Drupal vs Joomla, Wordpress & Proprietary CMS Products

We've outlined in detail in other sections of Drupality.com.au why you would choose Drupal based on its own merits. Of course, Drupal may not be the best solution for all projects, and the question will always arise about why you would choose Drupal in comparison to other content management systems. We've outlined our standard responses below, but before reading on, IBM spent a lot more time on this issue than we have, and you can read their report here.

Drupal vs. WordPress

We are huge fans of WordPress as a blogging and content management system for smaller websites, and have implemented and recommended it to clients on many occassions through our web consultancy. WordPress started out as a blogging tool, but you can now design and build quite a fully featured website using it. The WordPress admin system is very easy to use and allows you to create static pages or blog posts and customise the site design using a huge range of installable themes.

By all means consider WordPress for a simple website build, but you will quickly hit a ceiling if you need a site structure that's more complex than just pages and blog posts and need a site that can scale with high volumes of traffic and community features.

The Bivings Report published one of the better comparisons of Drupal vs. WordPress in 2007.

Drupal vs. Joomla

Again, Joomla is a good option for a more standard website design and we have used it on a number of client projects in the past. Similar issues exist in terms of Joomla have a more rigid site structure paradigm of Sections, Categories and Articles and Joomla is also not optimally architected to scale up in size, is not great in terms of standards compliance and has a number of inherent security issues. In our opinion, Joomla occupies a middle ground in which it's not very good for building complex websites, but a bit complicated for building simple ones.

Drupal vs. Other Open Source CMS Products

There are a lot of other well designed open source CMS products available that provide a decent array of features and functionality. The main thing we'd recommend assessing is whether these projects have long term viability based on the critical mass of a user community to support them.

Drupal vs. Proprietary CMS Products

Our attitude to this is simple: Do not buy your web development agency's proprietary CMS or one that has price tag in the thousands of dollars. There are literally thousands of proprietary content management systems available, all of which vary in terms of features and functionality. Some are great, most are not. With all of them, you will be beholden to the company that made the CMS for ongoing support and updates.  If the company downgrades the importance of the CMS in its product line, gets bought by a competitor or goes out of business (all normal scenarios in the tech industry, now accelerated by the global financial crisis), you'll be stuck with an obsolete content management system.