When is Drupal the right tool for the job?

What Drupal is not for

Tools that could be built quickly on another small and light platform probably should be built as such. We have built a number of things over the years in Gatsby, Python, Casper.js, React and more.

Basic sites that don’t require customisations or high levels of functionality. WordPress has a significant market share of blogs because they’re all essentially similar, and the level of time investment people are willing to make for their blog is quite limited.

Similarly, Wix and other SaaS website providers have done well by making basic customisation and functionality available to wider audiences. Yet amongst medium to large organisations, Drupal serves a high percentage of sites because it provides the long-term stability and functionality that is needed.

Small businesses that don’t want to maintain a bespoke web platform probably don’t want a Drupal site.
 

What Drupal is for

Go through https://www.drupal.org/case-studies to see the huge array of businesses, universities, charities and governments choosing to use Drupal to build their online experiences.
They chose Drupal for its ability to host:
 

• Beautiful interactive experiences
• Data handling processes
• Product databases
• Headless content services
   

Where Drupal excels

Media handling: The built-in Media Library stores all your images, videos, YouTube and Vimeo links and private documents ready for easy access across the site. You don’t need an external DAM, though you can plug one in relatively easily.

Custom or complex fields and data architectures: Drupal’s Field UI allows you to create and customise content types and their fields on-the-fly, making quick builds and small changes simple for those with the permissions to do so.

Full editorial freedom, or restriction: There are a range of content building options available with Drupal, spanning from the full-freedom WYSIWYG builder to the fully-tied-down configurations where you enter your text and choose the display options. You choose what you need, and then build around those requirements.

International or multilingual content: Translations in Drupal have been fully supported since the original early versions, and latest Drupal can also support external translation managers with AI translation generation.

Custom endpoints: Custom is Drupal’s favourite word! It’s built for custom. Building custom pages and endpoints and data processes is what Drupal is built for, and it excels at it.

Commerce: When standard out-of-the-box commerce doesn’t cut it, Drupal will let you rework and redesign almost any aspect of the customer journey. From product displays and interactions, through to setting up payment providers ahead of the competition.

Security: Open Source does not mean insecure. It means a whole community of people casting eyes on the code regularly, contributing feedback, thoughts and conversations. The Security Initiative further puts Drupal Core and most contributed modules under regular formal scrutiny. As a result, Drupal is generally considered a highly secure platform. Additionally, it supports a range of user login mechanisms including two-factor authentication and passkeys (webauthn).