The battle of the best CMS continues. Previously we compared Umbraco vs Wordpress, this time around we're comparing Umbraco against a different CMS platform in another epic battle to see who's on top. This week it's Drupal's turn.
Drupal is another big name in the CMS market. Known for being both robust and reliable, it's a very strong contender for those who are wanting a slightly more complex content system. It has a great user interface for no-code database queries, along with a strong dedicated following that keeps popular and necessary plugins updated and maintained.
The Drupal CMS itself holds a full list of features already. There's a full media control system, saying that with no image cropping out of the box. This has to be included with a separated third-party plugin -like several other features including restricted content and URL generation. With such a heavy reliance on plugins, this could be seen as either a positive or negative depending on what you aim to achieve for your website.
Creating a basic site with custom content fields is a breeze. No refresh pagination and filtering, with the almost limitless amount of filter options, this system is extremely flexible for the non-programmers out there, that still care about expertly crafting bespoke users' experience.
Drupal working in a pretty similar way to the likes of WordPress, in the sense that there are multiple difference themes you can use. You can add your own styling to each specific pages using theme overrides. The use of the Twig templating system might be a welcome change compared to the basic verbose PHP echo-based templating of the early noughties.
Drupal is built on the same technologies that WordPress uses, utilizing PHP's major benefit of being an interpreted language. This allows any number of plugins to register their own functions to be called at any point in the boot process. As a result, Drupal is a very flexible, and only takes a couple of lines of code to implement a simple SEO plugin.
While Drupal has some great features, it does appear fairly clunky. We agree there are are a lot of technical functionalities out there and as a whole remains a very robust system, its reliability in terms of plugins does raise some eyebrows in terms of future scalability and security.
Now, we have already spoken many times about the positive features Umbraco can provide you. We even has a whole blog posts dedicated to 31 reasons why it's so great. However, you might stumble across this blog post not already knowing the capabilities of the CMS.
Built on .Net, an entirely different technology to Drupal, the initial set up of an Umbraco is a breeze. Adding in custom documented types whether that being news articles, basic pages, and landing pages are very simple, with the added time-saving feature of compositions. These are custom sets of fields that you can include within your pages. Saving an abundance of time and effort to duplicate work for pages that use the same fields. Also, something else to quickly add in here, Umbraco is built on Angular, a frontend JavaScript framework, meaning you can modify the field editors in pretty much any way you like.
The editing experience on Umbraco is smooth and highly responsive. It's easy to manage images and documents with its built-in media manager. Now, whilst the page editing capabilities aren't quite as flexible as other CMS's on the market, you can add in already predefined templates. There are also very nifty preview features that allow you to view how a page will look across different devices before publishing life, which if you are in the content marketing sector is a complete game-changer.
With the likes of Umbraco, you have complete control over how your website is going to look. Umbraco doesn't have themes like Drupal and even WordPress have. The fact that there are no templates or themes leaves the designing process to be entirely flexible and explore every possible design avenue without limits.
Since the global pandemic, businesses have had to adjust to everything online which was already a pretty crowded environment. Stores that never had a website have since joined the online eCommerce world which means competition is high. So, if you want to stand out from the competition and have a website that looks entirely different from your competitors, Umbraco will easily allow you to do so.
With the backoffice being run on compiled .NET there is no amount of 'bad code' in the templated which can even kill the CMS editing page, also known as the 'backoffice'. this means it should always be recoverable which is so much better for website stability.
Umbraco offers a full feature set of ASP.NET'S mvc system allowing, complex forms and data validation to be easily implemented. With this way of working, it's more suited to modern web development and encourages separation of concerns, a concept that improves the resulting system's extensibility and maintainability, meaning your website can be extended and modified with no worries of breaking it's features which are already being used.
As Gold Partners, we will happily shout Umbraco's name but that's because we know how great of a CMS it is. It's user-friendly, easy to manipulate, and implement your custom coding, help and support are abundant, and pretty much can achieve your dream-looking website with no restrictions.
Just to build some tension... (drum roll please) of course, it's UMBRACO!
It just does everything most businesses will need a CMS to do but allows a lot of wiggle room for growth in both the technical and design aspects.
Users will love the highly compatible and surprisingly still powerful open source CMS, smooth website editing, and couples alongside an extensive range of well-thought-out management tools making Umbraco a pleasure to use.