10 ways Drupal is cost effective for Enterprise and Small Business

Whether you're choosing to move to Drupal or to leave Drupal, it's worth ensuring you're aware of the ways Drupal can deliver value.

Below are ten key ways that Drupal has brought clear benefits for our clients, and many others around the world.

There’s no platform tie-in

Drupal is an Open Source project, which means there is no cost or license for using it. Your monthly costs are your hosting and your support and development. There are no expensive bolt-ons, up-sells or platform costs. Everything you pay gets you something. And you’re not locked in at ComputerMinds, either - if you needed to take your site to a different agency, you can just take the whole thing - database, code and all - and set it up elsewhere without having to start again.

Drupal comes with a lot of features

Out of the box, you get a lot of functionality with Drupal - and even more since Drupal CMS. Things like automated image cropping, easy user management, content modelling via the UI were core features long before they were standard on other platforms - yet it’s easy to take so much of the base platform functionality for granted.

For things that don’t come in the box, there’s custom development and there’s a community-driven world of contributed modules.

There’s a huge collection of Drupal modules available - and they cost nothing

With thousands of modules on Drupal.org, there’s coverage for an enormous range of widely-used and specific functionality. Most modules are 100% free to use, unlike other platforms which are dominated by freemium and subscription models.

You just need a team with the domain knowledge to get the modules you need, configure and customise them.

Excellent administrative interfaces making training a breeze

The administrative and editorial experiences in modern Drupal are top notch. Clear, simple interfaces with intuitive structures mean you can spend less time training staff and more time doing important things.

Permissions and roles allow for independent working

The highly granular permissions system means that you can give people exactly the permissions they need to do their job, and leave them to it. No more chasing admins in other departments to get things done!
 

AI integrations are ready to save you time

There are already AI modules waiting to plug your content in to the future. The general AI module can connect your site and data to the LLM or provider of your choice, and you’re free to build from there or use readily-available examples.

Example: It’s possible to require Alt text on all your media - but utilising AI integrations you can simply outsource the image descriptions to an AI service and review them later.

Read more: Go faster with AI

SEO optimisation and metadata come for free

Internet basics like Page Titles, OpenGraph tags and hreflang tags are quick and free to get working for standard use cases, plus clever use of built-in tools and processes can automate much of your SEO metadata.

Don’t spend hours copy and pasting article teasers unnecessarily - get your site set up to do things the smart way so you can concentrate on more important issues.

Read more: SEO with Drupal

Translation handling built in, and ready for AI

Since the very first versions, Drupal has supported multilingual content. At this point, it supports a range of translation strategies and mechanisms including local translations and external translation managers with automatic AI translation.

Multisite installations

Where you need additional websites with essentially the same functionality, you can run multiple sites off the same codebase. It can be significantly cheaper than building whole additional sites, and maintenance overall will cost less per site too.

Read more: Multisite installations

Integrate with your DAM, or just use the Media Library

If you already have a DAM (Digital Asset Manager - a platform that stores and manages your imagery and media), you can probably plug in a module and get Drupal talking to it quite quickly. And if you don’t, you probably won’t need one! Drupal’s built in Media Library can handle most Media functionality out of the box, with contrib modules ready to extend it further. Save thousands by avoiding unnecessary additional services and subscriptions.