Drupal - Not Recommended for Non-Developer Teams
Updated May 22, 2025

Drupal - Not Recommended for Non-Developer Teams

Rae Carson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Drupal

We used Drupal to build our website. It was incredibly limited and difficult. Because we are a nonprofit organization, many of our staff are volunteers or part-time. This made it very difficult to make updates, because managing and editing the site were not user-friendly processes. We moved to WordPress, which gave us so many more options (plugins) to create a manageable user interface and to train our volunteers to work within the website and keep things organized and updated. We're very happy we switched even with the initial cost of transitioning.

Pros

  • Options for many languages
  • Options for developers
  • It's open-source

Cons

  • Not user-friendly
  • No central support
  • Not compatible with many of our plugins
  • Good themes cost money
  • Need lots of support from developers
  • Lost trust with our community members because they couldn't navigate the website
  • Had to purchase separate software for other tasks and they didn't integrate well
  • Negatively impacted our marketing efforts because we didn't have a clean site to send leads to
You really should be a developer if choosing Drupal over the other website builders out there. You will need a good handle on coding. Integrations and plugins are very limited on Drupal compared to other websites (especially WordPress, which is what we switched to). It's challenging to have multiple users managing the site.
I inherited Drupal from a developer who made the website for our nonprofit many years ago. It was increasingly obvious that it wasn't a fit for our organization, which has multiple staff and volunteers who need to edit or update the website but don't have coding experience. Wix or Squarespace are better options for beginners, but we moved to WordPress for customization and chose user-friendly plugins and themes.

Do you think Drupal delivers good value for the price?

No

Are you happy with Drupal's feature set?

No

Did Drupal live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Drupal go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Drupal again?

No

Drupal might be a good place to build a website if you are a developer and know exactly what you want and how to code it. Additionally, if the website will only ever be modified by developers. In situations where it would eb beneficial to have many people access the website (who are not developers), I'd highly recommend going with a different tool.

Drupal Feature Ratings

2.8
WYSIWYG editor
1
Code quality / cleanliness
Not Rated
Admin section
3
Page templates
4
Library of website themes
3
Mobile optimization / responsive design
Not Rated
Publishing workflow
Not Rated
Form generator
3
1.7
Content taxonomy
Not Rated
SEO support
1
Bulk management
Not Rated
Availability / breadth of extensions
2
Community / comment management
2
6.0
API
Not Rated
Internationalization / multi-language
6
2.0
Role-based user permissions
2
CMS programming language or framework ()
Not Rated

Using Drupal

6 - Anyone who needed to touch our website in any way -- edits, copy, backend work, adding pages, etc. Because Drupal wasn't as user-friendly as other websites I've worked with, we found it was only truly useful to our professional web developer. Unfortunately, we didn't have one on staff, so we had to hire out anytime the website needed an update.
1 - Drupal seems to require an in-house web developer who is familiar with coding and the platform. Our nonprofit employees and strategic volunteers needed to connect with someone outside the organization to get help any time we needed to integrate something or make a significant update. We did not find it very user-friendly.
  • Web design
  • Web development
  • e-commerce
  • Google Analytics
  • Social Integration
  • Website
  • N/A
We've already decided to make the move to another website platform that is more helpful with our needed integrations and will allow us to train in-house people on updating our website. We've chosen Wordpress and have had a developer help us choose templates and software that will make it possible.

Evaluating Drupal and Competitors

Yes - Drupal was the organization's first website platform. Because our experience with the platform was fraught with frustrations and limitations, we decided to switch from Drupal to WordPress and set up the website in a way that could serve the diverse needs of our organization. We're much happier with the result.
  • Scalability
  • Integration with Other Systems
  • Ease of Use
Ease of use is what made us move AWAY from Drupal. We did not find it user friendly and found it impossible to train our in-house staff to use it and make the kinds of regular updates we need to run our nonprofit organization. Wordpress has been a much better fit for us.
We would not consider using Drupal again. When evaluating website platforms, we would consider all the other software we use regularly and which platforms integrate well with them (it's a ton of work to overhaul multiple systems at once). We'd also make sure to pick something on which we can easily train our strategic volunteers and in-house staff.

Drupal Support

Using Drupal

ProsCons
Consistent
Do not like to use
Unnecessarily complex
Difficult to use
Requires technical support
Slow to learn
Cumbersome
Feel nervous using
Lots to learn
  • Add copy
  • Change a color
  • Add an image
  • Installing plugins
  • E-commerce
  • Custom modules

Comments

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