Drupal

Score6.8 out of 10

379 Reviews and Ratings

What is Drupal?

Drupal is a free, open-source content management system written in PHP that competes primarily with Joomla and Plone. The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains basic features such as account and menu management, RSS feeds, page layout customization, and system administration.

Categories & Use Cases

Videos

Mobile optimization / responsive design
The CMS helps users build webpages that work well on mobile devices – whether m-dot pages or responsively designed pages.
Category average: 8.5
Content taxonomy
Users can create multiple levels and types of content categories including tags.
Category average: 8.2
Bulk management
Users can change an attribute on a group of documents or sites all at once through features such as global search and replace, making bulk changes easier.
Category average: 7.8

Community / comment management
Users can put post/page comments through an approval process, auto-approve commenters based on their email addresses, block commenters by IP address, delete comments, etc.
Category average: 7.4
WYSIWYG editor
What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editing tool allows users to build pages without writing code.
Category average: 7.9
SEO support
The CMS helps users create the right website infrastructure (pagination, page headers, titles, meta tags, url structure, etc.) to increase the site’s visibility in search engine results.
Category average: 7.5

#1 most frequent

Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

8.3%

11,029 installations of 132,202

#2 most frequent

Manufacturing

4.0%

5,326 installations of 132,202

#3 most frequent

Other Services (except Public Administration)

3.8%

5,074 installations of 132,202

Verified User

Employee in Product Management (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Drupal is our current CMS that we use to host our website for our financial services firm and it's subsidiary. I publish articles on our website to provide landing pages for our Weekly Newsletter email, publish media mentions and press releases, create tokens for rate changes, update website pages to keep up with content changes and upload PDFs to our website.

Pros

Drag and drop functionality is easy to use
Easy to switch between straight text and HTML content
Ability to easily have multiple environments so that pages can be built in b/c-stage before they are approved and published
Solid user experience where it's clear how to navigate the platform

Cons

Content changes don't always update unless you clear cache in Aquia Cloud platform and Cloud Flare
When you do clear cache in Drupal, the website temporarily runs a little slower
Requires technical knowledge to build additional website features

Return on Investment

We had +437.7 web visits YoY for our parent firm
2,108,357 web visits (78.1% of 2.7M goal – pacing to hit 100% of goal before EOY) for our parent firm
We had +43% YoY increase in web visits to our subsidiary company

Usability

Alternatives Considered

WordPress, Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Asana

Other Software Used

Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Asana, Salesforce CMS

Verified User

Team Lead in Engineering (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have been working on Drupal as a team for over five years and have been providing solutions in the e-commerce space. We have found it somewhat complex for the clients, but at the same time, it offers great flexibility for the development team. We highly recommend Drupal to our potential clients.

Pros

Robust and scalable.
Highly secure.
Highly customisable.

Cons

Themes
Setup
Integration

Return on Investment

Could Launch on time.
Find difficult to explain to client to manage.
Integration time issue.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Adobe Commerce, Shopify and WordPress

Other Software Used

Adobe Commerce, Shopify, WordPress

Jeff Montgomery

CTO in Manufacturing at Animal Necessity (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Over the years, we've tried out a lot of different CMS systems to create marketing and e-commerce websites for various divisions of the company. Drupal has been around for a long time, and we've given their CMS a ride in hopes of creating a website to showcase some of our company's products and information to visitors from targeted pet groups in our industry.

Pros

It has excellent security features and consistent updates.
It allows for extensive customization with the integrated themes and core code, especially when you first install it. This allows our dev team to get creative with marketing initiatives.
There is a large online community of Drupal users that consistently help answer any questions and issues

Cons

This is not an easy CMS to work with if you don't have a good understanding of website development. It isn't "plug-and-play" like Wordpress or Shopify.
Over time, doing major updates to the system can be taxing, especially if you aren't well-versed enough in doing system updates in line with your "child" theme and code.
The CMS can become somewhat cumbersome with server resources if not carefully optimized while you build and customize it to your liking.

Return on Investment

Drupal helped us launch a creative, marketing- and product-focused website with custom coding integrations tailored to our goals.
Drupal allows us to rely on secure and consistently updated core code.
Drupal's code taxing on the server does start to get a bit heavy as you go along with customizations, so at some point, we decided to stop. We want to ensure our Google Page Score remains high, including paying close attention to page load speed.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

WordPress, Shopify, Wix and Squarespace

Dustin Day View profile

Director of UX development, social media and SEO/SEM in Marketing at DFT (a number of local companies under one umbrella) (1-10 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Drupal for more complex web applications and sites. Drupal is a very dynamic tool that can fit many different projects, from a simple website with dynamic content or user access to more complex applications like multiuser social sites. Drupal is a great tool to learn how to apply, although it helps to know PHP and how to customize a website's design (HTML/CSS).

Pros

Generate complex websites.
Allow different level user roles.
Create multi-site applications that have multiple mini-sites on one domain.
Build a complex dynamic website for corporate use.

Cons

Debugging can be difficult when modules conflict.
Permissions can be confusing if you’re not sure of user roles and how they function.
A better default image taxonomy and organization would be nice, sans dedicated module.

Return on Investment

Drupal has streamlined complex web application creation.
Drupal has minimized the need for our developers, allowing them to focus on more complex tasks.
Drupal is a great way to quickly implement a custom project.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

WordPress, Concrete CMS, GoDaddy Digital Marketing Suite and Joomla!

Other Software Used

WordPress, Joomla!, Adobe PhotoShop, ShortPixel

Sohail Lajevardi View profile

Drupal Front-end Engineer in Engineering at Ramsalt (11-50 employees employees)

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

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

Cons

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

Usability

Alternatives Considered

WordPress, Forestry CMS and Craft

Joomla!

Plone

Kentico Xperience

Drupal

What is Drupal?

Categories & Use Cases

Videos

Drupal Key Features

Top Performing Features

Mobile optimization / responsive design

Content taxonomy

Bulk management

Areas for Improvement

Community / comment management

WYSIWYG editor

SEO support

Most Frequent Users

Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

Manufacturing

Other Services (except Public Administration)

Drupal Reviews

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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Other Software Used

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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Usability

Alternatives Considered

Other Software Used

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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Usability

Alternatives Considered

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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Alternatives Considered

Other Software Used

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

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Return on Investment

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Drupal Alternatives