAYMENT FORMS MODX Cloud accepts major credit cards and PayPal for your hosting subscription. We can only accept check (cheque) payments on the Enterprise Plan, annually. CANCELLATION You may cancel your MODX Cloud account at any time. Before you cancel you'll be reminded to backup and remove all your live websites and then follow the instructions for cancellation. If you cancel within the first month, we'll provide you with a full refund. REFUNDS If you cancel within the first month, we'll provide you with a full refund. All other cancellations will be effective at the end of your current billing period. We do not provide refunds for remaining days or months on monthly or annual billing.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
DrupalMODX
Considered Both Products
Drupal
Chose Drupal
Drupal is harder to begin with but it gives the developer much more access to create bespoke features.
Chose Drupal
I think Wordpress beats Drupal in every possible way. The upgrades to newer versions are almost trivial, unlike Drupal which, in our experience, requires hundreds or thousands of hours of work and untold sums of money simply to go from one version to the next! In my opinion, …
Chose Drupal
Drupal's capabilities outpace WordPress by miles. Drupal is more customizable, scales better for larger companies and has advanced content types. If you own a small business or work at a startup company, I would recommend WordPress but if your firm is trying to scale and you …
Chose Drupal
Drupal is best for complex applications. It is more suitable for large-scale applications. It is more scalable and structured than the competitor. Provides a strong API structure and a Robust headless architecture, making it perfect for progressive web apps. Highly robust, …
Chose Drupal
Drupal excels at allowing seasoned programmers to really get creative with marketing initiatives in terms of working with a theme and the core code. That being said, it is definitely much more challenging for average developers and front-end builders to use, especially at …
Chose Drupal
Drupal has some advantages and disadvantages when stacked up against Wordpress,, including that Wordpress is easier to user for beginners and requires less training to get started. I noticed that while using Drupal, more help and assistance was needed from developers to make …
Chose Drupal
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, …
Chose Drupal
I inherited Drupal from a developer who made the website for our nonprofit many years ago. It was increasingly obvious that it wasn't a fit for our organization, which has multiple staff and volunteers who need to edit or update the website but don't have coding experience. Wix …
Chose Drupal
Drupal requires less to no coding abilities to spin up sites.
Even if someone is preparing to develop sites that require technical know how then Drupal provides role based systems to seperate developers from content writers.
Drupal 8 and 9 now have a vast array of plugins. Now …
Chose Drupal
WordPress for sure has a bigger community, a lot of paid extensions which sometimes is easier to purchase and get started, a lot of pre-designed templates to get you going, but nowadays with the scale of the projects we've been working with, and the need for custom-tailored …
Chose Drupal
Drupal's commerce module features custom e-commerce functionality, allowing for customization that fits our commercial enterprise model.
Chose Drupal
We use both, for different projects (Joomla and Drupal). Drupal proved to be more robust, more secure and more integrable with PHP applications.
Drupal requires a more senior technical team but allows for more complex activities. It's great if you have a medium to a large …
Chose Drupal
We first had a WordPress-based website, that evolved to a custom third-party developed content management system. In both cases, that involved additional costs for any change request, any security or any scalability need.
WordPress didn't meet enterprise requirements. That also …
Chose Drupal
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.
Chose Drupal
Drupal is far more usable and stable than Joomla!, and the developer community support is significantly stronger. While Drupal is often compared to WordPress, they are fundamentally different platforms, and in most projects, it's very clear when the requirements are beyond what …
Chose Drupal
We were looking for an open source CMS. WordPress wasn't powerful enough for our needs. Joomla was too difficult for our team to use.
Chose Drupal
We have used many content management systems — WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, ExpressionEngine, and more. Drupal is more powerful and flexible than most.
Chose Drupal
We did a comparison of Drupal against Joomla, WordPress, and Ingeniux. We found that its multiple themes available for web pages, user management, comment management, and form generation stands apart from its competitors.
Chose Drupal
I've used Wordpress sparingly when helping a client with an existing website. I find it much less powerful and robust, and frankly confusing. The way Wordpress websites are set up in the backend doesn't make sense to me after getting used to how Drupal is set up. They're …
Chose Drupal
Drupal is really the only well-supported open-source CMS that is designed for large, data-rich websites. There just really weren't any good alternatives. There are plenty of CMSs that excel at small to medium-sized websites. But for a large website with lots of structured data, …
Chose Drupal
Although Drupal is not the most used, it has great performance and is more used in professional projects. It allows us to expand without starting from scratch.
Chose Drupal
Security-wise and traffic-wise Drupal is built to handle a lot. While the other platforms mentioned ( mainly Wordpress ) are great and have a large community, I would only use Drupal for an Enterprise level platform to build a website on. I first learned about Drupal about 10 …
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 …
MODX
Chose MODX
After having built sites with wordpress, joomla, drupal, october cms, craft cms, magento, presstashop, opencart, os commerce and more it is my number 1 (october cms is 2).

Chose MODX
The other company that we looked into was Wordpress and all of the features that it offered our organization. What MODX offered to us from development to everyday use just made more sense for our organization as a whole. Wordpress is still a great CMS platform, just not exactly …
Chose MODX
As said before, MODX is a coder's dream because of the flexibility it provides to own your code and has true creative freedom. Because of that, there is a bigger learning curve when it comes to a non-developer trying to iterate on the CMS with content additions and changes. To …
Features
DrupalMODX
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Drupal
8.2
Ratings
0% below category average
MODX
9.9
Ratings
19% above category average
Role-based user permissions8.20 Ratings9.90 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
Drupal
7.7
Ratings
1% below category average
MODX
8.0
Ratings
3% above category average
API7.30 Ratings6.10 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language8.20 Ratings9.90 Ratings
Web Content Creation
Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Product A and Product B
Drupal
6.5
Ratings
18% below category average
MODX
9.4
Ratings
19% above category average
WYSIWYG editor6.30 Ratings9.80 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness8.20 Ratings9.90 Ratings
Admin section6.90 Ratings8.90 Ratings
Page templates5.60 Ratings9.90 Ratings
Library of website themes5.50 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design6.50 Ratings9.90 Ratings
Publishing workflow6.70 Ratings9.90 Ratings
Form generator6.50 Ratings9.90 Ratings
Web Content Management
Comparison of Web Content Management features of Product A and Product B
Drupal
6.5
Ratings
14% below category average
MODX
9.5
Ratings
24% above category average
Content taxonomy6.90 Ratings9.90 Ratings
SEO support6.30 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Bulk management6.30 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Availability / breadth of extensions6.60 Ratings8.90 Ratings
Community / comment management6.70 Ratings9.90 Ratings
Best Alternatives
DrupalMODX
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
DrupalMODX
Likelihood to Recommend
6.8
(0 ratings)
9.9
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
1.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
6.9
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Availability
9.7
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.9
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
1.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
In-Person Training
8.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
6.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
5.1
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
8.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
DrupalMODX
Likelihood to Recommend
If you want to set up a basic Not For Profit (NFP) Membership system and content base, Word Press is easier than Drupal. However, if you have specific needs that require a fair bit of customisation then Drupal is the best CRM available. If the webmaster is confident with PHP and SQL, Drupal allows a lot of creativity.
Read full review
In my opinion, MODX is usually the choice of a developer who wants to build out custom designs that create really interesting web pages, but when it comes to being easily used and edited by your marketing team, you can run into a lot of issues and end up making simple changes a more involved process.
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Pros
  • 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
  • Custom design capabilities.
  • Works well with plugins.
  • Permission systems for users.
Read full review
Cons
  • 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
  • Content Blocks - I mentioned this as a strength, but it also has its quirks. There are times that things do not function properly within the content blocks we have set up.
  • More Customization - The ability for the average user to customize more without having to know a ton of code.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
I really like Drupal, and besides the one major issue with not being able to update from version 6 to version 7 and I am happy to continuing using it. Hopefully as time goes on they will make it easier to upgrade or provide better tools for mid-level web designers like myself to build out new sites without the help of expensive 3rd party's.
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It is the CMS we use the most, not because we know it well but because we literally tried many of other CMS and this one did it for us.
However having said we really do not like the one shoe fits all approach. E..g for eCommerce we usually use PrestaShop etc. if a specialized CMS can do a task rather use that.
However for a general CMS [MODX] is hard to beat.
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Usability
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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Great and easy to use for both the coder and the end user. Especially if setup correctly by the coder.
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Reliability and Availability
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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We have not had it go down due to bugs etc. especially when comparing it to other cms out there.
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Performance
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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Damn its fast. really good page speed out of the box.
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Support Rating
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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Great community support on slack.
If you have a paid plugin great support also esp from modmore
If you have cloud hosting MODX support is fast and all servers are optimized for MODX
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In-Person Training
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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No answers on this topic
Online Training
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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No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
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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Good system
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Alternatives Considered
Drupal's capabilities outpace WordPress by miles. Drupal is more customizable, scales better for larger companies and has advanced content types. If you own a small business or work at a startup company, I would recommend WordPress but if your firm is trying to scale and you have more than 50 employees I would recommend Drupal.
Read full review
The other company that we looked into was WordPress and all of the features that it offered our organization. What MODX offered to us from development to everyday use just made more sense for our organization as a whole. WordPress is still a great CMS platform, just not exactly what we were looking for.
Read full review
Scalability
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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Very scalable. e.g. in the [MODX] manager you can manage multiple websites at once without having to login else where. it is very convenient and this way resources and be easily managed and shared.
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Return on Investment
  • Drupal helped us launch a creative, marketing- and product-focused website with custom coding integrations tailored to our goals.
  • Drupal allows us to rely on secure and consistently updated core code.
  • Drupal's code taxing on the server does start to get a bit heavy as you go along with customizations, so at some point, we decided to stop. We want to ensure our Google Page Score remains high, including paying close attention to page load speed.
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  • The positive impact that MODX has had on our organization is that it has allowed us to generate more organic traffic to our site.
  • We are also able to push more paid advertisements to our site on our lead generation landing pages.
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ScreenShots

MODX Screenshots

Screenshot of MODX Manager InterfaceScreenshot of SEO Management - page levelScreenshot of Screenshot of Easy editing landing pageScreenshot of Edit files directlyScreenshot of Create & edit custom fields