Whatever platform you prefer, awesome websites can be built on both. Though, what about Drupal vs WordPress costs and expenditures?
Source: 20,000$ to 200$. Drupal vs WordPress: Comparing Prices – CMS2CMS
This is an interesting article, as it breaks down in simple terms why the costs vary so greatly. I’ve got a decent understanding of WordPress. This blog is on a WordPress hosted server, and serves my needs pretty well, for example. I’ve also worked on other WordPress sites, including my STC chapter’s website, among others. My understanding of Drupal isn’t as great, but I got an introduction to it last year. Several major employers here in Central New Jersey use Drupal, and after not being able to convince them that with my knowledge of WordPress, SharePoint, and AEM authoring among many other custom CMSs I could figure out Drupal, I attended a Drupal Camp last year. Drupal is easy to figure out on a foundation level, once you understand what you are looking at. But I could see how the many permutations of add-ons and functionality could easily run you into higher costs, if for nothing else other than man hours developing codes to use for the tool. Drupal seemed like more of a developer’s open source CMS, whereas WordPress strikes me as trying to be more user friendly, even though there are WordPress developers out there. (I’m not one of them, for sure!) WordPress is more user-friendly for the average person to start with, whereas Drupal is not for the average person.
That makes it interesting to me, because this is why we need to have a good idea of what the content strategy is for a site before we even start developing. How many “bells and whistles” do we need for our site? How user friendly is it to administrative changes and edits on it? For example, part of the reason I haven’t hosted my WordPress independently and developed it with various add-ins is because, well, I don’t need much of that “bling”. Most of what I need is offered as a package from WordPress if you host on their servers. Even in the last year or so, they’ve been adding more add-ins so that people don’t have to go elsewhere, offering more value to their hosting service. I don’t know that the Drupal Community does that.
I will try to figure out more with Drupal eventually. I have to miss this year’s Drupal Camp near me (which is this weekend) since I have too many other things going on, and learning Drupal isn’t as high a priority at the moment as learning some other things, like finishing up my DITA studies and learning Sitecore in the near future.
What do you think? Do you have experience in WordPress and Drupal? What do you think of the article’s financial assessment? Include your comments below.
