We have been working on Drupal as a team for over five years and have been providing solutions in the e-commerce space. We have found it somewhat complex for the clients, but at the same time, it offers great flexibility for the development team. We highly recommend Drupal to our potential clients.
Pros
Robust and scalable.
Highly secure.
Highly customisable.
Cons
Themes
Setup
Integration
Likelihood to Recommend
We developed a corporate website using Drupal, which features a large number of static pages and several dynamic functions, including a contact us form, location finder, and job posting. We utilized Drupal with some customization to achieve the desired functionalities. We have also worked on e-commerce sites using Drupal, and there is a scope for improvements, specifically in cataloging.
VU
Verified User
Team Lead in Engineering (Computer Software company, 51-200 employees)
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
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
Cons
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
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
Easy to use, especially compared to other open source CMS.
Robust user community to address issues and to provide advice.
Cons
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.
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
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.
Cons
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.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (Internet company, 51-200 employees)
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
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.
Cons
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.
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
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.
Cons
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.
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
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.
Cons
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.
VU
Verified User
Technician in Marketing (Computer Software company, 1001-5000 employees)
In my work with a digital agency, I was building Drupal sites, adding features or modifying existing sites, or debugging Drupal sites for our customers. It was a foundation for most of our site building projects and was used across the company. Drupal's importance as a content management system cannot be overstated as it remains one of the most powerful tools for building robust sites that deliver rich, complex content types with well-designed layouts. It abstracts away much of the code that would need to be written to wireframe a website and allows one to focus on the higher level requirements of the site including design, content management, user management and security without having to spend hours writing baseline HTML, CSS and PHP code.
Pros
Drupal has the most flexible and robust site building tools available for quick site-building; it is possible to have a Drupal site up and running in your local development environment within a minute and immediately get to work.
It expertly uses a modular approach to extending your site, with the Drupal core shipping with most of the ones you will need, but with a vast array of modules available in the Drupal space to quickly and easily add features such as Google Maps, powerful layout designers, block management, menus, and more. Many times you can install a theme that fits the needs of your site and greatly reduce the amount of styling necessary to get a terrific-looking site, as well as the amount of JavaScript necessary to create things like slideshows.
It makes user management a breeze with the ability to easily create new user accounts and assign roles that govern access to content types and overall site management. It is therefore much easier to hand off a Drupal site to your customers and be confident they won't break it, while still finding it easy to manage their content.
Cons
Drupal's flexibility comes at the cost of having a fairly large footprint. It can take up much more space than a site developed using JavaScript, CSS and HTML that has been optimized; it is much harder to reduce the folder size of your Drupal site due to the number of moving parts required.
Drupal has many dependencies that can conflict with your local development environment at times and it can therefore be cumbersome to set up a Drupal site on a new machine or one that has other development environments on it that may use different PHP versions or paths to the PHP executable.
Drupal lags behind WordPress in terms of the number of themes and modules available, due to its smaller user base.
It has a much higher learning curve than WordPress, and to use it to the utmost you will need to pick up some degree of understanding about SQL, PHP, CSS, and Drupal components.
Likelihood to Recommend
Drupal works very well for enterprise sites with complex content types that require multiple content managers to maintain it. It may also work very well for something like a corporate intranet. Developers for small business sites may find it better to build on a simpler system using JavaScript, PHP, HTML, CSS, and frameworks like Angular or React, but Drupal's ability to make content and site management easy for your clients still drives its use for small businesses.
Drupal is an integral tool in every aspect of our business. Commercial Progression has been developing Drupal powered websites for a variety of industries since 2007. We love being a contributing member of the supportive and vast opensource community that has come together to build this amazing content management system. Of course we leverage Drupal to manage our front facing business websites, but it is also powerful enough to integrate with our CRM and build back office business management tools for ERP systems. Drupal excels at delivering enterprise grade integrations with large organizations that have a long range technology roadmap. Being able to scale with the complexity of any web development project makes Drupal the ideal tool for handling the most challenging web application projects.
Pros
The Drupal core ships with a granular, field level content construction toolset. The very popular views module is now part of the core Drupal CMS and enables the creation of complex content types, it's way more than a blogging tool.
Drupal is especially adept at integration with enterprise grade CRM and ERP systems. Because all of the data in Drupal is naturally available for mapping at the field level, there is a ready environment for connecting to restful API systems.
Drupal scales exceptionally well with multisite and multiuser environments. Large universities can standardize on a common codebase of Drupal and then roll it out to the entire campus. Individual colleges can customize their themes and content but do not need to worry about figuring out their own module stack.
Cons
Drupal is complex, it will take time and expertise to shape it into the tool you need it to be for your use case. WordPress can be installed and is ready to go for blogging out-of-the-box, but Drupal will need more setup up front to build out the functionality needed.
Finding strong Drupal expertise can be challenging for companies. Although the developer community is over a million strong, there are still few companies that truly have an expert Drupal developer on staff.
Drupal can be overkill for small websites with just a few pages or limited functionality. Many new flat file responsive tools can do well to build a basic brochure site without the overhead of a CMS like Drupal.
Security is an ongoing struggle for all users of opensource CMS solutions. If you choose Drupal for your website, you will need a plan for security updates to ensure you are one step ahead of the hackers.
Likelihood to Recommend
Drupal is excellent in adapting to larger enterprise use case scenarios. Websites that need to be deployed with a multisite or multiuser setup will benefit from Drupal's common codebase delivery options. Building complex websites with involved workflows and custom backend administration tools and dashboards are ideal for Drupal. Drupal is more of a web application development framework than a blogging or brochure website builder. Of course you can build a powerful blog or brochure website, but unless you augment the functionality to include content management workflows and integrations with marketing automation, ERP, and CRM systems; you will not be getting the full benefit of Drupal.
We are a digital agency that serves some clients who require Drupal expertise. They either come to us for help with Drupal, or we recommend Drupal to them based on their business needs. It solves the issue of providing a powerful and extensible open source CMS.
Pros
Drupal provides a robust and powerful open source CMS platform. Due to this, it has a wide community of supporters and contributors and a vast library of modules that have already been produced.
Drupal is free to use, which makes it a great choice for our clients that need something more powerful than WordPress, but cannot afford the licensing fees of system like Sitecore.
As of Drupal 8, Drupal provides good admin tools for configure data and content architecture and relationships.
Cons
Drupal's admin section, especially before Drupal 8, can be fairly confusing to navigate. This is tough for developers as well as content authors.
Drupal traditionally has been a little constrictive with regards to front end templating, although it has gotten easier over the years.
Likelihood to Recommend
Drupal is a very good choice for our clients that require a powerful, robust, extensible, and open sourced CMS system that has no licensing fees. It allows for complex data structures and efficient site performance without the cost of something like Sitecore. It provides much greater performance and is easier use when modeling complex data structures and relationships than another free CMS like WordPress.
