Drupal Reviews and Pricing

IT Consultant, Business Owner, Lecturer at a tech consulting company with 10,001+ employees

Apr 26, 2016

Through my different companies, we have developed many Drupal sites, from simple ones to complex E-commerce sites and custom made applications. The UI could be improved, though.

Pros and Cons

"Drupal is an open source content management system which provides an easy installation process, a good range of modules for features' expansion, as well as a supportive community that will help resolve issues that you face with Drupal."

"If you have a high traffic site and speed is important, to optimize Drupal you will probably need an expert."

What is most valuable?

Drupal is an open source content management system which provides an easy installation process, a good range of modules for features' expansion, as well as a supportive community that will help resolve issues that you face with Drupal.

How has it helped my organization?

We have been using Drupal for more than 7 years now. Through my different companies we have developed many Drupal sites, from simple ones to complex E-commerce sites and custom made applications.

Drupal 7.x if combined with the appropriate modules and cache mechanisms can provide a robust, fully featured and secure website with endless capabilities. However, for these optimizations to be made, a Drupal expert may be required. It is not as easy to use as Wordpress for example - although Drupal 7.x is vastly improved to Drupal 6.x and Drupal 8.x will be even better.

We have also tried Wordpress and Joomla in various occasions, and while Wordpress is our choice for simple projects, Drupal is always our cost-effective choice for complex projects. It provides flexibility, robust framework, excellent modules for easy expansion and a very good support community.

What needs improvement?

One of the things that Drupal needs to improve is the interface. It needs to become more user friendly. It is not as rich in terms of modules as Wordpress is, but it is getting there.

If you have a high traffic site and speed is important, to optimize Drupal you will probably need an expert.

In regards to the interface it needs to become more user friendly like for example Wordpress or Joomla, so that simple users can administer the site in an easy way and not get lost in menus and options that they don’t understand that may even break the site. Although the interface has improved in comparison to Drupal 6, there are still many things to be done.

The number of modules that Drupal has although adequate, is not nearly as good as the number of modules that Wordpress has. There are times that you cannot find a functionality in Drupal while you can find plenty of options in Wordpress. For example Drupal integration with mailers, the only reliable plugin is for Mailchimp. So if you want to integrate with another platform like Aweber, emma, getresponse etc, you have almost zero choices. While most of the platforms integrate perfectly with Wordpress.

Optimizing Drupal as a high performance site, is not an easy task. You have many options but the most effective ones require server and settings’ modifications, which can be done by experts. However once you have the proper setup, Drupal flies!

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user253797IT Consultant, Business Owner, Lecturer at a tech consulting company with 10,001+ employees

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Oct 18, 2017

Thank you Kiran. I agree with you Mark. I think the interface is getting better and better.

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it_user330165

Online Websites Advertising at a marketing services firm with 51-200 employees

Oct 20, 2015

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Its environment allows for rapid prototyping, but it needs a shorter learning curve.

Pros and Cons

"It has a huge community and support from all over the web."

"It needs a shorter learning curve."

Valuable Features:

It's extensible with so many modules.
The environment allows for rapid prototyping.
It provides security updates more often.
It has a huge community and support from all over the web.

Room for Improvement:

It needs a shorter learning curve.
It needs to improve resources usage.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

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it_user243900

Web Administrator at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 30, 2015

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It's your CMS if you're concerned with enterprise-level security, but the existing plugins don't cover all areas.

Pros and Cons

"Use Drupal if expandability is a must or if you are building a large website with various kinds of functionality."

"Drupal community and forums are not as easy and straightforward as Wordpress, the number of areas covered by existing plugins should be larger, and it is resource hungry compared to Wordpress."

What is most valuable?

- Ease of Customization

- Expandability

How has it helped my organization?

- Company website build in Drupal

What needs improvement?

- Drupal Community and Forums not as easy and straightforward as Wordpress

- The number of areas covered by existing plugins should be larger

- Resource Hungry, compared to Wordpress

For how long have I used the solution?

2 years

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No issues

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No issues

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No issues

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

Not needed

Technical Support:

Not needed

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Joomla, Wordpress. I typically use Wordpress for smaller websites, with less customization required and Drupal for larger websites that may need to expand in the future.

How was the initial setup?

Straightforward

What about the implementation team?

In house

What was our ROI?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Drupal is Free.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Joomla, Wordpress

What other advice do I have?

Make sure you know what kind of website you want to build and who will be using it.

It is good to note the following:

- Drupal has enterprise level security. Numerous government websites are build on Drupal so if security is a number one priority Drupal is your CMS

- As far as SEO is concerned, things can go really bad for Drupal if the developer does not know what he/she is doing, or does not understand customer needs. If SEO is done correctly Drupal is as good for SEO as any other CMS

- Use Drupal if expandability is a must or if you are building a large website with various kinds of functionality. For smaller websites and blogs, Wordpress is king.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user77997

Senior Manager of IT with 1,001-5,000 employees

Aug 13, 2014

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Migration from one version to the next requires significant effort, but our key metrics have improved dramatically.

Pros and Cons

"Significantly less time spent on production issues and maintaining existing functionality, translating into significantly more time adding new and enhanced functionality."

"Migration from one major version to the next major version requires significant effort."

What is most valuable?

<ol> <li>Feature-rich</li> <li>Open source </li> <li>Highly extendable</li> <li>Being actively developed</li> <li>Helpful, collaborative community</li> <li>free</li> </ol>

How has it helped my organization?

Significantly less time spent on production issues and maintaining existing functionality, translating into significantly more time adding new and enhanced functionality.

What needs improvement?

Migration from one major version to the next major version requires significant effort.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using this solution for 5 years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No issues with deployment.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No issues with stability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Initially, yes. Help from experienced consultants ameliorated this.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service: Excellent. There are always people in the community online and willing to have discussions. Each individual “module” (i.e., extension) has an issue queue where questions and issues can be brought up, discussed, and resolved. And there are consultancies available for contracted support.Technical Support: Excellent. The technical level of the community is high, as is that of consultancies.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Yes, several. Moved one site from flat files and homegrown systems, and others from Microsoft CMS 2002, all to enhance our ability to provide new and improved features and to decrease risk. Moved another from a customized (and therefore unmaintainable) version of Xoops. Moved others from hosted services to improve supportability.

How was the initial setup?

Setting up Drupal itself is straightforward. Implementing all the functionality required for a large, complex site becomes a large work effort. There are thousands of community modules available to add functionality, so determining the best way to add functionality (if you do not have trusted, experienced Drupal developers in-house) becomes a multi-pronged activity of discussions with the community, searching and comparing existing modules, and decisions about using them versus building custom modules.

What about the implementation team?

Our largest sites have been implemented using blended teams of consultancies and in-house developers. Our smaller sites have been implemented by in-house developers. The vendors we have used have high levels of expertise.

What was our ROI?

I can’t provide numbers, but I can say that our key metrics have improved dramatically.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Zero setup cost for most of our sites. We acquired servers to ensure our largest sites could handle large volumes of visitors. Our ongoing day-to-day cost is just the cost of employee time. We have a small devops team managing the infrastructure and several small teams of developers creating new and improved functionality.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We evaluated hundreds of other options.

What other advice do I have?

Do NOT implement your first site without the aid of an experienced, collaborative expert. It is very easy to build a Drupal site extremely poorly, and an expert will guide you toward using Drupal the way it works best.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user77997

Senior Manager of IT with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 24, 2014

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The amount of functionality provided is valuable but upgrading to new major versions has been complex and difficult

Pros and Cons

"Because of Drupal, we now have the ability to provide our customers with multilingual, multi-regional content to an extent that would not have been possible otherwise."

"There are not enough Drupal developers to satisfy demand."

What is most valuable?

The amount of functionality provided, both in the core product and in the thousands of community-developed modules.
The ability to review – and edit -- the code when needed.
The ability to find independent organizations and individuals who provide Drupal services.
The community, and its helpful, collaborative nature.

How has it helped my organization?

Because of Drupal, we now have the ability to provide our customers with multilingual, multi-regional content to an extent that would not have been possible otherwise.

What needs improvement?

There are not enough Drupal developers to satisfy demand.
Upgrading to new major versions has historically been complex and difficult. Hopefully the migration functionality being built for Drupal 8 will ease this work.

For how long have I used the solution?

Since 2009

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

We did not have enough knowledge of how Drupal-specific development practices affect site performance. Fortunately, Acquia had consultants on board who quickly identified the areas that needed to be addressed.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service: 5 starsTechnical Support: 5 stars

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Yes. One site was built on a home-grown content management system. A second was built on Xoops. Others were built on Microsoft Content Management Server. We switched the first to lower risk and to enhance our ability to provide new functionality. We switched the second because we were unable to continue supporting our forked installation of Xoops. We switched from the others to improve productivity and enable us to provide new functionality.

How was the initial setup?

Straightforward.

What about the implementation team?

Both. We augmented our internal team with Drupal experts. I would rate the experts’ level of expertise as a 4.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

No licensing fees, no annual maintenance fees. Original implementation cost (for our first site) was several hundred thousands of dollars, and day-to-day cost is the cost of employees and contractors to maintain and enhance the sites.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Hundreds, including both commercial and open source. Name them, and we probably evaluated them.

What other advice do I have?

If you plan on implementing it yourself, and you don’t already have Drupal experts on your team, don’t. Even if you believe you have the smartest developers in the world, you need to have experienced Drupal developers for technical guidance and to help ensure that your team uses Drupal development best practices.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user90792

Developer with 51-200 employees

Feb 20, 2014

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Do your research, play around with it yourself, figure out if it’s the right fit for you and if so, welcome to Drupal

Pros and Cons

"At Appnovation Technologies we leverage Drupal’s out of the box features and functionality in order to speed up development and delivery time for our clients."

"As with most if not all web technologies, theres always an initial learning curve that can seem daunting."

Valuable Features:

Content creation and management is highly robust with the ability to add any content type you could think of whether it be text, video, imagery, or more functional content like polls or forums.

Improvements to My Organization:

At Appnovation Technologies we leverage Drupal’s out of the box features and functionality in order to speed up development and delivery time for our clients. This allows us to focus more on creating high quality customizations and custom front end development which in the end produces an incredibly high quality and robust content management system.

Room for Improvement:

As with most if not all web technologies, theres always an initial learning curve that can seem daunting. These days however there are excellent online resources such as buildamodule.com that provides video training for Drupal which can be a lot easier to digest than reading documentation sometimes. That being said, there is some great documentation over at Drupal.org that would be a must-read for anyone considering Drupal for their next project.

Use of Solution:

I have been designing and developing using the Drupal CMS for the last 8 years.

Deployment Issues:

Your hosting will likely determine how easy the deployment process is since Drupal relies on various versions of PHP-5.x and above, as well as various extensions. More often than not, starting up Drupal on your local environment will introduce you to some of these dependencies before they would pop up in a production environment. There are various solutions out there for hosting, but the folks over at Acquia definitely have a great setup that is incredibly easy to use, which makes deployment an absolute breeze. Taking this a bit further, knowledge in Git also helps deploying between various environments if you’re in need of a development/staging/production environment stack.

Stability Issues:

Stability is often a concern for large scale deployments, and Drupal can handle those - but expertise in Drupal coding standards, and front end performance are at the forefront of creating a stable environment. Outside of human knowledge, Drupal itself has some great caching functionality included in its core. Page caching and compression, CSS and JavaScript compression and aggregation are also included in core functionality as well.

Initial Setup:

For your first time, you’ll need to read up on the Drupal.org documentation on how to set up a site locally. As you go through that process yourself, if you run into any issues Drupal will show you error messages pointing you in the right direction to troubleshoot. You should be able to do a quick google search for anything that looks foreign to you, just make sure you add ‘Drupal 7’ (or whatever version you’re using) to your search query to narrow down the results. A base understanding of MySQL will be required in order to set up a database, or at the very least you’ll need to know how to use tools such as PHPmyAdmin or other apps like Sequel Pro will definitely come in handy.

Other Advice:

My advice would be to get your hands on an installation of Drupal, get it going and play around with creating content, using modules and just generally exploring the various settings that are part of Drupal core. After that, it’s up to you to determine whether Drupal can meet your goals or use cases. If you’re still unsure, there are various case studies out there to read up on which may help your decision making process. On top of all of that, if you’re really serious about implementing Drupal, finding a good web development team with a strong understanding of Drupal standards is a must have. There are a lot of individuals and agencies out there doing incredible work with Drupal, so I would definitely recommend leveraging that if at all possible.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user8925

Developer with 51-200 employees

Sep 8, 2013

Comparing the Social Business Platforms: Drupal Commons, Sharepoint and Jive

In our first two posts we reviewed two of the most popular platforms for social business portals, Jive and Sharepoint. We found that Jive is feature-rich, user friendly, but also expensive. Sharepoint on the other hand is less user friendly, but a powerful tool nonetheless, particularly for businesses that use Microsoft products extensively. In this review we will examine Drupal Commons 3.0, an open-source Drupal-based platform.

For the Drupal Commons review, I went to the official website and downloaded a copy to try it out on my local box. Acquia, the parent company behind Drupal, offers services around this product. Commons, like Drupal, is an open-source product that is installed just like a normal Drupal site.

I have played with previous versions before but this version has been completely rebuilt in Drupal 7 and appears to be much improved.

1. Cost

Commons is distributed under the GNU general public license meaning that this product is fully open-source. The costs come from the labor required to install and customize the Commons site (Acquia has an article advocating their product pricing competitiveness here). One of the great things about Drupal is that you have thousands of developers and hundreds of companies available to support the product. That means organizations of any size can find labor to support their site. This is not always the case with some commercial products.

As I will detail in the review, Commons is not as fully featured out of the box as some competing products, but it does act as a solid base to build upon. So it’s value is really going to be determined based on an organization’s comparison of how much it costs to build a Commons-based site with desired customizations vs. how much the cost would be to use a competing product that provides more functionality out of the box.

2. Ability to Customize

The ability to customize Commons or any Drupal site is really one of it’s biggest selling points. Drupal’s flexibility and power make it one of the premier platforms in the CMS space. So having both a solid platform like Commons, plus the ability to customize for the needs of an organization is a really big selling point.

Commons like many other platforms, gives you several tools for customizing the platform from within the site itself.

Theme settings page layout options

This aspect alone does not differentiate Commons from other platforms in and of itself. Many platforms will allow you make changes from within the site itself. Some products will be much more user-friendly than Commons/Drupal.

The real strength with Drupal of course is the ability to download thousands of modules, i.e. plugins, as well as themes to extend it’s functionality. You are not limited to only these modules because you can create and deploy custom modules as well.

As I alluded to in cost, the value of this platform is really tied directly to a company’s desire to customize the site to fit their specific organizational needs. At the moment, Mediacurrent is using Yammer for intra-office communication which provides very little customization. On the other hand we use Open Atrium for project management as we have a strong need for customization. This is a key factor when evaluating this product against all others.

3. Overall features

One of the key features of Commons is simply that it can be used as an intranet or a public social business platform, like https://dev.twitter.com/. Or both. With groups-based permissions you could have some private and public groups, depending on what your organization is trying to accomplish. This is certainly an advantage. As with any Drupal site you could run a multi-site off of the same platform, which means that you could have a network of sites similar to what Sharepoint offers.

Another big selling point for Commons is that it is responsive out of the box.

Screengrab of the events page resized to mobile view

The downside is that there are no out of the box apps that I am aware of.

You will see a typical list of content features such as groups, events, wiki, polls, questions etc. that you see across most platforms. I will not go into detail other than to say that you can read about the latest features here. Otherwise the best way to get a feel for Commons is to try it out yourself.

Screenshot of groups page in my local Commons install

One way to try out Commons is to find a trial online if you do not how to install it locally yourself. I believe that Acquia has a way to try out their web hosting services which would include the ability to install Commons. You can also use WebEnabled which is easy as well as getpantheon.com to install Commons for free.

I personally feel that Commons is pretty intuitive, but I am also biased as a long time Drupal developer. As far as user-friendliness goes I do not think it can match the likes of Jive. I really think that for many organizations if you log into a Commons site and play around with it, you will either like the way it is organized or you won’t. Every competing product has ways to add groups, discussions, polls, blogs, etc. but they all organize the content differently.

The first decision each organization has to make when evaluating these platforms - “Do I like the way this works?” For our customers, who generally like Drupal to begin with, I would have no hesitation recommending Commons. For companies that don’t already use Drupal, it’s really about their impression of how Drupal operates that will drive whether or not they seriously evaluate Commons as the best solution for their site.

The biggest selling point that Acquia promotes is the ability for an organization to use one platform for all of their sites. They go in-depth in their Commons 3.0 webinar which can be found on Youtube. This means essentially that you can run Drupal for both your main website as well as your intranet. Being able to develop and customize one platform is going to be easier than potentially pairing multiple systems together. To be clear, I would agree that Commons is going to be more attractive if a company wants to use Drupal for all of their sites, as opposed to a company that would only be using Drupal for their intranet. So this factor should be considered.

Conclusion

To summarize, I would evaluate Commons as being suited best for organizations that want to leverage one platform uniquely tailored for their organizational needs. Commons will have more up-front costs than some online platforms, which use monthly billing; so it is not always the best fit compared to a free or cheaper online-only product which has more functionality out of the box.

Final Thoughts

My goal for this 3-part blog series was to give a fair comparison of three of the leading tools in the “Social Business Platform” space. At Mediacurrent we have built several intranet sites and are often asked to compare Drupal-based platforms with other products. I realize there are several platforms out there that I did not mention and several additional features that were left out in this roundup comparison.

Feedback is welcome! If you feel like I left out some critical features or other leading products that we should evaluate against these platforms, let me know in the comments section. I am also available on Twitter at https://twitter.com/drupalninja.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user138972Works at a tech services company

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Jul 23, 2014

Please don't (never!) start with product to solve a problem. Sheesh. Try and describe the business problem, the advantage you hope to gain, then work backwards. It is call design thinking or design for innovation. Yes, for IT wonks and pot-bellied CIOs, it is apostasy. Sooner or later the product-centric vendor hubris must give away to creating genuine value.

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