More and more often, when deciding on a purchase, users tend to trust other users’ reviews rather than the sleek product descriptions. Moreover, reviews can shed light on the most valuable features that marketers neglected to pay attention to, or indicate the flaws that the description is silent about.
What we are driving at, is that reviews and testimonials, however subjective, are worth taking into account when you’re vague about the final choice of any product. So, this post may come in handy if you find it hard to decide whether to prefer Drupal to WordPress or vice versa for your website. in this post, we are going to employ user reviews and testimonials to research the key features recommended by users of both CMS giants at hand.
Let’s talk numbers
If you’re at least briefly acquainted with WordPress and Drupal, you must be aware of the approximate number of users they boast. If not, we will spare you the need to search – Drupal is used on 692,855 websites, according to BuiltWith, while the number of websites built on WordPress totals 17,402,952 as of January 23, 2017.
Armed with this data , you won’t be taken by surprise by the number of Facebook likes their pages received. So, Drupal’s got 90,107 likes at the moment of this post being written, while WordPress page features as many as 1, 086 536 likes.
Features and usability rating
According to Trustradius feature rating comparison of Drupal to WordPress, the latter wins in the overall score, but when viewed in details, users consider WP better only in web content creation, while Drupal has a higher rating of security features, as well as in terms of the platform and infrastructure.
But while the features comparisons show both platforms fairly on the same line, the area where their ratings differ significantly is usability. Here, Drupal’s is losing to WordPress, with the rating of 6.4 vs. 9.0 correspondingly. Well, it’s not a surprise either, since WordPress popularity is often attributed to its accessibility and a gentle learning curve even for users with no technical background.
Another popular user reviews resource G2Crowd offers a move detailed Drupal and WordPress feature comparison. While both platforms are rated rather high by the users, WordPress is the leader in all areas based on all the reviews, the biggest discrepancy found again in the ease of use (6.7 Drupal vs 8.7 WordPress), as shown in the picture below.
The areas where Drupal excels over WP are API integrations and Enterprise scalability, according to all users reviews. It is worth mentioning, that segmenting user reviews according to large enterprise users shows one more area where Drupal scores higher – its Ease of doing business with, the platform founded by Dries Buytaert getting 8.7 points vs. WordPress’s 8.5.
Watching the reviewers’ industry stats, we cannot omit a curious tendency. The biggest share of Drupal reviews is made by users from Computer software industry, whereas WordPress is most reviewed by people working in Marketing and Advertising. This can be taken as an indicator that Drupal is mostly used by people with some technical skills, while WordPress is suitable for users who are connected with content creation, publishing and promotion, but aren’t typically much technically savvy.
We also recommend to read/look at: What CMS Will Be Your Choice 2017? Facts And Figures [Infographic].
Wrapping up
You can find a lot of positive reviews and testimonials for both WordPress and Drupal, praising the advantages of this or that platform, and similarly there are testimonials that bring to the surface the numerous disadvantages brought to users by their CMS. We won’t go deep into that.
The whole point is, both Drupal and WordPress are decent, world renowned and incredibly popular content management systems. The takeaway from the research above indicates that users consider WordPress easier to use, but remember that they are for the most part non-technical audience. It also says that Drupal is found more scalable and more suitable for business. So, if you’re looking for the ultimate platform for your website, don’t go after the popularity, and focus on the purpose of your site and your own skills and capabilities instead. This will let you pick the great platform to be your partner in creating a successful online presence rather than having to fight with it.
Let us know your thoughts on the subject in the comments below.