Drupal vs WordPress (woocommerce): Which one is best for Ecommerce Startup Ideas?

What is WordPress vs Drupal?

WordPress and Drupal are competitors in the same league, as both are Content Management Systems. Being a CMS, they give their users a whole self-hosted solution to manage an already working website, or create new content on the website and then manage that. Thus, they conduct the same job process as each other.

• WordPress:

From the information gathered, WordPress(such as Woocommerce development company ), without any doubt, is the world’s highest used and most popular CM systems, having a wide range of users across the globe. The commendable thing about WordPress is that it was never meant to be a CMS, and was actually set up as a platform for blogging in 2003, though, overtime; it developed and nurtured into what it is today, a complete Content Management System in the market.

As WordPress is highly regarded in the CMS market, some of the big, notable companies and entities are also using it to have their own presence on the web. Some examples of such entities are:

• gov
• Sony Mobile
• University of Washington
• Mercedes Benz
• The New Yorker

These names are very well-known in the market, and if they are using WordPress to manage their whole content, then surely, WordPress has to be the top of the line in its own market.

There are multiple advantages of using WordPress too, such as:

• Ease of use – WordPress is known for its easy to understand user interface, the way all its features and tools are presented visibly, and is found to be highly user-friendly, especially for the people who are beginners and not proper developers.
• Extensibility – WordPress can easily be extended into different branches by adding more third-party plugins or themes, as it enters different communities easily, and does not need custom development at all. If the right extensions are used, WordPress can be made to do anything that the business requires of it.
• Ease of getting help – WordPress has a massive community that has a complete global presence, so seeking customer support or any kind of technical help is very easy.
• Lower development costs – WordPress developers cost cheaper as compared to others, and they also offer “out of the box” kind of solutions, so the cost of the developers is totally justified.
• Drupal:

Drupal is a content management system that has lived around for a longer period of time than WordPress has, but even then, WordPress has gained immense market share that Drupal cannot compete against. It was launched originally in 2000, three years before WordPress, yet, it has been a little behind WordPress since the latter came through.

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Though, even if it does not gather a great market share, Drupal is still used by some highly notable entities whose websites are running completely on Drupal, for example:

• University of Colorado
• State of Colorado
• The Economist
• Dallas Cowboys
• gov

Drupal also has its own advantages as mentioned below:

• Custom content types – Drupal has custom content types that are highly flexible, which suits the different users as per their requirements.
• Access controls and permissions – Drupal has an in-built control system for access, where the business owner can give individual permission to people and even create new roles if and when required.
• Supports multilingual sites – Drupal has about eight multilingual functions that are etched into the core and no third party intervention is required in this regard.
• Taxonomies for data handling – Drupal gives much relaxation when it comes to its taxonomy system, which is highly flexible, especially in terms of handling a lot of data and content.

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Why do we need to compare Drupal versus WordPress?

Drupal and WordPress are both content management systems, catering to possibly the same market of people, but still, their market shares are different, they offer very different kinds of solutions and even their features and tools differ from each other. Thus, there Is a comparison required, but, that comparison should not be according to who is providing you with what, rather, the comparison should be made on the basis of which one suits your business type, model and expectations in the best possible manner. The CMS that you choose should always be in sync with the organizational beliefs, values and match the project’s requirements at its best.

As deeper research into both these platforms suggests, both, WordPress(such as woocommerce website design ) and Drupal, are great and powerful tools in order to build amazing websites and owe to powerful digital experiences, though, they do have their own differences. Yet, we cannot say that the differences in each case are good or bad, because that comparison does not serve the fact that it is not that one is bad and the other is good, but it is just a matter of which platform prioritizes which tools and features, and thus, focuses more on that aspect.

One can be more focused on the speed and agility of the project, whereas the other can be focused towards scales and sales, but both are great in whatever they do, so to choose the best option for yourself can be done when you know what exactly you expect from the system. Ease of use, control, editing, themes, anything can be a priority for the business owner, so it up to him which one fits his business the best.

As per comments by users, each, Drupal and WordPress, have their own pros and cons, and their own distinct abilities when it comes to managing CMS, though, if a person is looking for a platform that provides a mix of multiple factors such as speed, ease of use, power, beauty and flexibility, these are things that both of them can provide, so the business owner has to look into more specific details and offerings if they want to make the best choice for their business. Therefore, before choosing a platform, the business owner should have a complete checklist and wants and needs, and then match those to both the platforms to see where the best fit is achieved.

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• Functionality

Drupal is known to have its own share of complexity, much more than WordPress(such as Woocommerce Migration ), but this complexity itself is the reason that Drupal also has the advantage of advanced functionality that can better cater to its users and their needs. This is because Drupal is a platform that was built by developers and only for developers who can easily work with complexity, thus, if you are not a developer and have no prior knowledge, you will have much difficulty working with Drupal, and will most probably ignore the great options and features it offers.

Drupal’s functionality is much in depth, as compared to WordPress(such as Woocommerce Integration ), as Drupal has many more features, which could also be a disadvantage at times since people who do not know complex work, can get confused, and not get the main benefits of Drupal overall.

Drupal creates a sort of learning curve when it comes to its usage, containing taxonomies, blocks and views, content types, etc., and it also provides a lot of power to the users of the Drupal platform.

WordPress, on other hand, is an easy-to-use and highly user friendly platform, having a much easier user interface, where pretty much everything is in view and self-explanatory. Even a beginner or new user, who does not know the developer work, can also work easily on WordPress, so this advantage goes to WordPress over Drupal.

Drupal wins again when it comes to multiple templates for the page, content types, user permissions and other advanced features, where WordPress is a little lagging behind. Handling access to private content and individualized access points are something that Drupal deal with best, and can easily handle different site stakeholders at one time.

• Design

In order to have a responsive development and design your WooCommerce website, one this you need to be sure of is that your images are well-managed and up to the perfectly balanced scale, or else, your website can lead you downwards. In this regard, both the CMS platforms have solutions for responsive designing and images, but they both have a different approach towards this problem.

When working with WordPress, the functions.php is the kind of file that deals with image sizes, and is measured in per break points, which are pre-declared. Though, performance issues can arise if the scales and images are not aligned, which may lead to the intervention of CSS to help work out the theme and the issue at hand.

Where Drupal is concerned, there is an Image Style module already available inside the admin region, which can help the user to easily set the image sizes, though, it takes some time to setup, but at the end, the work is done without any php file involvement.

One major advantage that both, Drupal vs WordPress, have is that their designing options are agnostic and highly customizable, giving the users a chance to design their website using templates and design however they want to. The pre-determined available themes in both these CMS platforms are known to be responsive and have a low development time.

• Themes

Coming to the already available themes and the theme market itself, it is known that Drupal has great pre-available themes, known as starter themes, that are both, responsive and also have low development time, but this does not always work out for users in the best possible way. This is because, the kind of development that Drupal requires cannot be completed by just these theme spin offs that are available, and some purchases need to be made for enhancement purposes.

One disadvantage that Drupal has here is that it is complicated and requires extra time and effort to choose themes and play around it. Moreover, the fact that third party customizations are mostly required for enhancement purposes, it makes the whole process a lot more expensive, because themes and options available for Drupal are overall expensive.

Comparatively, WordPress has a great theme market and most of the themes are DIYs (do it yourself), making them highly customizable and according to the perfect needs of the users. The advantage of these WordPress themes is that they are very easy to use, have great responsiveness and do not need much integration or addition from any other sources, so they cost much less that Drupal ones.

• Development Time

Where development time is concerned, we have already seen above that WordPress takes lesser time to develop, essentially because all the options are more or less easily set and the pre-determined themes are great for a start. In addition, any new and non-developer person can quickly make and start a website, so the development time is definitely low.

Drupal has a more advanced development phase, and if you do not use the advanced settings, there is no real use of Drupal. The more advanced mode that you use, the greater the development time. Additionally speaking, Drupal is more complex and gives too many options for customizations, confusing the developer as compare to the website development on Woocommerce, making him take more time in the whole development process.

• Features

Drupal has multiple advanced features that can be added to one’s website, in order to make it all the more interesting and give a variety of options to the business to add to their page. Though, again, adding more features does require some development knowledge and only the ones who have development experience can really make the best possible use of adding advanced features.

From content types, page layouts, checkout options to product portfolios, access and controls, etc., Drupal has a huge variety of features to offer, in addition to multiple third party sources of features too, but they all need the right developer resource to come into handy.

WordPress mostly has simple and basic features to start with, that are ideal for beginners and first time users. Though, other third party features can be added, these basic features are more than enough to make a proper, functional website, and even to make it reliable and attractive, more options are not quite required.

• Payment Gateways and Fees

Since WordPress has a greater market share and caters to a larger population than Drupal, in addition, it is WooCommerce website, so all the big names in the payment gateways have integrated with WordPress same Shopify Payment Gateway, such as:

• Amazon Pay
• Apple Pay
• PayPal Pro
• Skrill
• Stripe
• 2Checkout

People using these gateways get regular shipment discounts and special prices too at times, making their purchasing experience even better. WordPress keeps a certain amount of fixed fees, and gives the rest to the payment gateway provider.

Drupal is a more complex website development platform, and not too commonly used in the world at the moment, so some big payment gateways have not yet integrated with Drupal, and a few smaller ones are what work for it, such as:

• Amazon Pay
• AliPay
• com
• China Payments
• PayONE
• Sezzle Pay
• WeChat Pay

Now, these payment gateways charge a little higher than the others because they are still settling in and new to the payment gateway market. So Drupal users have to pay for the transactions, and even Drupal gives a certain amount to these gateways in return for integration.

• Marketing Tools

Though in earlier version of Drupal, marketing tools and outsider integrations were not that much, but with Drupal 7 and now Drupal 8, things have started working out for Drupal, and their marketing tools variety has also definitely increased, keeping in mind all the important marketing essentials. Drupal offers some amazing marketing tools and options, such as:

• Visitor Tracking
• Email Marketing
• Lead Scoring
• Customizing Workflows
• Hubspot and MailChimp integrations easily

WordPress also has a variety of marketing tools and options that it offers, including tracking of visitors, orders, etc. and also marketing through emails, though, most of the marketing tools need to be downloaded in the form of plugins, and WordPress plugins, most of the time, slow down the whole website and are not ideal for use.

• SEO

The best kind of search engine optimizations, that websites can put to use in order to get higher rankings on any search engine expect the website to be light and fitting into all the possible optimization checklist items. These checklist items may include some of the following essential features, like:

• Page Load Time
• Schemas
• Content Delivery Networks, etc.

When it comes SEO and its advantages, both, Drupal and WordPress are not very great in this aspect, and need extra third party help if they want to increase their SEO abilities.

Though, the worst case scenario can be faced by Drupal if the developer is not well versed in search engine optimization, and does something wrong, which would lead to a disaster. This is why WordPress is a better option, since there is a very low margin of error in that.

The three options given above that are considered factors to keep in mind when working with SEO are equally found in both of our CMS options, which is why, both rank similarly when I comes to SEO. If there is something that one CMS lacks, they have support plugins to help them reach that area too, so that nothing is really missed out.

• Customer Help and Technical Support

Drupal is a highly complex platform for website development, so it is obvious that the most help would be needed by Drupal users themselves. Though Drupal users are mostly well versed developers as it is not a job for beginners, they still need some help and support, which is openly provided by Drupal. Yes, Drupal has a global network of its users that share their problems and solutions openly, so as to help their community of developers. The support is available throughout the day, and can seek it at any point of the development process.

WordPress, too, has a wide community of users who readily help each other out. There is ample online support for any technical help and customer support or query, be it through live chat, call, or otherwise. Much help is not required since WordPress is very easy to use; but then again, any minor or major problem is completely fixed within more or less twenty four hours.

• Integration

Integrations are when you combine features or options of any third party source you’re your own CMS platform, such as web services of micro services from iPhone apps, or any other platforms. Integrations help the website to develop in a better way, and have many more features and options than it would in its raw form.

Drupal deal in complexities and even the integrations it makes are a highly complicated step. Best integrations can be combined if the developer knows what he is doing, and has good experience in it, which can be highly beneficial for the page and the business that is developing the page. Though, if the developer has no clue what he is doing, wrong integrations can cost you more than the profit it gives you.

WordPress also easily lets integrations flow in, but users mostly do not want to integrate anything with their WordPress website, as they want it raw, fresh and easy to use, and do not want to complicate the page much.

• Sales Features

WordPress is a platform that was initially started for blogging, thus, it is best known for blogs and works best in that regard. For people opening online stores, WordPress is a great option, but there are much better options available out there, that are focused on online stores itself. WordPress is really easy to use and a great one for beginners to start their store, however, the responsibilities and decisions that come along with and eCommerce website(other e-commerce sites include Salesforce Commerce Cloud, bigcommerce web design company and salesforce commerce cloud development), are very hefty, and WordPress needs to step up if it wants to make its name in the online business store market.

Drupal has a fully integrated system Commerce 2, which is integrated seamlessly into Drupal’s newer versions, and gives a great sales outlook. From having a customer faced display, customizable options for the cashier screen, APIs enabled and printing enabled of receipts, the whole shopping experience is great, and very alike to real life Point of Sale (POS) counters. This increases sales, as customers like having an easy checkout that they are familiar with already in real life.

• Inventory Management

Both, WordPress and Drupal manage to keep their inventory in check and balance most of the time, and have stock checks as well, though, the developer working on Drupal needs to know his job and how the inventory is supposed to be managed, or else, orders will be wrongly punched, inventory will be mismanaged, and the whole business is going to suffer. Yet again, due to lower complexities, there is a very low margin of error in WordPress when it comes to managing the inventory, because it is a simple and basic process that is integrated into the CMS platform and is already an available option for users.

• Mobile Responsiveness

If we are talking about responsive themes and mobile friendly sites, both WordPress and Drupal have starter packs and pre-determined themes that are highly mobile responsive, and will surely help you get your site on the market as soon as it is up and running. WPTouch for WordPress and drupal.org for Drupal, both have thematic options that cater smoothly with mobile responsiveness.

Another aspect of mobile responsiveness is editing the content on the mobile, for which purpose, WordPress has its own, native application for mobile phone users, which lets you edit the content of your WordPress website anytime and anywhere. Drupal does not have any such native application, but they are developing better mobile responsive actions for their new Drupal 8 launch.

• Application Integrations

WordPress is a user friendly app, which also has integrations available for multiple different apps and platforms, such as Facebook, where it can create interactive pages and conduct business. Similarly, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest are also on the list of integrations available for WordPress. It also uses MailChimp for any kind of writing and business communication required, along with Google Sheets.

For Drupal, a business owner can turn it into a complete app if connected with its APIs. Though, for third party integrations of different apps, Drupal can also easily integrate with MailChimp, Google Sheets, and Google Drive, and can conduct sales and marketing through Facebook and Instagram, but Pinterest is not part of the package with Drupal, but Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM is a great way to manage content and other processes, so Drupal has much better integration options than WordPress.

• Final Thoughts

WordPress and Drupal may be competitors in the market and WordPress may have its own greater market share, but when it comes to comparing the two platforms, they both have their own advantages, disadvantages, features, processes and target market.

Just like WordPress users who do not want complexities in their website will keep using WordPress and not switch to Drupal, great app and website developers who are Drupal experts will also always prefer Drupal over WordPress. This is because their ease of use might not be there, but their end product may satisfy them much more than what they were getting out of WordPress.

Furthermore, we discussed above different segments and areas of a content management system and platform, and both WordPress and Drupal have shown to be catering to a complete different market of users. Both platforms are being used with different businesses, and all businesses are satisfied with what they are getting.

Thus, choosing a CMS platform is not  based on what kind of platform it is or how it works, rather, the main purpose of the platform is to fulfill the needs of the business in the best possible way, that is when a perfect fit platform is chosen and used.

Drupal vs WordPress (woocommerce) vs Joomla: Which one is best and why?

All three of the mentioned platforms, Drupal, WordPress and Joomla are great CMS platforms, and have their own pros and cons, but which one is the best depends on the kind of business you own, and what you are looking for in a platform.

WordPress is a basic and simple CMS platform which was originally built for blogging, and later turned into a whole CMS platform. It is very basic and simple to use, and has customizable options, yet, is cheaper and takes lesser time to develop.

Drupal is a highly complex CMS platform that needs specialized developers in order to make a website worth it, and only special developers can make the best use of Drupal. It could get expensive since it has multiple customizable options for maximum benefits, and it takes a lot of time to develop a website on it, too.

Joomla is a CMS platform that is closer to WordPress in the options, features and the way it works, but there is one main difference. WordPress is a blogging and CMS platform together, but in Joomla, these two aspects belong to two different departments, and each department has the best developers and staff to take care of the work they have at hand. This is a great way to divide and rule, as specialized staff is not wasted and is working on the part that they are best at.

Which is more secure Drupal or WordPress?

Where your website is concerned, both these platforms, WordPress and Drupal, are highly secure on their own. For example, the main WordPress platform itself is highly secure, but with different people’s needs when third party integrations take place, a lot of security threats are posed, and WordPress become more insecure. Same is the case with Drupal, but the Drupal team has a more closer look on third party interventions, acting as a better filter against the insecure threats.

Can you use Drupal with WordPress (woocommerce)?

In very rare cases, as found, it is possible to integrate some aspects of Drupal into the WordPress system, though, mostly it is done through migration, where the user migrates from Drupal to WordPress through a whole, specified was of migration. Both these platforms are competitors, so there is not much use of using both of them together as one.

WordPress (woocommerce ) vs Drupal which is easier to make your website?

According to the comparative analysis above, WordPress is a better and easier way to make your website since it has easy to use options and a great user friendly interface, with very less development time and pre-available complete themes that just need little customization and your website is ready to run.

Drupal becomes tiresome, costly and takes a lot of time if the person making the website is not a pro developer, and even then, with so many customization options, it gets difficult to make a simple website within a short period of time.

How big is Drupal vs WordPress (woocommerce)?

WordPress vs Drupal is a comparative debate where each has its own positives and negatives. WordPress has a greater market share in the market than Drupal, though, the marketplace for options, plugins and integrations that Drupal has is vast, and has many more options than WordPress does, yet, WordPress is a bigger name in the market as compared to Drupal.

WooCommerce Mobile app vs Shopify application development: Which one is best by features?  

Both Woocommerce Mobile app and Shopify application development score high for various features. Overall the Shopify app performs better with an average score of 9.3 for various features, as compared to Woocommerce that scores 8.8 for its features. The user experience for Shopify stands at 100% (that’s obvious), whereas, for Woocommerce the User Experience stands at a high of 97%.

Shopify store support and maintenance services vs. WooCommerce maintenance: How to consider both by cost?

The monthly support and maintenance services costs for Shopify and WooCommerce are mostly the same. The overall cost of maintenance services for both platforms will eventually depend on the size of the store along with various other factors. Nonetheless, since Shopify claims a large market share, there are more agencies offering maintenance services for Shopify stores, thereby, you can expect a more reasonable maintenance cost.

Does webpage design matter while creating Drupel and WordPress websites?

Yes, the webpage design matters a great deal when designing the website. It is basically because it can impact the audience’s perception of your brand. A good webpage design will attract customers to your website, which translates into higher leads and sales. However, to get an effective webpage design, you can hire a professional Shopify web page design company.