#1 most frequent
United States of America
30.4%39,878 installations of 130,988
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
Videos
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: 7.9
Internationalization / multi-language
The software supports multiple languages, countries, currencies, etc.
Category average: 7.8
Areas for Improvement
WYSIWYG editor
What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editing tool allows users to build pages without writing code.
Category average: 8
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: 7.3
Who Buys & Uses Drupal
#2 most frequent
France
6.6%8,612 installations of 130,988
#3 most frequent
Germany
6.5%8,543 installations of 130,988
Pros
- Robust customizability and flexibility for diverse project requirements
- Strong security features with consistent updates
- Advanced functionality suitable for complex web applications and dynamic sites
Cons
- Unintuitive User Interface and overall ease of use
- Requires significant technical knowledge for effective use and customization
- Updates and upgrades are often complex and not streamlined
Drupal is Great but it requires a committed effort to build with
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.
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.
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
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
Drupal Is A Solid Choice For Seasoned Programmers.
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
Great for web developers learning curve for content editors
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
building out new stories on a corporate newsroom, creating new pages for audiences to learn more about the business, creating a press center for media to download relevant assets, publishing press releases, publishing external facing business updates, hosting an about us page, etc.
Pros
- developer tools
- secure CMS
- simple web design
Cons
- needs a more intuitive user interface
- simpler taxonomy and nomenclature for broader audiences
- more dynamic design options
Usability
Alternatives Considered
WordPress, Wix and Blogger
