Of the systems available today, Drupal provides one of the best combinations of security, power, convenience, and overall value to our clients, allowing agencies like Devvly to rapidly build robust and feature-rich sites while affordably maintaining the highest quality.
Application not Website
One of the main things to keep in mind is that most sites today are not a simple marketing website, but rather a fully-featured web application with a custom commerce and administrative functionality. Drupal is better suited than WordPress for this type of application.
WordPress's strength is getting a simple website up with basic out of the box functionality. Drupal's strength is providing the users with the framework and tools to build a fully custom, complex web application specific to their unique needs.
Security
Drupal's design stands up to security vulnerabilities. It offers a dedicated security team that systematically reviews Drupal's core code and optional modules that add functionality and address and release security fixes. With over 45k contributors, Drupal is one of the most secure and stable platforms on the market.
Conversely, a recent report by security firm Sucuri has revealed that WordPress accounts for the vast majority of compromised CMS platforms. The report showed that WordPress accounted for 90% of hacked websites in 2018 (up from 83% in 2017), while other CMS systems such as Magento and Drupal only made up 4.6% and 3.7%, respectively.
The issues associated with WordPress also do not come from users running old versions of the platform. Just 37% of infected sites on this platform were outdated. The primary attack vector abused when infecting WordPress are plugins with known and unknown vulnerabilities. This makes the role of third-party components more significant for this CMS.
Drupal methodically vets and reviews its third-party components, while maintaining 100% control of all code storage and distribution. In contrast, WordPress does very little to vet and check the plugins in its ecosystem, and plugins can be submitted in myriad ways, making it virtually impossible to guarantee quality and security.
Performance and Scalability
Drupal's scalability is unmatched, powering small marketing sites up to large applications, content-heavy news sites, and media-rich platforms. With over a million websites running on Drupal, here are just a few companies using it to power their websites: NASA, The Weather Channel, NBC Sports, FOX News, TIME, The Grammys, TLC, YMCA, Oxford University, Wendy's, DHL and many more. For more examples, see Devvly's curated list of companies that use Drupal: https://www.drupal.com/showcases.
Open Source
Drupal is a genuinely free and open-source platform, with a strong commitment to the open-source community. All of Drupal's code is free to use, and Devvly continues to contribute code back to the community to improve Drupal's ecosystem further. By contrast, many of WordPress's best plugins are paid or provide a basic version with lock features requiring users to pay or subscribe monthly to unlock the full version.
Commerce
Both Drupal and WordPress have robust E-commerce options. However, WordPress's e-commerce solution, WooCommerce, is built with a standard product and checkout system in mind. Whereas Drupal's solution, Drupal Commerce, is a commerce framework that allows users to create multiple custom product and checkout workflows within the same application.
Flexibility
Drupal doesn't dictate to your organization; we dictate what we need from Drupal. Many other CMS platforms like WordPress impose their will on your organization, forcing you to conform to their way of doing things. Drupal acts the opposite way allowing you to create a solution that supports your specific business needs. Drupal creates a foundation for limitless solutions.
Admin Tools and Content Authoring
Drupal 8's admin features are as intuitive as WP, but it can support application tools, whereas WP is content-driven only. To get WP to support the idiosyncrasies of an application build would require custom coding workarounds, which could likely break the application when extending its functionality and features through various iterations.
API First
Drupal 8 is API first, meaning the platform's foundation is an API that can be leveraged to easily and quickly build custom integrations. Drupal's REST API allows the application to integrate with third-party services easily. I.e., this is important if a client wants to move to custom automated online payment services. WP does not support custom defined workflows like Drupal and will end up costing more in the end to accomplish desired outcomes.
Multilingual Support
Drupal can support Global ready features such as Language support – Drupal core has a translation manager built into it out of the box, including language translation features and multilingual support. It also has localized elements to support ever-changing international rules, which are particularly important for data and commerce, both requests and transactional. This is essential for trans-national clients, for whom Drupal will reduce long-term costs due to its multilingual support.
Access Controls and User Management
Drupal has much more advanced access controls - you can have site admins, content editors, individualized access to private content, etc. This way, Drupal can support multiple site stakeholders. This support is essential when webmasters want to segregate permissions cross multiple admins, subscribers, users, etc., to grant limited access to content. WordPress does not support this level of access control.
Web Content Accessibility
Drupal has a dedicated commitment and fully supported project for Web Content Accessibility (WCAG 2.0). The WCAG focus includes a fully dedicated accessibility team with a commitment to ensuring support for:
- Search engine form and presentation
- Drag and Drop functionality
- Color contrast and intensity
- Adding skip navigation to core themes
- Image handling
- Form labeling
- Removing duplicate or null tags
This focus drastically reduces WCAG maintenance cost over time, and more importantly, the same accessibility elements are present in the application features.
Budget Planning and Version Control
Drupal has a defined Semantic versioning schedule with the release of D8, which allows companies to keep their software current and up to date while managing future costs. Drupal 8's contributed modules follow the same semantic versioning, whereas WordPress modules do not, and are inconsistent with their ongoing support. Ultimately, what this means is that when WP updates its version, your application can break because the plugins utilized will likely not be supported, but this doesn't happen with Drupal.
A version update can take down your entire application in WordPress with no clear path to resolution in terms of time and cost.
Mobile First
Drupal 8 has a mobile-first focus – The US market for mobile access shifted in 2015 as the predominant platform for viewing web applications. Although WP works fine for content, its mobile focus does not support web applications.