WordPress vs Drupal: Which CMS Is Better?

Not too long ago, Drupal was a dominant force in the non-profit sector. Today the trends have been dramatic and WordPress has become the dominant content management system (CMS) in the world, not just for nonprofits, foundations and social impact organizations but across every sector of the business world as well.

Briteweb is specifically sought out for our expertise in website development in the social sector, we’re often asked whether Drupal or WordPress is a better CMS for nonprofits. In our opinion (and the general consensus of the interwebs) is that WordPress wins in every category.

Drupal has not been able to stay competitive in the broader CMS space, and because of this they have consciously moved towards being primarily an enterprise solution. This means that they have continued to increase the complexity and weight of their codebase. This translates into increased cost to develop and maintain your website and a level of infrastructure bloat that is unnecessary for 98% of the websites out there. Drupal is not necessarily a bad platform from a code perspective, it’s just overly complicated for most websites, which means you will spend a lot of extra money building and managing it.

We have never come across a content problem that WordPress couldn’t solve. WordPress’ domination of the market means that there are an incredible amount of integrations, plugins and APIs available to connect with your website. This means you have a much larger community developing solutions and supporting the WordPress ecosystem and virtually every CRM and email list management tool integrating with WordPress out of the box.

All that said, the number one reason we chose WordPress in the first place was ease of use for you, the website owner. Our primary decision for scrapping Drupal was how complicated it was for the content manager. While we provide training and reference materials for our sites, we find that our clients are able to get up and running far faster on WordPress and feel more at ease managing content than they ever did on their previous CMS. Most of our clients today are either existing WordPress users, or moving away from Drupal or other CMS solutions and are always extremely happy with the transition.

We’ve visualized the numbers below, which should provide you perspective on the market. Here is a quick summary:

The following statistics were gathered from BuiltWith, W3Techs and Google Trends.

Why it matters: Market share dictates how many 3rd party online services and tools will build integrations, how many agencies and specialists are available to choose from for support, and the size of the ecosystem of people and companies building plugins and add-ons for a platform. Most importantly it determines the size of the open source community contributing to innovation of the platform.

Why it matters: One of the biggest concerns a lot of our clients have is whether their website architecture will be relevant and continue to drive value over time. The pace of change on the internet is unprecedented in history and it’s important to choose tools that have momentum behind them and are staying current with trends.

Why it matters: One of the biggest concerns a lot of our clients have is whether their website architecture will be relevant and continue to drive value over time. The pace of change on the internet is unprecedented in history and it’s important to choose tools that have momentum behind them and are staying current with trends. If interest is dwindling, why would you consider investing the future of your organization’s digital platform in Drupal?

The amount of people searching for Drupal on Google has dropped by 73% worldwide in the last five years. WordPress has remained relatively even and beaten overall trends for the CMS space.

For over a decade, we have specialized in WordPress and the newest CMS tech out there. Massive sites like TechCrunch, The New Yorker and BBC America trust WordPress to deliver content to millions of users per month – it’s no wonder that WordPress powers such a large portion of the internet, with the largest market share of any CMS platform by far.

When it comes to WordPress, we’re experts in the field. We’ve been at the top of the “Best Of” lists on WordPress.org multiple times. We’ve also published a number of plugins over the last 5 years and contributed pioneering work to the WordPress API. Not to mention the award-winning websites we’ve built with it for our clients.

While WordPress has our vote over Drupal, there’s a whole new world outside of these two CMSs. Keep an eye out for our new post on WordPress vs. Headless.

Get in touch if you’d like to discuss your next web project with us.