Drupal vs. Wordpress

You are asking an endless, opinion oriented, question that could be debated infinitely into the future.

If you are just building a corporate brochure website, you may not need many of Drupal's advanced/powerful content management and backend web applications features.

However, the bottomline is that neither WordPress nor Drupal is fundamentally "better" than the other, just different and evolved to appeal to different needs and audiences, with varying technological and even sociological consequences.

Definitely super opinionated argument can of worms, as ^^ commenter said.

What does the small business do? And I don't mean the industry or products, I mean how do they do business? How "small" is the small business? Do they have a developer/site builder/IT/CS/etc. person on staff?

If it's gonna be a brochure site with some blog stuff and some pictures of products, comparison should probably go beyond just those 2 CMS's. If they are gonna change content all the time, do news articles that require editorial reviewing, e-commerce, integrate with other tools, blah blah, then you start to narrow the field a bit.

If it's just a brochure-style site, or even if it's a simple e-commerce site, I would suggest Wordpress.

However, if you have complex products, or a complex user experience on the site, Drupal may be better.

Wordpress is probably more susceptible to security vulnerabilities. This is increasingly a concern, so something worth thinking about.

Choose Wordpress if:
- It is just some attractive pages of text and images, like a virtual flyer.
- A default theme you buy for a couple of dollars will do fine.
- There is no budget to keep the site up to date. Wordpress has auto-update functionality, Drupal does not.
- You don't make websites often.

Explore Drupal if:
- You need more complex custom content types, and basically want the site to function more like a database.
- The client wants to create attractive long-form texts (see the Paragraphs module).
- You want to generate lists of things based on more complex reasoning and relations (Views module).
- You don't want to dive into too much PHP to do any of the above.
- You have a budget and CSS skills to polish the existing themes. Drupal 8 doesn't have as many good themes yet.
- The client's business may grow and be ready to move to another platform. Wordpress plugins often use shortcodes inside textareas. Drupal allows you to keep your content 'clean', which is useful if you ever want to migrate away from Drupal. Then you won't have to go shortcode hunting.

In general I'd say Wordpress is like LEGO and Drupal is like LEGO Technic.

For a small business site I'd say: go with Wordpress.

This question i also asked myself. A the moment all my websites are wordpress based, but i plan to try drupal on a new project. I can't give you an advice yet because i didn't tried drupal, but from what i hear and read wordpress suits better for small websites.

Frankly speaking, I have 4 blog sites and all of them are WordPress based for WordPress is recognized as the most easy-to-use CMS. Drupal seems to be called as “Expert’s choice” in general. So if you are knowledgeable enough, you can try Drupal. Drupal is also is known for the ability to tag, categorize and organize complex content. The designers love the flexibility; administrators love the limitless scalability, and developers love the well-documented APIs. As for as I'm concerned, WordPress is an ideal choice for anyone who wants to build an easy-to-manage site including common websites, blogs, everyday news sites. And Drupal is more suitable for technical experts to create complex and advanced websites like Fast Company, Team Sugar. The more comparison information can be found at https://whatswp.com/wordpress-vs-drupal/.

Comparing Drupal and WordPress is like comparing a car to a boat, or apples with onions. They both best in their own scope

I was using WordPress since 2010 and for me one thing that WP is not so good are the plug-ins. It’s true that WP has thousands of great plug-ins, but most of them are repeated in functionality and others are fremmium, meaning you have to pay if you want the full product.

Drupal has a strict policy of non repeated contributed modules and they are all free (Open Source), no fremium modules or themes are allowed.

Cheers, Bestann [spam link redacted].

If business is small and need is small, wordpress is better.

But if business is small but potential is not small, DRUPAL  is must

If business is not small, OPT DRUPAL

We, migrated from static page (HTML) to dynamic content management, our advisors suggested opt the Wordpress. But after 3 years, when, our post content went beyond 5000, wordpress started crying. As diverse nature and need of our audience, word press increasingly went tedious, and unfortunately not maintainable, ultimately we shifted our attention toward drupal.

Drupal, CMS, firstly looked cumbersome, but after learning, I shall claim, this is most easiest and simplest to create the most complex and toughest site.

wordpress is our laboratory, joomla is our practice ground and drupal is our battle field

WordPress is being overhyped during last years and there is a certain reason for that - it gives a complete pack of comprehensive and well-documented tools to build the most common types of websites. You will probably need to buy a premium theme and maybe some premium plugins but in the end, you will receive a good looking modern website which is easy to update and maintain.

However, when you, as a developer, dive a bit deeper into WordPress, your frustration will increase tremendously. Besides being slow and vulnerable, WordPress declares the philosophy - "please use our themes, plugins and templates and standardize everything". But if you are building websites commercially, you might know that the clients don't want to accept this standardized approach, they want their site to be “exactly like this fancy picture” or “like our competitor’s site” etc. The need a custom website but all content and features should be editable from the Admin panel of course. And here starts THE PAIN.

Just stop and think for a minute – why the CMS which is usually called “the most user-friendly” ends up in the top of MOST HATED platforms by the developers every year, according to Stack Overflow survey? For example, in 2017 it took 3rd place in the hated list.

As for the Drupal, it’s being in the transition period now, when D7 is outdated and D8’s crucial modules are not 100% finished. While everyone’s complaining about “steep learning curve” D8 is actually being so much friendlier to the website developer due to amazing view system, content management and Twig templating. At the same time, it lacks the most basic features which we use in WordPress - like the Layout builder, 1-click updating and some others.

If you know Drupal well, you can build excellent sites on Drupal 8 just now but for many devs it will become accessible after implementing such obvious features as Media library and mentioned Layout builder (also a migration from D7). According to official statements, we’ll see it in the nearest future in 8.5 - 8.6 releases.    

In my opinion, wordpress is fun and easy to customise, especially for the beginners.

People always say it is a bad comparison, WP vs Drupal, like cars to boats or a train.

With Drupal 8 being the defacto platform, it is more like a car to a spaceship. If you need to traverse outer space, then Drupal is the solution. If you need to traverse roads then clearly a spaceship is not even a choice.

A few points to help you decide:
- Drupal is not for small sites. Brochures, info sites, blogs, small e-commerce, Drupal is not even interested in handling that.
- If you are not part of a team, you are most likely not going to want to be on Drupal
- If your development budget is less than $10k, you are most likely not capable of doing much with Drupal 8

Wordpress FAR exceeds Drupal's effectiveness for small sites, or for sites built by single developers or with a smaller budget.

So if your site is simple or you want it fast, if you don't have a team supporting you and you don't have a business budget, Drupal 8 may simply not be an option for you.

If you are building something very large or complex, some rich custom online experience, then Wordpress is likely to slow you down or may not be able to handle it.

Without a doubt Wordpress. It's perfect in everything.

My 2ct having worked with WP and D7/D8.

I definitely have to say Drupal.

You can do a lot of stuff easily with WP, but it does not scale.
The moment you use 3rd-Party-modules, or your requirements change to s.th. more demanding(which they usually do)
you are in a world of hurt with WP.
It does not have namespaces, prefixing everything, classes are just collections of functions to be used together, but not necessarily in the same context/state.
I just need to point to the fact that in WP you always have to check if a class is loaded or not

if (!class_exists('PREFIXmyAwesomeClass')) {
  require_once('.......some.....path');
}

From a software-design-standpoint: This approach is wrong on so many levels.

You have multiple entry-points into the application.

And yes it let's you just simply terminate and return whatever you want(I know drupal allows this as well, but in WP it is not the exception, rather the rule, last time I worked with it)
Allows for an easy iteration in the beginning but later on.........

Obviously I am not taking about build a nice eye-candy-web-presence for the bakery down the road, rather backend-/api-related stuff.