Drupal vs Contentful

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Our analysts compared Drupal vs Contentful based on data from our 400+ point analysis of CMS Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

Drupal Software Tool
Contentful Software Tool

Product Basics

Drupal is a free to use, open-source solution to manage website content through authoring, customization and automated workflows. Its WYSIWYG editor comes with an intuitive interface to customize text, images and layouts without needing developer support. Multiple users can create content in a central repository and share it on any channel, backed by a modern content delivery network (CDN) provider.

It enables marketing automation with advanced email reporting for specific audiences, streamlined processes, real-time sales alerts and bulk data management. Its data security protocol includes database encryption, user access control and security reports. Backed by a strong online developer community, its coding standards and strict code review processes help mitigate internet vulnerabilities
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Contentful is a cloud-native API-first platform that allows users to create, manage and distribute content to virtually any digital channel, all from a single hub. It stores and distributes a wide range of content that includes text, video, images, music, structured documents and more. Coupled with a headless architecture, native integrations apps and powerful webhooks make it flexible and extensible. Its web app allows creatives to create rich text content with headlines, quotes, lists, visual formatting and media.

Editors can create landing pages, fine-tune product descriptions, tweak forms and publish content all from a unified interface. Robust REST and GraphQL APIs enable content delivery to multiple channels like iOS, Android and Windows mobile apps, and websites. It provides separate workspaces and role-based permissions for data governance.
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$300 Monthly, Freemium
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Product Assistance

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Email
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FAQ
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Knowledge Base
24/7 Live Support
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Product Insights

  • Scalability: Drupal effortlessly scales with your business growth, handling traffic spikes and expanding content without compromising performance, making it ideal for businesses aiming for growth.
  • Security: With a dedicated security team and a robust coding standard, Drupal provides enterprise-level security, making it a trusted platform for government agencies and large corporations.
  • Customization: Drupal offers unparalleled customization options through modules and themes, allowing businesses to tailor their websites to their unique needs and brand identity.
  • Content Management Flexibility: Drupal excels in managing complex content structures and hierarchies, enabling businesses to deliver rich, multimedia content experiences.
  • Community Support: Drupal benefits from a large, active community of developers who contribute modules, themes, and fixes, ensuring the platform stays innovative and secure.
  • SEO-Friendly: With its advanced SEO modules, Drupal helps businesses improve their search engine visibility, driving more organic traffic to their websites.
  • Accessibility: Drupal adheres to web accessibility standards, ensuring websites are usable for people with disabilities, which expands audience reach and complies with legal requirements.
  • Multi-language Support: Drupal provides built-in multilingual support, allowing businesses to create websites in multiple languages, catering to a global audience.
  • Integration Capabilities: Drupal can integrate with a wide array of marketing, sales, and analytics tools, enabling businesses to create a cohesive digital ecosystem.
  • Mobile-First Approach: With responsive design and mobile-first themes, Drupal ensures websites look great and function well on all devices, enhancing user experience.
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  • Streamlined Content Management: Contentful simplifies the process of creating, managing, and distributing content across multiple platforms, enabling teams to publish content faster and more efficiently than traditional CMS platforms.
  • Enhanced Collaboration: With its cloud-based architecture, Contentful allows team members to collaborate in real-time, regardless of their location. This ensures that content updates and approvals can happen swiftly, keeping projects on track.
  • Flexible Integration: Contentful offers robust APIs that enable seamless integration with various tools and systems, such as analytics, marketing, and e-commerce platforms. This flexibility allows businesses to tailor their tech stack to their specific needs.
  • Scalability: Designed to handle the demands of both small projects and large-scale operations, Contentful can scale alongside your business. This means you won't have to migrate to another platform as your content needs grow.
  • Improved Content Delivery: Contentful utilizes a content delivery network (CDN) to ensure that your content is delivered quickly and reliably to users around the world, enhancing the user experience and engagement.
  • Content Model Flexibility: Unlike traditional CMS platforms that often force content into predefined templates, Contentful allows users to define their own content models. This flexibility supports a more structured and efficient approach to content management, catering to diverse content types and structures.
  • Enhanced Security: Contentful prioritizes security with features like two-factor authentication, role-based access control, and regular security audits. This helps protect your content and user data from unauthorized access and potential breaches.
  • Cost Efficiency: By streamlining content operations and reducing the need for custom development, Contentful can help businesses save on operational and development costs. Its cloud-based nature also eliminates the need for expensive server maintenance.
  • Future-Proof Technology: Contentful is built on modern technology standards and is continuously updated, ensuring that your content management system remains cutting-edge. This helps safeguard your investment and keeps you ahead of digital trends.
  • Global Reach: With its CDN and multilingual content management capabilities, Contentful enables businesses to easily reach and engage global audiences, breaking down geographical and language barriers.
  • Personalized User Experiences: Contentful supports dynamic content personalization, allowing businesses to tailor content based on user behavior and preferences. This leads to more engaging and relevant user experiences, boosting conversion rates and customer loyalty.
  • Comprehensive Analytics: Integration with analytics tools allows Contentful users to track content performance and user engagement in real-time. This data-driven approach enables continuous optimization of content strategies for better results.
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  • Content Authoring: Publish and deploy content across multiple platforms from one place. Connect marketing tools such as marketing automation, CRM, analytics and more to build and manage sites, build multichannel digital experiences and customize mobile web browsers and apps. 
  • Security: Keep data secure with access controls, database encryption, Denial of Service (DoS) and more. Prevent security failures with its strong coding standards and community code review process, continuously monitored by a team of security experts. Prevent malicious data entry, resolve issues before exploitation and share information via security reports. 
  • Performance: Ensure websites keep up with high traffic volumes by working with an advanced CDN provider, guaranteeing uptime without server outages. Run over a million performance checks per day and implement technology that scales across server clusters, providing customers with quick availability. 
  • Multilingual: Automated translation for over 100 languages makes every aspect of content accessible to viewers across the globe. Detect a site visitor’s preferred language based on information such as IP address, browser settings and more. 
  • Accessibility: Allow customers with disabilities to create, access and consume content, following the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) guidelines. Utilize structured metadata that is intelligible by screen readers and provide editorial tools to apply accessible content creation capabilities.  
  • Marketing Automation: Integrate marketing automation platforms to assign rules for tasks such as sending prospects email offers, assigning them to particular lists or using AI such as chat bots to deliver information. Refine marketing processes with no licensing costs by streamlining workflows, creating real-time sales alerts, managing data in bulk and more. 
  • Personalization: Deliver a personalized customer experience by analyzing site visitor’s clicks and decisions at each data point to create a profile for them. Leverage information such as geolocation, browser history, device type and behaviors to deliver tailored marketing messages, recommended products and more. 
  • Content as a Service: Manage and deploy content for a variety of websites and services from one location in a preconfigured development environment. Design reusable content, deliver content in various layouts, scale regardless of size and more using the platform’s unbarred infrastructure and APIs. 
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  • API: JSON payloads provide complete programmatic control over CMS features such as assets, translations and more. Delivers API payloads in the sub-100 ms range utilizing caching strategies and external CDNs. 
  • Toolbox: Customizable UX allows editors to easily create content of all forms, such as rich text, locations, JSON snippets and more. Choose and add fields to customizable content types. Publish in multiple languages and time zones to ensure viewers across the world can view content at the same time. Safeguard content with roles and permissions tools. 
  • Recordkeep: The ISO 27001-compliant cloud platform creates a safe space for all data and information to be held while being monitored 24/7, ensuring 99.99% uptime. 
  • Security: Keep information secure with SAML 2.0, 2FA and SCIM integration allowing for SSO (Single Sign-on). The vendor's security program is monitored by the Information Systems Management System (ISMS) which is continuously up-to-date with the ISO 27001:2013 international standards. 
  • Editing: Includes built-in real-time markdown editing. An embedded media library prevents broken public links. 
  • Customize: Prototype easily with SDKs available in multiple languages. Integrate with any API service by utilizing natively joined apps and third-party software. Personalize how content is created, managed and consumed through open source field editors, the Forma 360 design system and UI extensions. 
  • Mobile Apps: Update content across platforms with flexible APIs and interfaces. Developers can manage multiple digital interfaces using a single content backend. Selective sync, image auto-compression and support for offline persistence delivers a seamless mobile device experience. 
  • Open Source Libraries: Forma 360 design software and field editors allow editors to create an interface that implements custom behaviors, without having to recreate components. 
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Product Ranking

#13

among all
CMS Software

#29

among all
CMS Software

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User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 1237 reviews
Great User Sentiment 283 reviews
81%
of users recommend this product

Drupal has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 81% when considering 1237 user reviews from 6 recognized software review sites.

87%
of users recommend this product

Contentful has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 87% when considering 283 user reviews from 6 recognized software review sites.

4.9 (14)
4.3 (15)
3.8 (339)
4.3 (98)
4.23 (376)
4.42 (52)
4.2 (339)
4.5 (42)
4.3 (7)
4.4 (71)
3.6 (162)
3.9 (5)

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Highly Customizable: Drupal is known for its flexibility, allowing users to create highly customized websites without extensive coding knowledge. The availability of numerous modules and themes empowers users to tailor their sites to specific needs and preferences.
Scalability: Drupal's architecture is designed to handle websites of all sizes, from small personal blogs to large enterprise applications. Its ability to scale efficiently makes it a suitable choice for projects with growth potential.
Strong Security: Drupal has a reputation for robust security features and a dedicated security team. Regular updates and security patches help protect websites from vulnerabilities and potential threats.
Active Community: Drupal boasts a large and active community of developers and users who contribute to its development, provide support, and share knowledge. This vibrant community fosters collaboration and innovation within the Drupal ecosystem.
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Structured Content: Contentful's structured content approach separates content from its presentation, offering flexibility and reusability across various platforms and channels. This means content can be easily adapted for different devices and applications without the need to recreate it from scratch.
API-first Approach: Contentful's API-first design allows for seamless integration with other tools and services, enabling developers to build custom workflows and automate content delivery. This can streamline content management processes and improve efficiency.
Collaboration Features: Contentful provides features that facilitate collaboration among team members, such as roles and permissions, version history, and content scheduling. These features can help teams work together more effectively and ensure content consistency.
Scalability and Performance: Contentful is designed to handle large volumes of content and traffic, making it suitable for businesses of all sizes. Its cloud-based infrastructure ensures high availability and performance, even during peak usage periods.
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Steep Learning Curve: Drupal's robust features and flexibility come at the cost of complexity, making it challenging for beginners to grasp. The learning curve can be daunting for users accustomed to more intuitive content management systems.
Module Dependency Issues: Drupal's modular architecture, while offering extensive customization, can lead to compatibility issues between modules. Resolving these conflicts often requires technical expertise, causing frustration for users seeking a seamless experience.
Performance Overhead: Drupal's feature-rich nature can impact website performance, especially on shared hosting environments or with numerous modules enabled. Optimization may be necessary to ensure smooth operation and fast loading times.
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Content Modeling Challenges: Contentful's content modeling can be complex and time-consuming, especially for users accustomed to traditional CMS platforms. The learning curve can be steep, requiring users to invest significant effort in understanding and implementing content types and relationships effectively.
Preview Limitations: The platform's preview functionality may not always accurately reflect the final published content, leading to potential discrepancies and requiring additional verification steps before publishing.
Search Function Shortcomings: Contentful's search capabilities have been reported as less than optimal, making it challenging for users to efficiently locate specific content within their projects, especially as the content library grows.
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Don't "drupal" the ball when it comes to choosing the right content management system (CMS) for your needs. Drupal has been around for over two decades and has garnered a reputation for being a powerful and flexible platform, but it's not without its quirks. User reviews from the past year paint a picture of a CMS that's a bit of a mixed bag, with some folks singing its praises and others scratching their heads in frustration. Drupal's biggest strength is its flexibility. It's like a chameleon, able to adapt to a wide range of website needs, from simple blogs to complex e-commerce platforms. This is largely thanks to its extensive library of modules and themes, which allow users to add all sorts of bells and whistles to their sites. However, this flexibility comes at a cost: complexity. Drupal has a steeper learning curve than some other CMS options like WordPress, and it can be a bit overwhelming for beginners. It's like trying to assemble a piece of furniture from IKEA without the instructions – doable, but definitely not a walk in the park. So, who is Drupal best suited for? It's a great choice for organizations with complex website needs and the technical know-how to navigate its intricacies. If you're looking for a CMS that you can truly make your own and are willing to put in the time to learn the ropes, Drupal could be your perfect match. However, if you're a beginner or need a quick and easy solution, you might want to consider a more user-friendly option. Remember, the CMS landscape is constantly evolving, so it's always a good idea to check out the latest reviews and comparisons before making a decision.

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Feeling a little content-less? Contentful might just be the CMS remedy you need Contentful has garnered a reputation for its user-friendly interface, making it a breeze for folks without a tech background to navigate the platform. The extensive range of templates empowers users to craft visually appealing and engaging content, while seamless integration with popular marketing tools streamlines content management across various platforms. However, some users have expressed concerns about the pricing structure, which may pose a challenge for smaller businesses or those with tighter budgets. Additionally, the absence of certain features could be a dealbreaker for businesses with specific requirements. What truly sets Contentful apart is its headless architecture, providing unparalleled flexibility and customization compared to traditional CMS platforms. This means businesses can tailor the platform to their exact needs, integrating it with any front-end technology or framework. This adaptability makes Contentful an excellent choice for businesses with diverse content requirements or those seeking to deliver content across multiple channels, such as websites, mobile apps, and smart devices. In a nutshell, Contentful is best suited for businesses that prioritize flexibility, scalability, and a user-friendly experience. It's particularly well-suited for organizations with complex content needs or those looking to deliver content across multiple platforms. However, businesses with budget constraints or requiring specific features may need to explore alternative options. Keep in mind that the software landscape is constantly evolving, so it's always a good idea to check for the latest updates and user reviews before making a decision.

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