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Craft vs Drupal: What are the differences?
Comparison of Craft and Drupal
License Model: Craft follows a proprietary license model, where a license must be purchased to use it, while Drupal follows a free and open-source license model, making it accessible and cost-effective for users.
Flexibility: Craft provides a more flexible and modular architecture, allowing developers to customize and extend its functionality effortlessly. On the other hand, Drupal offers a highly flexible framework with a vast array of modules and themes, enabling developers to create complex websites with diverse functionalities.
Ease of Use: Craft focuses on providing a user-friendly and intuitive interface, making it easier for non-technical users to manage content and create websites. Drupal, although powerful, is more developer-centric, requiring some technical skills to effectively utilize its features.
Performance: Craft is known for its exceptional performance and scalability due to its efficient caching mechanisms and optimized codebase. Drupal, while also capable of delivering high-performance websites, may require additional optimization efforts to achieve similar performance levels.
Community Support: Drupal boasts a large and active community of developers and contributors, ensuring continuous improvements, updates, and extensive support resources. Craft, although growing, has a smaller community, and its support ecosystem is relatively less established.
Target Audience: Craft is usually preferred for smaller to medium-sized projects that require a balance between simplicity and flexibility. Drupal, with its robust features and scalability, is commonly chosen for more extensive, complex websites and enterprise-level applications.
In summary, Craft and Drupal differ in their license model, flexibility, ease of use, performance, community support, and target audience. While Craft offers a proprietary license, flexibility, a user-friendly interface, excellent performance, and targets smaller to medium-sized projects, Drupal follows an open-source model, provides extensive flexibility, requires some technical skills, may need additional optimization efforts, has a larger community support, and targets more extensive, complex websites and enterprise applications.
I usually take a slightly different tack because the technical level of people I usually am dealing with is lower. I tend to be pitching to decision makers and not tech people. A bit of my standard answer is below.
Wix and Squarespace are proprietary systems meant for unsophisticated users who want to build their own websites quickly and easily. While they are good for that specific use case, they do not offer any way to move beyond that if your needs arise. Since they are proprietary closed systems if you need something more advanced at some point your only option is to start over.
WordPress is an Open Source CMS that allows much more freedom. It is not quite as simple to setup and create a new site but if you are talking to me then you are not looking to build it yourself so that is really a non-issue. The main benefit of WordPress is freedom. You can host it on virtually any decent web hosting service and since it uses PHP and MySQL you can have virtually any developer take over a project without problem.
I believe in open source because of that freedom. It is good for me as a developer and it is good for my clients. If something were to happen to me or my company you would have no problem finding another qualified WordPress developer to take over the site in a totally seamless fashion. There would be no need to start from scratch.
Additionally the extensible nature of WordPress means that no matter what your future needs, WordPress can handle it. Adding things like e-commerce and custom quoting systems are just two examples of advanced solution's that I have added to WordPress sites years after they were first built.
WordPress is used by tiny one person businesses all the way up to major websites like the NY Times and I think it is right for this project as well.
10 Years ago I have started to check more about the online sphere and I have decided to make a website. There were a few CMS available at that time like WordPress or Joomla that you can use to have your website. At that point, I have decided to use WordPress as it was the easiest and I am glad I have made a good decision. Now WordPress is the most used CMS. Later I have created also a site about WordPress: https://www.wpdoze.com
Pros of Craft
- Quick bespoke CMS8
- Easy to use CMS7
- Clean slate approach to templating6
- Has it's own StackExcange2
- Clean templating markup (twig)2
- Great support2
- Free licence available for single user account version2
Pros of Drupal
- Stable, highly functional cms75
- Great community60
- Easy cms to make websites44
- Highly customizable43
- Digital customer experience delivery platform22
- Really powerful17
- Customizable16
- Flexible11
- Good tool for prototyping10
- Enterprise proven over many years when others failed9
- Headless adds even more power/flexibility8
- Open source8
- Each version becomes more intuitive for clients to use7
- Well documented7
- Lego blocks methodology6
- Caching and performance4
- Built on Symfony3
- Powerful3
- Can build anything3
- Views2
- API-based CMS2
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Cons of Craft
Cons of Drupal
- DJango1
- Steep learning curve1