TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Drupal

Score7 out of 10

390 Reviews and Ratings

Get a Demo

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.

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features Drupal has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 390 ratings of Drupal's features
View all features

Top Performing Features

  • Role-based user permissions

    Permissions to perform actions or access or modify data are assigned to roles, which are then assigned to users, reducing complexity of administration.

    Category average: 8.3

  • Code quality / cleanliness

    Code generated by WYSIWYG editor is clean and validates according to W3C standards.

    Category average: 8

  • Internationalization / multi-language

    The software supports multiple languages, countries, currencies, etc.

    Category average: 7.8

Areas for Improvement

  • SEO support

    The CMS helps users create the right website infrastructure (pagination, page headers, titles, meta tags, url structure, etc.) to increase the site’s visibility in search engine results.

    Category average: 7.6

  • Page templates

    The CMS has standard webpage templates or types of web pages (e.g. homepage, article page, interior page, blog page, etc.); users can also build custom templates.

    Category average: 7.9

  • Library of website themes

    A library of website frameworks or themes is available as a starting point for building a website.

    Category average: 7.2

Reviews

What users are saying about Drupal.
View all reviews

Drupal is Great but it requires a committed effort to build with

Incentivized
Paul NielsenView profile
Volunteer Web Developer in Information Technology at Servas International (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Servas uses Drupal 11 (originally Drupal 6) for it's Online Portal. Our current version of ServasOnline released in July 2024, delivers content and allows members to be in households and to edit their household and membership profiles. Using the ServasOnline (servas.org), members who are planning for to travel can search using Google Maps for members who are Hosts or Day Hosts and request accommodation.
Before choosing Drupal, we investigated COTS products but we could not find anything that could meet our needs. With a team of volunteers and some paid professionals we are able to develop our portal on a well developed Drupal CRM foundation.

Pros

  • Host Searching using Google Maps
  • Membership Management
  • Bespoke tools such as membership fee payments coded using PHP
  • The ability to take standard modules and templates and customize them is a powerful feature of Drupal.

Cons

  • Drupal keeps improving. There is still room to make it easier to understand and customize templates.
  • The Drupal learning curve is still harder than WP and more support for beginners is needed to help build a bigger community.
  • By promoting a bigger Drupal community, we can hope for a bigger range of Templates and Modules.

Return on Investment

  • Being able to use a bespoke membership search with Google maps has massively improved the ability of travellers to find hosts
  • Using the Household with family members metaphor and has helped our members feel 'at home' using ServasOnline
  • Building ServasOnline has not been a small task and finding volunteer web developers who are comfortable working with Drupal is a serious challenge for the future. The site is designed to continue to grow and evolve but this does require a committed team of volunteers.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

WordPress

Other Software Used

YouTube Live, Atlassian Jira

Drupal is an amazing tool for dynamic web applications.

Incentivized
Dustin DayView profile
Director of UX development, social media and SEO/SEM in Marketing at DFT (a number of local companies under one umbrella) (1-10 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Drupal for more complex web applications and sites. Drupal is a very dynamic tool that can fit many different projects, from a simple website with dynamic content or user access to more complex applications like multiuser social sites. Drupal is a great tool to learn how to apply, although it helps to know PHP and how to customize a website's design (HTML/CSS).

Pros

  • Generate complex websites.
  • Allow different level user roles.
  • Create multi-site applications that have multiple mini-sites on one domain.
  • Build a complex dynamic website for corporate use.

Cons

  • Debugging can be difficult when modules conflict.
  • Permissions can be confusing if you’re not sure of user roles and how they function.
  • A better default image taxonomy and organization would be nice, sans dedicated module.

Return on Investment

  • Drupal has streamlined complex web application creation.
  • Drupal has minimized the need for our developers, allowing them to focus on more complex tasks.
  • Drupal is a great way to quickly implement a custom project.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

WordPress, Concrete CMS, GoDaddy Digital Marketing Suite and Joomla!

Other Software Used

WordPress, Joomla!, Adobe PhotoShop, ShortPixel

Drupal - Versatility for Online Music Studio

Incentivized
Jeff PurtleView profile
Owner at Purtle.com (1-10 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My trumpet and brass teaching website, to manage student assignments, control access to the private audio library, and manage the historic media. I’m in the process of upgrading to Drupal 11 and the new ai framework and that will be something not possible for a RAG chatbot and automated SEO

Pros

  • Access control
  • File system management
  • AI

Cons

  • Themes
  • AI
  • Bootstrap 5 style themes in core

Return on Investment

  • Online site library
  • Student management
  • Access control to private media

Usability

Other Software Used

Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro X

In my opinion, Spectacular disappointment that keeps twisting the knife

Incentivized
Verified User
Executive in Information Technology (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used Drupal for our large ecommerce and blog site. We originally went with it because at the time, it was more customizable than Wordpress. Or so we were told. We have done many customizations to the checkout interface and product pages. We have had our site on Drupal for over a decade.

Pros

  • Modular design offers customizability
  • Some important functionality built in
  • Community of contributors for add-on modules

Cons

  • In our experience, the upgrade process is horrendous or nonexistent
  • I think the amount of things that need a coder to change is too high
  • In my opinion, it is not user friendly or intuitive

Return on Investment

  • I think we have wasted so much money on this site
  • In my experience, Developers need to do extensive work to change anything
  • In our experience, much more expensive and time consuming than Wordpress

Usability

Alternatives Considered

WordPress

Other Software Used

WordPress, Keap, Zapier

Drupal Is A Solid Choice For Seasoned Programmers.

Incentivized
Jeff Montgomery
CTO in Manufacturing at Animal Necessity (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Over the years, we've tried out a lot of different CMS systems to create marketing and e-commerce websites for various divisions of the company. Drupal has been around for a long time, and we've given their CMS a ride in hopes of creating a website to showcase some of our company's products and information to visitors from targeted pet groups in our industry.

Pros

  • It has excellent security features and consistent updates.
  • It allows for extensive customization with the integrated themes and core code, especially when you first install it. This allows our dev team to get creative with marketing initiatives.
  • There is a large online community of Drupal users that consistently help answer any questions and issues

Cons

  • This is not an easy CMS to work with if you don't have a good understanding of website development. It isn't "plug-and-play" like Wordpress or Shopify.
  • Over time, doing major updates to the system can be taxing, especially if you aren't well-versed enough in doing system updates in line with your "child" theme and code.
  • The CMS can become somewhat cumbersome with server resources if not carefully optimized while you build and customize it to your liking.

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.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

WordPress, Shopify, Wix and Squarespace

Related Products

Products similar to Drupal that may also meet your needs.
All comparisons
Joomla!
CompareLearn more
Plone
CompareLearn more
Kentico Xperience
CompareLearn more