Drupal vs WordPress the ultimate comparison
Drupal and WordPress are the two familiar content management systems that are widely used to create websites. The selection of the best CMS suitable for a project is a difficult task most of the time. In this blog I would like to compare these two CMS.
At the end of this blog, you can determine which one is good for your business.
Content Management System (CMS) is a software used to create, update, publish contents. CMS plays a vital role in website development because of its flexibility to manage contents. Not much technical knowledge is required to handle web contents using CMS.
I am explaining the Drupal Vs WordPress comparison using the below factors.
1. Security
Drupal has a large set of functionalities that is designed to build robust websites. The APIs and configurations of Drupal adhere to best practices. Drupal database API provides better support to write SQL queries in a secure way. Drupal form API is preventing cross site scripting and cross-site request forgeries. Session API is a secure choice for handling sessions. Drupal using twig template to render contents on the front end. Twig is one of the most template engines available in PHP. This has a lot of security features included.
The Drupal community actively maintains the core code so that the chance of vulnerability is very less. Drupal is fully using the advantages of OOPs concept. It is using the Symfony framework to build the core architecture. We don’t have any doubts that Symfony is the most robust framework available in PHP. The most of the Drupal core structure such as services, router, middleware’s , compiler etc are borrowed from Symfony. If you have a large website having a lot of custom features, Drupal will be the best choice.
WordPress also has suitable sets of functionalities. WordPress is not fully following OOPs concepts. We can write wordpress plugins on OOPs ways but the wordpress core is still using procedural code structure in most of the places. WordPress is depending on contributed plugins for most of the functionalities. Eg: webforms modules are the popular modules to create forms. But wordpress is secure in its way. One of the main advantages of wordpress is its user friendliness. The wordpress needs less coding to build a website as compared to drupal. The wordpress code structure is easy to understand. if you have a simple website with less features, WordPress is a good choice.
Winner: Drupal
2. Performance
Drupal has built in functionalities for handling performance. Drupal cache API provides better support on the website performance. The main advantage of Cache API is it is extensible. So we can customize the caching strategy as per our project’s needs. Twig template is also using caching to render outputs. The best use of cache tags , cache context etc makes Drupal faster. Drupal showing good performance in larger websites
WordPress using lightweight architecture. So it is faster than any other CMS. The way it is storing the content on the database is very interesting. The database is designed itself to pick the contents in a quick way. But as I said, WordPress relies much on plugins for functionalities. So it would be messy sometimes. WordPress is okay for smaller websites.
Winner: Drupal
3. SEO
Drupal Meta Tag Modules giving better support for handling meta tags. There are other modules like simple XML site map, pathauto etc that are good to handle best SEO practices. As Drupal is a developer friendly framework, it helps developers to requisite the workflow for SEO. Drupal is also good but we need to customize it for good practices.
WordPress websites have the most successive track record on SEO ranking. WordPress itself is SEO friendly. As it is started as a blog framework, its creators added sufficient components for SEO on its core. Plugins like All in one SEO, Yoast SEO etc gives additional SEO support for WordPress projects.
Winner : WordPress
4. Ease of Use
Drupal is a developer friendly framework. It has greater support for extending its API at any level. But it is less friendly in the view of the content administrator. Drupal doesn’t have a common pattern to structure the contents. It is flexible to design on the basis of project requirements. So the content administrators need better knowledge sharing from the technical person before using it.
WordPress is simple to use. It is most customer friendly. So the content administrators can easily grasp it without the help of a technical person. But lack of APIs and support, developers may have difficulties to extend the functionalities.
Winner: WordPress
5. Headless Architecture
Drupal has built -in support for headless architecture. It’s REST API, JSON API and Authentication API are adequate to create headless applications in a secure way. Drupal is widely used for this type of website development because of its functionality pools. One of the main advantages of Drupal in terms of headless architecture is it’s API doesn’t have boundaries to use with any front end applications.
WordPress doesn’t have much support for headless architecture. Some initiatives are already active on this matter. A react based WordPress headless CMS setup is available. But it is not as friendly as Drupal.
Winner : Drupal
6. Coding Standards
Maintaining a better code structure is inevitable for any projects.
As I said, Drupal adheres to better OOPs concepts. It allows the developers to write better flow of codes. Drupal database abstraction layer provides a better query API that allows developers to write better SQL queries irrespective of the database used. Drupal developers can follow better standards to write the codes because of its structure. Most of the functionalities have a way to do it on Drupal.
WordPress lacks the best coding practices in many places. But you can manage this if you are following common practices to write codes on WordPress. Developers have a tendency to install plugins on each and every piece of functionality. But the fact is you can write custom plugins in most of the cases. That helps to maintain code and gather logics in one place. Of Course we can’t avoid contributing plugins. I mean, it should limit to complex logics that take time.
Winner: Drupal
7. Multisite Approach
Drupal has great support for multisite. Drupal multisite allows to run different websites from a single code base. Each site can have its own configuration, modules, files, database etc.
WordPress has good features for multisite networks. During the installation WordPress can install for either single or multiple websites. All configuration and database are common for all sites in the network. WordPress creates separate database tables for each site. It provides a separate admin dashboard for each site.
Winner: WordPress
8. CI / CD
Drupal uses most of the latest standards available in the tech world. So continuous integration with Drupal is easy and adaptable. configuration synchronisation in drupal is a great tool to move configurations from one environment to another. Drupal uses composer to install core modules and libraries. So we can easily implement CI/CD for the project releases with drupal.
WordPress is not very flexible for the CI/CD approach. But I can’t say, this CMS is inadequate to use this approach.It should be. Even though we can use the composer to manage WordPress code with WordPress packagist repo, none of us will think about this at first. Also transferring configuration from one environment to another is a tedious task.
Winner: Drupal
9. E-commerce Application
Drupal uses the Drupal Commerce modules to build ecommerce applications. These modules are written in a secure and extensible way. Drupal commerce has almost all the choices for building a perfect ecommerce application.
WordPress uses the WooCommerce plugins to build e-commerce applications. Most of the websites are using WordPress with WooCommerce. So it’s also a good choice. But if you have more customization and a large volume of functionality, I would say it is not a good choice.
Winner: Drupal
10. Community Support
Drupal has great community support. All functionalities have been well documented in Drupal.org. All contributed plugins will be reviewed by several members of Drupal.org and we can ensure the better coding standards and security on each module available in Drupal.
The modules available on Drupal.org are completely free. So no extra cost needed to purchase modules.
WordPress also has great community support. The documentations are available in wordpress.org. Most of the plugins available in wordpress.org have paid versions also.So that means you have to pay extra cost, if you need premium functionalities from those plugins. Most of the time these plugins will lead to developer frustration finally.