Drupal

Drupal

Score 7.6 out of 10
Drupal

Overview

What is Drupal?

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...
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Popular Features

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  • Code quality / cleanliness (65)
    8.4
    84%
  • Page templates (66)
    8.3
    83%
  • Admin section (67)
    8.2
    82%
  • Publishing workflow (66)
    7.7
    77%

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Pricing

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Drupal

Drupal

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Unavailable

What is Drupal?

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.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting / Integration Services

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Product Demos

Why Drupal?
01:36
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Features

Security

This component helps a company minimize the security risks by controlling access to the software and its data, and encouraging best practices among users.

9.8Avg 8.0

Platform & Infrastructure

Features related to platform-wide settings and structure, such as permissions, languages, integrations, customizations, etc.

9Avg 7.7

Web Content Creation

Features that support the creation of website content.

8.4Avg 7.6

Web Content Management

Features for managing website content

8.7Avg 7.4
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Product Details

What is Drupal?

Drupal is a free and 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 common to content management systems. These include a dashboard with a menu management system, RSS feeds, page layout customization and themes to aid this, and system administration tools. Drupal offers access statistics, more advanced search features, caching and feature throttling (to improve performance if needed), descriptive URLs, multiple users with controllable privileges, access control and restrictions, and workflow tools (triggers). There are over 30,000 addons or modules to expand Drupal's functionality.

Drupal Video

Why Drupal?

Drupal Integrations

Drupal Competitors

Drupal Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Joomla!, Kentico Xperience, and Plone are common alternatives for Drupal.

Reviewers rate Role-based user permissions highest, with a score of 9.8.

The most common users of Drupal are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

 (362)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 76)
Popular Filters
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
December 12, 2022

Drupal, a hidden gem in the sea of the content management systems out there, a framework of it's own that goes beyond a common CMS

Sohail Lajevardi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Sohail Lajevardi
Drupal Front-end Engineer
Ramsalt (Computer Software, 11-50 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Drupal daily, that's our main driver for any websites and apps we are developing, this has been the case for the past 12 years for me personally, the scope is as wide as a small local webshop to large enterprise organizations, connecting multiple websites as services to each other, we also use Drupal as a content hub as a headless CMS, or just fetching data off of it with exposed API
Pros and Cons
  • Well structured entity definition
  • Designed to be extended, everything can be extended/connected to each other
  • API-first design with the latest versions
  • Great developer experience
  • Huge community, all driven off of open-source contributors
  • Developer onboarding experience
  • Better marketing materials
  • Better out of box experience
  • Faster innovations/integrations with Javascript ecosystem
Likelihood to Recommend
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
June 14, 2021

An open source CMS with excellent tools!

Dominik Ras | TrustRadius Reviewer
Dominik Ras
Senior Project Manager
Polcode (Information Technology & Services, 51-200 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
With Drupal, we customize all modules to meet the best marketing terms, respond to the needs and guarantee clients a better web presence. With its ability to manage different themes for each site and have a unique look and feel, all of our clients we have worked with have been satisfied. It has allowed us to create websites and update our clients' sites.
Pros and Cons
  • Drupal has the main advantage of being an open-source product; we can customize the way we want.
  • It allows me to manage and create websites or blogs that our customers require.
  • It has impressive administration and customization features, being able to manage any amount and type of content.
  • I have always started and completed a new page in Drupal in just a few minutes.
  • It has been straightforward to understand and effortless to use.
  • Drupal has different languages used; not just anyone can make use of the tool.
  • It should have more support material to customize and modify the code.
Likelihood to Recommend
In my experience, Drupal is an excellent CMS with advanced features that offer powerful content management. It has guaranteed security to back up data and is constantly being updated with new features. It also allows you to customize your websites the way you want.
May 28, 2021

Drupal is a great open source CMS

Fernanda Ministerio | TrustRadius Reviewer
Fernanda Ministerio
Especialista de Desenvolvimento Industrial
SENAI-DN (Non-profit Organization Management, 10,001+ employees)
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
It is a very powerful tool for the general construction of websites. Drupal is used by my department as a content management tool to bring information and communication to our users on a variety of digital channels. All of this is managed using the open source Drupal framework for which we have a license. Another very interesting point is the possibility of applying different themes for each site. It allows good user management and is also easy to use.
Pros and Cons
  • Open source framework
  • Variety of themes, colors and possibilities of work with images and texts
  • Easy to use
  • 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
Likelihood to Recommend
Drupal is suitable for design or development professionals looking for a more robust platform than Joomla or WordPress. It has many better features. With a little thought and creativity, Drupal allows you to do many amazing things. The possibility of integration with PHP modules is really the limit for customization. However, Drupal is not suitable for amateurs; someone who wants to make just one website for themselves; or a professional on a tight deadline. The learning curve can be a very big obstacle and is sometimes not worth it.

I have been working for some time and sometimes give up on some projects and choose another tool. It is definitely not a technology for those in a hurry, it is necessary to have time and dedication. The newer versions of Drupal are more friendly and intuitive and allow the construction of many cool things.
May 27, 2021

Drupal for enterprise-level website in azure/devops context

Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Banking Company, 1001-5000 employees
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Drupal is the content management system we choose when we made our website again.
It is used by both marketing and IT department :
The marketing dept uses it mainly to manage content, add or modify pages, and get customer behavior insights,
while the IT dept uses it mainly for user/access management and maintenance purposes.
Pros and Cons
  • Enterprise-level security and performance
  • Easy skin/ UX-UI customisation
  • Easy plugin management
  • Large web community in case of need
  • Development is complicated and hard to learn, even for experimented developers
  • Time-consuming maintenance (frequent updates and patches to install)
  • Plugin development could be easier
Likelihood to Recommend
On my sense, it is by far the best enterprise Content Management System, at a time when security and scalability are highly required. But consider another way if you can't afford a robust 3rd party IT provider or a specialized/dedicated IT team that can provide support for non IT users.
May 25, 2021

Capable Contextual CMS

Chris Kerry | TrustRadius Reviewer
Chris Kerry
Application Developer
Kansas State Historical Society (Museums & Institutions, 11-50 employees)
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
The Historical Society considered using Drupal vs Sitefinity and settled on Drupal due to its open-source structure and versatility. Drupal is a strong tool to use for large organizations where having the ability to do almost anything is key. The software is more like a framework than a CMS in that you can transform it into almost anything you want like building blocks. One thing to keep in mind is it has a steep learning curve for new users and it is very unopinionated in style and setup.
Pros and Cons
  • Relational context makes for very powerful page capabilities
  • Can be transformed into anything you can imagine
  • Fast search capabilities
  • Steep learning curve
  • Not ready for use out of the box
  • Can be slow to load if not configured properly
Likelihood to Recommend
For universities and historical societies, [Drupal] is an excellent tool to showcase your institution's different departments and capabilities. I would not recommend this software for smaller organizations with smaller IT departments since it is a lot for a single developer to do by themselves. Excellent enterprise software for no cost.
May 24, 2021

A solid open-source CMS with solid security and extensibility

Verified User
C-Level Executive in Marketing
Marketing and Advertising Company, 11-50 employees
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Drupal in the following situations:
  1. Our own website runs on Drupal
  2. We implement clients' websites, and depending on the scope and functional requirements, we will often recommend and implement Drupal as the CMS that would best fit their needs (including multisite).
  3. In situations requiring non-core functionality, we evaluate, recommend, and implement suitable Drupal modules. Where none are available, we may develop a custom module.
  4. We work within the hosted Drupal (Acquia) platform for some clients.
  5. Finally, we've consulted on the implementation of the investor relations (IR) website portals of several publicly traded companies, which also run on Drupal.
Pros and Cons
  • Secure
  • Extensible
  • Customizable
  • Non-intuitive UX
  • Developer-driven UI
  • Permissions overkill
Likelihood to Recommend
In the instances where a business (small, medium, and even potentially large/enterprise) have the following requirements:
  • Content management
  • Frequent content additions and/or updates
  • Scalable framework
  • Functional requirements that can't be met/managed by WordPress
  • Multilingual and/or multi-regional
  • Centrally managed multiple-website management
  • Varying user types with configurable permissions
  • Integration with other platforms, such as SSO authenticators
  • Preferably not e-commerce (typically better handled with a hosted solution, such as Shopify)
March 06, 2021

Really powerful tool to build websites with great themes and templates

Verified User
Analyst in Information Technology
Education Management Company, 10,001+ employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Drupal is used by my department as a content management tool to reach our target audience in multiple digital channels. We manage the educational author's key works, charities managed by them, their educational talks, the reader's page. All this is managed using the Drupal open-source framework for which we have a license. The ability to apply different themes for each website is useful in managing multiple authors and giving their websites a unique look all through Drupal's specific themes and skins which are applied through a few clicks.
Pros and Cons
  • Open source framework and localization.
  • Multiple themes and skins for user's webpages and websites.
  • Allowing them to write PHP modules is a big advantage, but at times integrating them is a slight challenge due to the version on which the developer is working.
  • Security and new release notifications are a hassle as they happen too often, but are still a good thing to have.
Likelihood to Recommend
Drupal is very well suited for creating blogs, and websites for people like music artists, authors, and universities. It is very easy to customize and the deployment is not a hassle at all as the changes are reflected instantly. It is very scalable too. Scenarios where Drupal is less suited are when it comes to security or having your own video player or media player. Though it has robust support for images, the support for video could use some work.
January 21, 2020

Need a Content Collaboration Website at Low Cost. Try Drupal!

Fred Bals | TrustRadius Reviewer
Fred Bals
Senior Content Strategist
Black Duck Software (Computer Software, 501-1000 employees)
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Open source CMS use by our content team for collaboration and to share files. As the content team is scattered across three different geographies, Drupal allows us to communicate and collaborate quickly and easily through an intranet site. We find it ideal to edit collateral among several collaborators. The allocation of roles to each user allows a quick review cycle while lessening the chance of errors.
Pros and Cons
  • Easy to use, especially compared to other open source CMS.
  • Robust user community to address issues and to provide advice.
  • Steep learning curve (but easy to use once you learn the system).
  • Poorly written or unsupported plug-ins can be a security liability.
Likelihood to Recommend
Our experience with Drupal is for in-house websites ranging from relatively simple blogs to enterprise-level collaboration sites. In our case, we use it to develop content among an internal audience. I'd recommend it for any team that has a technical bent or has developer support (we have both). Drupal can power any number of websites, from extremely complicated to simple portfolios.
January 13, 2020

Drupal is Powerful at Scale

Lindsay Halsey | TrustRadius Reviewer
Lindsay Halsey
Co-Founder
webShine (Marketing and Advertising, 1-10 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
As a search engine marketing agency, some of our customers' websites are powered by Drupal. We configure modules to ensure their websites meet search engine marketing best practices. Overall, we find Drupal to be a powerful content management [tool]. The initial learning curve can be steep, but once you understand how Drupal is organized, it's a solid CMS.
Pros and Cons
  • Powerful
  • Easy to scale
  • Can be overwhelming to get started
  • No two Drupal websites are built quite the same
Likelihood to Recommend
Well suited for businesses with large websites.
December 04, 2019

An all-powerful CMS with a steep learning curve

Bobby Donohue | TrustRadius Reviewer
Bobby Donohue
Principal and Creative Director
Fuelblue (Design, 1-10 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
I use Drupal as the primary platform for website design and development for my own company's websites, and all my clients as well. While some smaller client websites may be fine using something less complicated like WordPress, Drupal gives me several unique advantages:

  • All my websites use it, so every website I create an manage is on one platform.
  • Drupal is infinitely scalable, so as my clients' needs change, it's relatively easy to alter the current website rather than start from scratch.
  • Drupal has a feature called "Views", which enables me to create custom content display modes for each client, without reinventing the wheel every time.
Pros and Cons
  • Customizable.
  • Scaleable.
  • Robust community for support.
  • Search engine friendly.
  • Extremely powerful, but easily scaled down for simple sites.
  • Steep learning curve, but worth it.
  • Modules with similar jobs can be confusing - This can be a pro or a con, depending on the day. Sometimes it's nice to have choices, but other times there can be 3 or 4 modules that all do 90% of what you need, but none that do it all. Drupal requires creative thinking to get various modules to work together to complete a task.
  • Some modules get abandoned or don't work the way you intended.
Likelihood to Recommend
Drupal is well suited for design or development professionals looking for a more robust platform than Joomla or WordPress. With a little thinking and creativity, there is nothing Drupal cannot do. And if you can create your own PHP modules, then the sky is really the limit for customizability. Drupal is not well suited for a hobbyist; someone looking to make just one website for themselves; or a pro under a tight deadline. The learning curve may be too big a hurdle, and sometimes not worth it.
I joke it took me nearly 2 years to get "pretty good" at Drupal. It was a commitment I made to learn it and use it for my entire business in the long term. If you need something easy and quick for right now, then don't start learning Drupal. It requires time and patience. When I started I was proficient at HTML but had never used a CMS before. If you already use other CMS's with MySQL and PHP, then you will already know how all that works. So it probably won't take you two years. Plus, I learned on Drupal 5, which was not at all designer-friendly. That was put together by coders and it showed. Today, Drupal 7 and 8 are much more user-friendly.
July 19, 2019

Drupal, the CMS for large, data-rich websites

Richard Davies | TrustRadius Reviewer
Richard Davies
Senior Web Application Developer
City of Portland (Government Administration, 5001-10,000 employees)
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Drupal has been selected as the CMS for our new city website. It was time to replace the custom, home-grown CMS we've been using for almost 20 years, and we wanted something that could power a large, enterprise-wide website. We wanted something with a large user base and healthy ecosystem so that we could ensure that the software will be supported and maintained for years to come. Drupal fit the bill as one of the most popular open-source content management systems that is used by over a million websites, many of them government websites like ours.
Pros and Cons
  • Drupal has a large support community. Many businesses and organizations have adopted it, and it has a large developer base, so it's likely to be around for a long time.
  • Drupal is designed around the concept of structured data so that the data you put into it is reusable and can easily be referenced or accessed by other pages, or exposed through APIs to other systems.
  • Drupal is well suited for building large, complex websites.
  • Drupal has a steep learning curve due to its flexibility and complexity. Because it's so flexible and customizable, sometimes it's daunting trying to figure out the best way to do something.
  • Some aspects of the system don't receive the support and attention they need, particularly contributed modules. It can take months (or years) for bugs to get resolved, or for new features to be developed. Many of the contributed modules are poorly supported. It's common to find modules that still haven't been migrated to the latest version of Drupal, even though it's been out for over 2 years. It's also common to discover a bug, only to find out that a patch was already submitted to fix that bug months ago, but hasn't been merged into the module yet.
  • Upgrading to new versions of Drupal core can sometimes be painful and challenging, depending on how you've customized it or what modules you've enabled.
  • Sometimes it's difficult to figure out how to customize a particular aspect of the system because you have to work within the framework it provides.
Likelihood to Recommend
Drupal is a good choice for large, complex websites. Because it was designed with structured data in mind, it works will with data-rich websites where you need to reference data in different ways and on different pages. For example, a website acting as a music library containing a database of artists, albums, and songs. Or a large corporate website or government website.
Drupal is probably not the best choice for smaller, simpler websites. For example, it's probably overkill for a small brochure website with only a handful of pages that rarely change.
March 29, 2019

Customizable, scalable and professional content manager.

Rose M. Warner | TrustRadius Reviewer
Rose M. Warner
Software Developer
SunDevs (Information Technology and Services, 11-50 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Drupal is an excellent content manager since it handles large volumes of users and content. We use it in our web system and in the internal intranet. It allows us to create profiles of the users with details and excellent personalization. Besides the personalization, Drupal gives us the facility to add what we need through modules.
Pros and Cons
  • Is easy to install and has a very professional and clean interface.
  • Has a lot of free and paid add-ons for anything you can think of. You can also design your own because there is enough documentation for that.
  • Drupal is excellent for websites with a lot of content, also where you require high personalization of the permissions and details of the users.
  • Has excellent options to implement your websites in different languages.
  • As the new versions evolve, they become incompatible with older complements.
  • For those who start, the learning curve is steep.
Likelihood to Recommend
Drupal is suitable for websites with a large amount of content or users since it handles traffic and user customization very well. It is not very suitable for small projects.
March 14, 2019

Trusted large scale content management system

Josh Howe | TrustRadius Reviewer
Josh Howe
Web Producer II
Rocket Software (Marketing and Advertising, 1001-5000 employees)
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
My company's website is built using Drupal. It is fast, scalable and easy to understand with just basic web knowledge. To be clear - I am not a developer - but work on the frontend building pages, adding events and modules. When I was in the job market - I did notice that a lot of large scale companies use Drupal.
Pros and Cons
  • Producing pages - I can start and complete a new page in Drupal in just a few minutes. It is really easy to understand and very straight forward.
  • Updates - Drupal is constantly being updated with security patches, new versions and works with most new web technologies
  • Cross Browser friendly
  • Organization leaves a little to be desired. In the version that we are using ( 7 ) - sometimes when you remove an asset, it is hard to see if there are any other versions of the assets on different pages.
  • The asset library can be a little more organized. Finding something that you uploaded can be difficult to locate if you do not know where it was originally posted.
Likelihood to Recommend
For large scale businesses Drupal is a trusted and secure platform to build on. Security is probably the biggest factor for large companies and Drupal has a well thought out solution to this problem. WordPress is great for smaller sites - Drupal is for global and large companies. I look forward to every update that they release.
January 09, 2019

Drupal has many advantages for small and large businesses

Verified User
Professional in Corporate
Photography Company, 1-10 employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Drupal to create our business website. We were able to customize it to fit our needs and to create a way to showcase our work to clients, build a client base, and connect with clients and keep them up to date. It addressed our security needs as well as our ability to see websites scaled onto smaller platforms.
Pros and Cons
  • Customizable to fit our needs.
  • Scalability.
  • Cross-device seamless content.
  • Loading time for heavy content could be slightly improved.
Likelihood to Recommend
It was great to be able to easily and seamlessly show our content from different mobile platforms, different web browsers, and different sized screens and that suited our business. I feel Drupal is appropriate for all of our needs and the needs of most businesses.
January 06, 2019

Drupal for multipurpose websitex

Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Internet Company, 51-200 employees
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Drupal is a well developed, well-known Content Management system, capable of handling a large volume of visitors, and can create a number of content pages. It can be used as a simple blog, can make interactive business sites, and can create an e-commerce site too. Can easily be customizable to meet one's needs. The theme system is another of the important features, as you can use the large number of free templates available if you do not want to build from scratch.
Pros and Cons
  • Handling a large number of users easily.
  • Can get easy themes, modules, as it is available for free too.
  • Can create large sites, dynamic blogs, e-commerce, interactive sites.
  • Can be difficult to deal with for a non-technical person.
Likelihood to Recommend
Drupal is a highly used product among developers to create different types of websites, blogs, e-commerce sites. It includes shopping carts, help desks, live chat features, and inventory management. Drupal has a very strong community, so it's easy to get your problem solved. It can be connected with other tools like facebook, twitter, chat systems etc.
Features :
Advanced User Management
Open Source
Plugins
Support
Collaboration with other tools etc.
January 01, 2019

Drupal: Excellent CMS for Corporate use

Akande Davis | TrustRadius Reviewer
Akande Davis
Marketing Communications Specialist
Hunter Industries (Consumer Goods, 1001-5000 employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Drupal is the primary platform that all of our customer's company websites are built on. We build landing pages, customer portals, and our brochure style pages on Drupal.
Pros and Cons
  • Responsive web design
  • Fast loading page speeds
  • SEO
  • Slow learning curve
  • Could improve CMS experience
Likelihood to Recommend
If you are a corporate entity with multiple websites that need to be managed with a robust team of developers, Drupal is likely the platform that you need to use. If you are looking to develop a quick and easy to use website for a small business or a business that does not have a dedicated developer, I would not recommend Drupal.
December 26, 2018

Do you deploy a lot of content daily? Do you have strong technical resources? Drupal 8 might be a fit!

Kyle Reichelt | TrustRadius Reviewer
Kyle Reichelt
Senior Project Manager
OnMetric (Internet, 11-50 employees)
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
My company was recently hired to build out a fully integrated digital ecosystem for a large endurance brand; inclusive of a CMS, E-commerce Platform, Data warehousing, and a data normalization engine to tie it all together. For this, we selected Drupal 8, Magento, and AWS (Redshift and Lambdas).

Being a global brand, Drupal 8 was the CMS (built by developers for developers) that provided the most extensible launchpad with localization and language support, as well as great workflow and collaboration tools for content creators.

Drupal 8 is utilized by brand ambassadors to submit content for review, internal editors to review content, race directors to manage events and venues, as well as marketers to post landing pages. It ensures consistent branding across the board.
Pros and Cons
  • 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.
  • This is NOT the most intuitive CMS. You really need to take the time to understand how Drupal 8 works--how content is served up--if you're going to administer a site. Whereas WordPress is very "flat" and simple, Drupal 8 is much more dynamic. You utilize Views to access your content/data and "blocks" to build out beautiful landing pages (similar to widgets in WordPress). I had to prepare a TON of documentation for the client--so many user guides.
  • It is not very friendly to engineers. It probably took 3 to 4 times longer to build out a Drupal 8 site as opposed to had we built it as a static site with perhaps a WordPress back-end (though you would have required multiple WordPress instances to manage localization and other things, which is what we were replacing).
  • It seems that the Drupal 8 consortium (or whatever) is trying to push the ball forward a little too far, rather than consistently maintaining a solid foundation. There were many times when my engineers had to build entirely custom modules to compensate for known bugs in Drupal 8. I have good engineers and we still lost weeks to deploy a workaround. Your organization might not be so lucky as to have an appropriate caliber of engineers, though I hope it is!
Likelihood to Recommend
It is great if you're a medium to large-scale operation that is heavily reliant on always having fresh content deployed to your web properties. It is particularly great if you need to localize your website in different countries (landing pages, languages, etc). It can save you a lot of time that would otherwise be spent maintaining separate websites, and deploying often redundant content to the different websites. Every human touchpoint has the potential for error.

It is not great if you just need a static website, and you aren't deploying more than just a simple blog. It's not great if you don't have senior-level developers to maintain the site. If you're the type of company that needs your website to be "done" then you've come to the wrong place. A Drupal 8 website is itself a living organism that requires an ongoing commitment.
December 22, 2018

Drupal as a Solution for Clients

Dr. C. Michael Sturgeon | TrustRadius Reviewer
Dr. C. Michael Sturgeon
Research Coach
Lee University (Higher Education, 501-1000 employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
I am, in addition to my organization title, a web developer. After many years of coding, I decided to look into CMSs as this allowed clients to access their sites and update content as needed. Some clients find that the use of Drupal is the solution to simplifying the updating process. Drupal is one CMS that allows the administrator to assign pages or content areas to specific personnel. This again is the solution to the problem of multiple people updating. Depending on the need, Drupal offers flexibility. As a full organization, departments can be given administrative or editor access and avoid even seeing other departments' pages. In my opinion, this is the best solution, especially for the price.
Pros and Cons
  • Very flexible CMS (Content Management System)
  • Coding is not required; however, could be useful
  • Offers various levels of control
  • Themes for layout and color schemes are available at reasonable prices
  • Drupal does have a learning curve that requires time, especially if new to CMSs. Therefore, before starting one should be prepared by making a site on their own time prior to offering Drupal as a service.
  • Documentation is lengthy but thorough. Some of this gets complicated and the community of users is not as large as some others, such as WordPress or HTML, JS, JQuery, CSS etc.
  • The languages used to develop Drupal are a variety and they are multiple. Therefore, if the developer would like to use it and tweak the code, they must know a number of web programming languages.
Likelihood to Recommend
If I have a colleague that is technically sound, I would recommend Drupal for web development. I would particularly do this if they are short of time to keep there site up to date. If they lack the time or willingness to put much effort into the updates or any type of changes after the site goes live. In addition to the matter of content management, the language(s) and development of Drupal help it to be a more expedient page load. Of course, at times, the theme could factor on this matter.
December 21, 2018

Possibly the most powerful and flexible CMS

BM
Ben McClure
Head of Development Technologies
Top Floor Technologies (Internet, 11-50 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We are a marketing and web development company and creating Drupal sites is one of our specialties. We use it internally for several things, but also for most of our clients' projects when their needs fit the solution. It allows us to build sites ranging from small blogs or brochure sites all the way up to huge, scalable, custom e-commerce sites utilizing the same set of tools built by one of the best communities online.
Pros and Cons
  • Drupal is great at managing any amount of content, and any type of content. Its flexibility and customizability are two of its greatest strengths.
  • Drupal isn't just a CMS, Drupal lets you build the CMS that website editors will be using. Its backend customization and admin features are awesome and are being expanded by the community all the time.
  • There are thousands of contributed modules and themes freely available. Not only is Drupal open source, but all the best modules and themes people have built are available for free as well!
  • Drupal's community is big, prolific, and welcoming. Not only can you use other's community contributions, but the community is always happy to help others building their own Drupal sites or custom modules and themes for the rest of the community. If you ever get stuck, the forums or Drupal Slack are incredible resources for assistance.
  • Drupal's admin side is very powerful and flexible, but it's a little bit harder to wrap one's mind around. If a customer is familiar with using a basic WordPress site, showing them the full Drupal back-end might be overwhelming and confusing at first. Luckily you can easily limit and customize the admin pages that each role sees.
  • Drupal is huge and complex. Doing simple things is generally simple, but more advanced capabilities of Drupal have a higher learning curve (as can be expected). You can build a Drupal site quickly, but don't expect to build your dream site with loads of custom features in a week.
  • Ready-made themes are more sparse than something like WordPress. If you're most interested in simply plugging an existing theme in and using it, you won't find as many professional-looking themes out of the box. There are some, but with Drupal, the best results are usually achieved by finding a good base theme and creating your own child theme based off of it.
Likelihood to Recommend
Drupal is well-suited to pretty much any web project requiring a CMS-like experience or a lot of admin control. If you need a CMS, I would strongly encourage you to evaluate the latest version of Drupal for your needs.

On the other hand, if all you need is a small static site, and you don't need to let people edit content or control the site on the web, then Drupal might be overkill. Simply utilize a code framework or a static site generator, and you can save time and money in that case.
December 21, 2018

Drupal works at scale, and is free.

Matthew Deakyne | TrustRadius Reviewer
Matthew Deakyne
Academic Services Manager
The University of Kansas (Higher Education, 10,001+ employees)
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Drupal is being used across the whole KU organization. It's the primary content management system, and pages are created for departments, units, and organizations on campus. It provides a supported solution for users to manage their own content, for web developers to help optimize and for marketing to track usage. Content is also exported in blocks to feed other systems with information, including important academic dates.
Pros and Cons
  • Managing content blocks. Drupal is very effective at providing a standard way to move content across systems.
  • User management of content. Users have complete control over their spaces. It requires some training, but users can update content and create alerts without the need for a web developer.
  • Overall design. Drupal looks pretty good, and provides a good structure for simple text, graphics, and links.
  • Drupal is not intended for visualizations or other interactive content - this is an emerging field that could be better.
  • While mobile responsive, I wouldn't call Drupal the most modern design. It's functional, but not beautiful.
  • Users have control over their content, but it can be difficult to figure out how to do what you are trying to do.
Likelihood to Recommend
Drupal is very good for basic content that can be managed by the end user. It's less suited for interactive content and does require training for end users to be effective. There are other products that are more beautiful, or easier to use - but it scales well for an organization of our size (~10,000 employees, many more students).
December 17, 2018

Drupal Can Be Great If You Know How To Use It

Nicholas De Salvo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Nicholas De Salvo
Founder, Creative Director
Edge One Media (Design, 1-10 employees)
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Drupal has powered our company website for multiple iterations over the passed 10 years. We have also used it in client projects during that time. What we have liked about it is the granular control it allows over your website out of the box.
Pros and Cons
  • Easily create custom content types which can be used and reused in multiple views around a website.
  • Granular control of websites on a per page basis.
  • Allows tiered user access to support users having different access to content and administration capabilities.
  • Steep learning curve
  • Resource intensive
  • Making a development mistake can result in hours of debugging trying to figure out what went wrong.
Likelihood to Recommend
Drupal offers powerful content administration, tiered user accounts, and modular content building. It is a good step for an organization who has started to outgrow WordPress, is managing a lot of content, or can build content types administration into views they’re looking for. The downside is that it’s not really an intuitive experience-- site administration requires technical skill, and it can take a long time to learn how to do things.
December 13, 2018

QA Analyst's Review of Drupal

Verified User
Analyst in Quality Assurance
Education Management Company, 201-500 employees
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
The company I work for builds websites for higher education institutions. We use Drupal and another platform. We have plans to move away from the other platform and have all of our websites on Drupal. Drupal is easy to use, versatile, secure, and overall a great product. We have a wide variety of departments which use Drupal including our Developers, QA team, Content team, and UX team.
Pros and Cons
  • Customization.
  • Wide variety of add-on features/functionality.
  • Easy to learn and use.
  • While easy to use, you do have to have some development skills.
  • Installing needs to be done by someone with technical skills.
  • Upgrading can be troublesome.
Likelihood to Recommend
It is well suited for information-based websites. I have some experience with e-commerce sites and Drupal, as well. It was a little bit more challenging using Drupal for the e-commerce sites.
December 11, 2018

Drupal is a good, moderately powerful CMS that isn't too confusing

Jimmy Mack | TrustRadius Reviewer
Jimmy Mack
Senior Communications Specialist
City of Olathe (Government Administration, 501-1000 employees)
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Drupal is used as the content management system for our organization's intranet. The intranet has hundreds of pages as well as image and document storage capabilities. It also has a number of custom integrations built by the organization's information technology department that have been integrated into the Drupal system for use. Users across the organization access Drupal.
Pros and Cons
  • It has a document repository that makes it easy to store necessary documents
  • It has an image repository where users can store images
  • it has the ability to have many users across the organization
  • it can be a bit buggy at times
  • it's not the most intuitive user experience
  • while it's nice there is a photo repository, the folder structure could be formatted a bit better
Likelihood to Recommend
Drupal is a good basic CMS for people who are looking to have more advanced features that a CMS like WordPress but aren't looking for an enterprise level CMS. In my experience, Drupal has worked great for small or mid-sized companies, non profits, etc. The recently released Drupal 8, which I have not yet used, looks to be a big improvement in user experience.
December 11, 2018

Drupal is a powerful but complicated CMS

Nate Dillon | TrustRadius Reviewer
Nate Dillon
Front-End Web Developer, Office of Mediated Education
Kansas State University (Higher Education, 5001-10,000 employees)
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
I used Drupal in a previous organization to build websites for clients. Drupal was our primary CMS, and we used it to build about 12 websites per year. I currently use Drupal to build a few of my personal websites, as well as websites for friends. I also use Drupal to build and maintain a website for an organization that I am a part of.
Pros and Cons
  • Very powerful out of the box
  • Highly customizable
  • Secure
  • Good community
  • Steep learning curve
  • Resource intensive
  • Custom coding and templates can be difficult
  • Painfully slow for features and fixes to be added to Drupal core
Likelihood to Recommend
Drupal is well suited for websites that need a large amount of customization, such as several different types of content. It also works well for sites that will require a large amount of control over users and permissions. It would be less appropriate to use on smaller, simpler sites. Also, you should be cautious using it on shared hosting servers, as it can tend to use quite a lot of server resources.
September 28, 2018

Drupal: A Definite Recommend!

Verified User
Technician in Marketing
Computer Software Company, 1001-5000 employees
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Drupal is the main development platform that we use at my company. We currently use versions 7 and 8. We are in the process of migrating all version 7 instances to version 8. We use Drupal to house and promote all of our various assets, promote events, track registrations via integration. Drupal is used by various departments within my organization but is run by one main group whereas all of the others are supporting it. Drupal is used to both promote our products as well as serve as a singular housing unit for all resources, forms, event information, and company information.
Pros and Cons
  • Drupal integrates very well with all of our technology, ie. Salesforce, Marketo, etc.
  • Drupal's interface allows us to easily update and push out new material with ease.
  • Drupal is a very well known technology that has made it easy for us to find talent that is familiar with it.
  • There are certain limitations in the amount of information that can be passed from Drupal to Salesforce, specifically in areas of how long viewers are on a particular page.
  • Drupal uses up a ton of memory space, due to how large our sites are, it has been costly to add in the required hardware.
Likelihood to Recommend
Drupal is great for a company of any size. It can support incredibly large companies or small ones. It was incredibly easy to install and supports many different resource assets that have been instrumental in growing our existing brands as well as the new ones we continue to acquire. Drupal also has the ability to create many different user roles so that we never have to worry about someone having access to something they should not have. Though this is not something new to Drupal, we have recently integrated it with Google Analytics and are finally leveraging this integration to its full potential.
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