Item: Drupal
Rating: 10
Author: Sohail Lajevardi

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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 and Cons

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

Developer onboarding experience
Better marketing materials
Better out of box experience
Faster innovations/integrations with Javascript ecosystem

Return on Investment

Given the endless possibilities that Drupal can have, we tend to have great support going on when we get a website launched
It has become much much faster and easier for us to launch a new project due to reusability
Configuration management in Drupal helps greatly with CI/CD, saves us costs

Alternatives Considered

WordPress, Forestry CMS and Craft

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

Key Insights

Do you think Drupal delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Drupal's feature set?

Yes

Did Drupal live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Drupal go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Drupal again?

Yes

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

Drupal, a hidden gem in the sea of the content management systems out there, a framework of it's own that goes beyond a common CMS

Overall Satisfaction with Drupal