Calling all marketing managers and small business owners currently in the process of digitising their companies! Amongst many other strategic decisions, one of the main questions will be what CMS to use. Which content management system is best suited for your website goals? Let's dive in.
To choose is to loose. Or is it?
Our strategic analysts receive questions on the choice of the best CMS on a daily basis. In the SME market, Drupal and WordPress often square up to each other. Even though they are both rooted in an open source philosophy, there are more than a few important differences between the two that need further consideration to make an informed choice.
At Dropsolid, our Drupal roots give away our preference. When our CEO and COO founded the company, though, they did do their research and evaluate multiple cms options to see which cms's would be able to stand the test of time and provide the most business value in the long run. Below, we will give you some pro's and cons to take into account when deciding on the right CMS for your business.
Open source philosophy
Both content management systems are rooted in similar ideas about open source software. Both WordPress and Drupal are available free of charge – there are no licensing fees. The engines behind both CMS's are well-maintained by their respective developer communities and their source code is anybody's t use and change.
If we consider both WordPress and Drupal's code and build at first glance, they both receive top marks. Their basis lies in php code, editable templates and near-infinite expansion possibilities using plug-ins, modules and features.
In all fairness, we do have a slight preference for Drupal when it comes to architecture, since its building blocks are more flexible at its core, which makes the CMS easier to scale. We'll divulge on this later.
User convenience
Historically speaking, WordPress was designed as a blogging tool, whilst Drupal has its origins in a community or discussion board. This explains a lot of the differences in user focus. It is extremely easy to design a nice-looking blog post in Wordpress using a smooth and visually attractive site template - something which took Drupal a few years to catch up on. For more complex websites that include specific and more complex features (e.g. product overviews, e-commerce, booking modules etc.) Drupal has always been the better choice. In the past few years, Drupal has upped its game and focused more on user friendliness, which has facilitated non-technical marketeers or content editors with their content management.
At Dropsolid, we have countered this historic disadvantage for simple websites by building our own PaaS platform, which enables us to launch easily manageable Drupal sites faster than ever before.
Scaleability en future-proofness
When it comes to scaling and website expansion, Drupal is the clear winner. WordPress plug-ins are mostly self-contained, which makes it difficult for them to communicate with other systems. The Drupal community focuses entirely on open integrations with external APIs and code that is easy to edit. This allows for organic synergies and collaboration. Drupal functionalities are like an organic toolbox and can be replaced or removed more easily, whilst largers WordPress websites are prone to running into a brick wall with a plethora of different modules. Multilingual capabilities can be added using plug-ins in WordPress and are a standard Drupal feature.
With regard to multisite, this is no fair fight: our very own Drupal Cloud is the living proof of scalable Drupal. Currently, we have more than three hundred websites running on our own multisite environment.
Conclusion
All of the above points made us decide to place our bets on Drupal. So far, Drupal has proven to be an excellent and most versatile choice and an ideal platform for generating short and long term business value.