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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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Small business owners don’t have much time to build their online presence, don’t have much money to spend on digital advertising, and don’t want to navigate the complexity of what it means to be online today. So UENI presents a solution built specifically for them. Unlike DIY website builders or…

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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.

9.4
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

(26-50 of 75)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Stefanie Cash | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
My company needed a new website that was responsive, allowed for an easy to manage content management system, and flexibility/scalability. Due to Drupal being open source and having the ability to create templates that are customized - it solved many of our business problems. Some of those problems being; dynamic response, loading forms, creating custom landing pages.
September 11, 2018

Drupal is the 777 of CMS'

Sean Pomory | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Drupal is used to manage our primary website. It is managed by the Marketing department, without any involvement from the IT department. It serves as a quick, effective and relatively inexpensive way to manage over a thousand pages of content. In addition, the direction towards API first has significant savings, allowing us to build a solution that integrates many technologies into one interface for content editors.
Charles Hogan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The global education services division is driven by websites designed to market and recruit online degree programs for prospective students and consumers. 95 percent of those websites are built with Drupal. Through these websites we gather information vital to the company's business strategies.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our college and entire university have been using Drupal to create web pages. It provides an easy web working environment for both web professionals and non-professional users. For the professional users, you can work directly in a code mode and write your own CSS style. For the non-professional users, you can use the default functions and use it as simply as you are using a Word application. Drupal also gives different users different roles. You can assign a less experienced user a lower role, he/she can draft the initial page and wait for an experienced user to approve and publish the page.
Brian Nizinsky | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Drupal hosts our main public website, which has hundreds of thousands of users visit it monthly. It is being used by the marketing department and we chose it for its flexibility and ease of use. We were stuck with an old CMS that was rigid and a pain to work with. Our developers hated it and it prevented us from being nimble. Drupal solves those problems for us.
Andrew Shannon | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used Drupal to create our own custom learning management system for the company, which helped us digitally distribute our software packages and limit the amount of time users had access to them, thus making them subscription products, which was something we were never able to do before. Customers loved the move because it did away with having to use a DVD disc in their computer and remember to bring it with them when they needed their kids to do their homework. We also made a secure online space for kids under the age of 13 to interact with their teachers on homework and class discussions, thus adding another digital layer of interface between teachers and kids for better communication.
March 07, 2017

DSMM Guru

Elizabeth Foust | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The program that I manage within the school of medicine uses Drupal to maintain our individual website. I manage and maintain all edits, updates, and links on our web page. We use our webpage to provide knowledge to potential students who are interested in participating in our 9-month training program.
Joel Tanzi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Shane Sevo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
September 23, 2016

Drupal as a framework

Armen Danielyan, PMP | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are a small department (in a big non-profit organization) that supports organization's international and domestic development projects through consulting and implementation of ICT solutions. We develop websites and web applications such as online databases, digital libraries, data collection and visualization platforms, communities of practice and many more for these projects. We switched to Drupal in 2011 and never looked back. For most of the websites and applications we develop Drupal is a perfect fit. The development on Drupal is very efficient and most of the time is as easy as selecting right modules and configuring them to work together. In 90% of cases we don't have to write a single line of custom code. We do create custom themes based on custom design though.
August 09, 2016

Drupal review

Alex Lada | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Eric Batson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Drupal was the software used to create many of our organization's intranet sites. It was used across the majority of the organization. Each operating unit used it to create sites that conveyed who they were, the work they did, and other basic information. We used it so the operating units' sites would be uniform in their look and feel. Consequently, information would be be found in predictable locations across the operating unit sites.
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We utilize Drupal as the backend CMS for a website. It was implemented by the website design firm and handed over to us once the design process was completed, so we manage it ourselves now. It was basically implemented as a way to update the site without directly editing the HTML and to provide some additional functionality, such as user account management (website logins) and some basic scheduling.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Drupal is our main CMS/framework for our complex web solutions (in-house) and to develop websites that require advance data relationship for our customers. Websites starting from simple corporate directories to web apps that rely on data structure and data relationships are well served by this powerful CMS. For small or very basic websites we use some more basic software because Drupal is too much power for basic web tasks.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
My company is a digital agency that specializes in building and managing content management systems for clients. We primarily recommend Drupal as a solution, and use it for our own company website because of its flexibility as a CMS. While we do use other platforms and software within the company and externally for marketing purposes, from a developer's standpoint, Drupal is a crucial part both for managing our own website and in providing a great solution for clients.
Surinder Sachdeva | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
By using Drupal, being it is a CMS, we have been able to start somewhere in the middle, rather than starting from scratch, and expand it to our business needs. Expandability is the key here, unlike other CMSs, Drupal can be expended to any scale, which allows us to add complex web applications on top of a very secure and sophisticated system.
Jason Smith | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Drupal is the core platform supporting all of our web properties and is part of the long term plan for internal and external facing sites. Drupal provides an extensible base for creating customized solutions with a lower initial effort while keeping our maintenance footprint small.
March 18, 2016

Drupal review

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Drupal is currently used across our university as our main website platform. Because of its ease of use, it was a good choice compared to the previous platform that was being used.
Andres Gonzalez | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I have developed some sites using Drupal in the past, and I maintain some of them today. What I do is to apply updates on the core or the modules when it's necessary. I also help when changes are required in the theme or when implementing new functionalities that require adding/editing content types, taxonomies or modules.
Kelly Lee | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
In a previous position, we used Drupal for our website and built Drupal sites for clients. We found Drupal to be more secure, manageable, customizable and [provided a more] rock solid performance than WordPress sites that were used in the past.
Bart Martinez | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Used for the department news and information site and as a gateway to our other applications. We are migrating away from static HTML pages and Drupal will allow non-technical staff to put up announcements and news updates rather than developers.
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