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Drupal

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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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Drupal has been widely used in a variety of industries and situations, proving itself as a robust and extensible platform that can fulfill …
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Drupal! You beauty!

10 out of 10
February 09, 2023
  • To develop content oriented and transaction oriented sites
  • Non technical users can easily build sites using Drupal
  • Drupal 8 and above have …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 16 features
  • Page templates (67)
    9.5
    95%
  • Admin section (68)
    9.5
    95%
  • Code quality / cleanliness (66)
    9.1
    91%
  • Publishing workflow (67)
    9.1
    91%
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Pricing

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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

Drupal Glazed Theme Tutorial 1: Basic Drag and Drop Controls

YouTube

Drupal Demo

YouTube

Drupal Paragraph Blocks Demo

YouTube

JSON:API demo

YouTube

Drupal Link Intelligence Getting Started Demo

YouTube

Drupal Content Optimizer SEO Module Demo Video

YouTube
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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.

10
Avg 8.0

Platform & Infrastructure

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

9.5
Avg 7.7

Web Content Creation

Features that support the creation of website content.

9.3
Avg 7.6

Web Content Management

Features for managing website content

9.5
Avg 7.3
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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 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 and Mobile optimization / responsive design and Form generator highest, with a score of 10.

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

(378)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Drupal has been widely used in a variety of industries and situations, proving itself as a robust and extensible platform that can fulfill specific needs. For example, Ericsson is leveraging Drupal to develop an internal application for accessing company policies and documents, including a news and events section. This showcases Drupal's capability to serve as an efficient tool for knowledge management within organizations. Similarly, Commercial Progression takes advantage of Drupal's integration capabilities with CRM and ERP systems to develop websites for various industries, demonstrating its flexibility in meeting diverse business requirements.

Another key use case for Drupal is creating uniform intranet sites across different operating units, enabling organizations to convey their identity and provide basic information consistently. This allows companies to maintain a cohesive brand image while providing essential resources to their employees. Additionally, non-technical staff can easily create and manage content using Drupal, addressing marketing web presence needs efficiently without extensive coding knowledge. This user-friendly aspect of Drupal makes it accessible to a wide range of users within an organization.

Furthermore, Drupal proves invaluable in the realm of website development, offering a quick and flexible solution for building test sites or serving as a content management system for clients who require rapid website development with built-in control. Its ability to handle large volumes of content makes it suitable for managing customer service articles, translation services, and industry-standard features like views and revisioning. The platform is also chosen by developers specializing in Drupal due to its ease of use in quickly getting sites up and running for clients.

In the educational sector, the University of Edinburgh's Web Interfaces team has utilized Drupal to develop bespoke web solutions with a focus on security and scalability. This use case highlights Drupal's suitability for academic institutions seeking reliable and customizable solutions for their web development needs. Moreover, Drupal has proven its worth in the online education space, with approximately 95% of websites designed to market and recruit online degree programs being built with this platform.

Overall, Drupal offers a versatile range of use cases, from powering corporate intranets to supporting website development across various industries. Its capacity for customization and its ability to handle diverse content needs make it a compelling choice for organizations of all sizes.

Extensibility and Customization: Users highly appreciate the extensibility and customization options provided by Drupal's wide range of contributed modules. Many reviewers have stated that this flexibility allows them to tailor the software to their specific needs, enhancing the overall value of the platform.

Cost-effectiveness: The open-source nature of Drupal is seen as a major advantage by users, with many stating that it eliminates ongoing licensing costs. Reviewers mention that this cost-effectiveness makes Drupal an attractive option for those on a tight budget.

Strong Community Support: Users highly value the fantastic open-source community surrounding Drupal. Several reviewers have mentioned that they appreciate the community's readiness to help and provide solutions to any problems encountered. This support system is seen as invaluable, ensuring users have necessary assistance and resources to overcome challenges while using the software.

Intuitive User Interface: Some users have mentioned that the user interface of Drupal is not intuitive and requires technical expertise to use effectively. They feel that the platform lacks a WYSIWYG text editor, making it necessary to have a basic understanding of HTML and CSS style sheets to customize the site.

Complicated Development Process: Several users have found the development process in Drupal to be complicated and difficult to learn, even for experienced developers. They express that development is hard to learn and complicated, which can be challenging for those with prior experience in web development.

Time-Consuming Maintenance: Users have expressed that maintaining Drupal websites can be time-consuming due to frequent updates and patches that need to be installed. The continuous need for maintenance can become burdensome as it requires allocating additional time towards keeping the website up-to-date.

Security Concerns with Plugins: Some users have raised concerns about the security of Drupal websites, attributing it to the large number of plugins available from numerous developers. They find it harder to ensure site security due to this vast variety of plugins, often requiring careful vetting and monitoring.

Resource-Intensive Infrastructure Requirement: Users mention that compared to other content management systems (CMSs), Drupal requires a more powerful infrastructure. This makes it more resource-intensive in terms of hardware requirements, potentially increasing costs for hosting and server resources.

Steep Learning Curve with Drupal 8: The learning curve associated with Drupal has been highlighted by users as a challenge, particularly concerning its eighth version. They perceive Drupal 8 as significantly different from previous versions, complicating the learning process further.

Confusing Back-end User Interface: Some users find the back-end user interface of Drupal confusing and clunky. They express difficulties navigating through menus or locating specific settings within the interface, leading them to consider it less user-friendly than desired.

Configuration Changes Hidden in Menus: Users mention encountering certain configuration changes hidden within menus where they may not expect them. This can make it challenging for users to locate and modify specific settings, potentially causing frustration or inefficiencies.

Time-Consuming Setup and Configuration: The process of setting up and configuring Drupal has been mentioned as time-consuming by users. They express that it requires technical skills and knowledge, making the initial setup a potential pain point. Additionally, some changes may require IT assistance and might not be applied immediately.

Limited Ease of Use: While Drupal is generally considered relatively easy to use, some users note that it still requires development skills. They advise that installation and upgrading processes should be handled by someone with technical expertise to avoid potential troubles during these procedures.

Users have made several recommendations based on their experiences with Drupal. Here are the three most common recommendations:

  1. Start with a theme if you don't have much time to learn the system.
  2. Avoid using too many plugins and have someone on-site for day-to-day maintenance.
  3. Consider other options for CRM or shopping cart functionality.

Overall, users believe Drupal is a robust CMS platform but recommend starting with a theme for quicker setup, limiting plugin usage, and considering alternative options for CRM and shopping cart functionality. These recommendations aim to optimize the user experience and ensure efficient management of websites built on Drupal.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 68)
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February 09, 2023

Drupal! You beauty!

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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 almost everything that ca developer can think of creating can just search the community and install the plugin in their sites to use its functionality.
Sohail Lajevardi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller
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 designs, freebies and paid-extensions of WordPress is no good to us.

For Forestry, since it's a Javascript CMS for exposing API, it's quite nice and all but compared to what Drupal can do, is quite limited, if it's just a blog-style website that you are after, Forestry might work as well, note that it's also a paid service.

Craft CMS for sure got a lot of ideas off of Drupal, some of it's main features that they advertise is already in Drupal for years and I have not seen any benefits over Drupal, also it has a smaller community compared to Drupal
Fernanda Ministerio | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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 operation that depends a lot on always having new content deployed on your web pages.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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 implied a strong [dependence] towards the IT provider that developed the custom content management system.
Chris Kerry | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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 WordPress can offer. Drupal has a much more defined framework for building out content taxonomy, navigation, template structuring, and content moderation; whereas, these items can easily be 'hacked' together in a very cludgy way within WordPress, depending on the taste/style of the developer (leading to an unsustainable CMS).
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Bobby Donohue | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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 different platforms, and some of the basic features are approached in very different ways. To be fair, I have never really tried to learn WordPress as a platform. I know from anecdotal experience it is perfectly fine for most business websites, but having gotten used to how Drupal sets things up, WordPress always seemed backward to me.
Richard Davies | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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, Drupal was the obvious choice.
Josh Howe | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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 years ago while in college. It has passed the test of time and proven to be one of the top platforms for large scale companies.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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 client experience of Drupal is also better than others. Integration of Drupal with other tools is also easy. The only problem with Drupal is that a non-technical guy finds it hard to understand and work on it.
Kyle Reichelt | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Drupal is certainly a more complex animal, comparatively. But its power lies in its flexibility, extensibility, and stability. And the API is fantastic. There's really nothing else like it.
Dr. C. Michael Sturgeon | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I selected Drupal because of the simplicity upon going live. "Simple" is not the word I would use prior to the site going live though. I have used Jumla (which I believe was part of Drupal as one CMS about 12 or 15 years ago). Jumla is almost identical in capabilities to Drupal. It is developed differently, but capable of most other things that Drupal can do to my knowledge. I have used an extremely highly priced product (approx 500,000.00) of which I will not mention the name - as it was absolutely terrible in functionality and had limitations for editors. Lastly, I have frequently used WordPress as my CMS. WP has more theme options and the community of users is larger than the size of Drupal users. WordPress can be simple or complex depending on the theme, plugins, etc. These are some of the many comparisons.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
In my mind, Drupal and WordPress are the top open source CMSes, and I rarely recommend not going with an open source CMS. WordPress can be great, especially for single developers, but I find that the code structure and extensibility of Drupal makes it superior for many use cases, and the open and friendly nature of the community seals the deal.
Matthew Deakyne | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I've used Squarespace and WordPress for other businesses, and Drupal was honestly selected due to cost. It does a good job of scaling across our organization - and many units have benefited from having a space to provide content. Squarespace is more modern, and WordPress may be easier to use - but Drupal works.
Nicholas De Salvo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Drupal has strong role-based permissions for users, powerful content blocks for editing, and granular customizing options in their views. For a company or organization requiring a lot of customization, Drupal can be a really powerful tool. However, Drupal does require developers who know how to get the most out of it and is much more difficult to get set up than something like WordPress. It can be resource intensive and does not always work well in shared hosting environments. Drupal can be a great solution for the right project, but make sure you have the proper technical experience or a good development team behind you.
Jimmy Mack | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
When selected, Drupal was the tool that had enough power to create a robust intranet while not being too overly complicated. It allowed for custom integrations that were developed from IT, and it was able to handle the mass amount of users we needed, many of whom are not overly tech savvy or familiar with using a CMS.
Nate Dillon | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
WordPress would be the best alternative to Drupal that I've seen, but in my experience, Drupal is better at complex websites that need a lot of customization. WordPress would be much better suited for a blog than Drupal.

I only briefly looked at Joomla, and I wasn't impressed.

ExpressionEngine seems very nice, but it is not free.

Jekyll is great for websites that can be static, without a database, but updating content requires the users to be able to edit pages manually, as there is no interface for editing. There are some services that offer an interface for editing Jekyll projects for a price.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have previously used WordPress, we found that the site is limited in its potential compared to Drupal. The biggest slow down we have seen is in the use of plug ins, unlike Drupal, WordPress experienced severe slowdowns. The user interface is rather slow and unrefined compared to Drupal, Drupal definitely is much more visually appealing and overall much more easy to use.
Stefanie Cash | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Drupal is similar to WordPress when discussing content management and WYSIWYG capabilities. That is where the similarities end from a functional standpoint. WordPress is a top contender for blog sites, whereas Drupal is for sellable content, i.e. products and services. Both have API customization features so you can create custom feeds and port over information.
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