Sitecore vs. Drupal: Understanding Which is Best for Your Business

A successful business thrives on an excellent digital presence. At present, it is essential to connect with potential customers to market the right services directly to the target audience and mold your services based on customer needs. A consistent yet customized web Content Management System (CMS) is pivotal for brands to build a robust digital presence.  

A Content Management System, also called CMS, powers your website, among other channels, by giving you complete ownership over your web content, design, and functionality. It is the perfect solution for a content management system to manage your content if you're looking forward to making a website while offering a personalized experience for everyone.

How A CMS Can Power Your Business

We have already shared some brief benefits of using dynamic CMS, but let's look at some exceptionally detailed ways of how it can impact your business and assist in product and service marketing.

Minimal Coding Knowledge Required to Create a Powerful Website 

Over time, CMS systems have revolutionized the entire web design by making it possible for non-technical persons to create beautiful and functional websites without coding knowledge. You can create and maintain the content through CMS, design your website, and make it interactive. All this can be done with zero coding knowledge through a CMS – which helps many non-technical organizations. 

Ease of Collaboration While Building Websites 

Now multiple users can have access to the backend of CMS in real-time. This means when the content developers develop content, IT professionals can implement any security protocol, or developers can include code in your website's theme all in real-time. All these tasks are possible by using the collaborative features of a CMS. Moreover, collaboration improves your workflow and productivity in different teams. 

Creating Unique and Meaningful Digital Experiences for Every User

Digital experience is the new normal. Now, more than ever, a personalized and unique digital experience is essential to achieving competitive advantages and building an emotional bond between the customers and the brand. 

A CMS helps you collect and process interaction data in real time. Then it also interprets that data to know where your customers are in their buying journey. By analyzing this data, and understanding customer behaviors and concerns, you can showcase to them the content that suits their situation and thus make your content more audience and customer oriented. In all these situations, a CMS is part of a centralized digital experience platform to make these things happen.

Flexibility and Scalability to Improve Operational Functionality

A good CMS should be flexible and scalable enough to grow with your business. It has a wide range of APIs to get the most out of your content across several devices and channels. In general, you can run CMS from your servers or cloud. A scalable and flexible CMS can offer you the agility to handle massive traffic or evolving demand. The highest-trafficked websites almost always rely on robust and dynamic CMS. If your brand wants to reach new customers across several channels, prioritize having multichannel scalability features in your CMS.

Gain More Insights into Choosing Between Sitecore Vs. Drupal

Having a CMS is the solution to maintain fresh web content for businesses. It enables you to build, maintain, customize, and publish several pieces of information in a user-friendly interface simultaneously. For example - Sitecore and Drupal are amongst the most popular CMS platforms. Both are dynamic and provide a lot of business solutions. Let's take a deep dive into Sitecore and Drupal's offerings.

Sitecore Vs. Drupal: Introduction

Sitecore and Drupal are known as absolute leaders in the market, but these two CMS platforms are by no means identical. One focuses on specialized e-Commerce capability while the other prioritizes flexibility for unique digital innovation. However, that's not the only difference between Drupal and Sitecore. We'll go through all the differences but, before diving deep into the details, let's briefly introduce Sitecore vs. Drupal.

Sitecore

Sitecore is one of the most popular CMS’s for high volume websites in the enterprise category. Sitecore is one of the most agile and significant CMS tools. It consists of some of the most powerful functionality required for marketing automation. It enables brands to personalize and perfect their content to fit each customer's unique taste. 

Several well-known brands prefer Sitecore. For instance – Acrisure, a Michigan-based global fintech leader transformed its entire digital experience and scaled marketing operations with Sitecore's robust capabilities. This unique shift of re-platforming to Sitecore brought several possibilities for Acrisure. Sitecore is also a good choice for mid-market enterprises looking to create an impeccable relationship with their customers by providing a modern and elevated experience that caters to their needs.

Drupal

Drupal is one of the most widely used enterprises web CMS. Presently, more than 1,000,000 websites in the world are running on Drupal. Its key platform has more than 200 latest components built in for successful digital experiences. It is deployed by some big brands like Timex, McDonald's, and many others. Drupal would be a strong choice for companies looking to make complex systems integrations seamless.

Measuring the Capabilities Offered by Sitecore vs. Drupal

Now that we have an overall idea of what Sitecore and Drupal bring to the table, we can drill into their offerings a little more to know how well they handle certain business aspects.

Driving Successful Outcomes in Content Management

Drupal's administrator panel is flexible enough to execute every kind of workflow that suits your company. You will have the power to deploy all the rules for posting content or even integrate multiple content altogether. The backend of Drupal is hugely customizable to deliver great digital experiences. Earlier, Sitecore's backend used to be minimal. Still, now with its latest release of Sitecore 10, it has a host of helpful features to make the website development more accessible and performant with capabilities like - Docker containers, Headless rendering with ASP.NET Core, and built-in content serialization. Localization is one of the best features of Sitecore. It can translate the content automatically into the local language of the user viewing it.

The security of a website is an ongoing process for the business. However, there have been specific vulnerabilities associated with Drupal. On the other hand, Sitecore has a more dynamic approach to modern and robust security. Sitecore's fine-grained user roles make the difference here. You can control each user-specific permission to decide what they are allowed to do. Since Sitecore is created with .NET, it receives timely updates whenever Microsoft releases a patch. The great thing about Sitecore's security is that you don't need to integrate it with other systems. This lessens the risk of vulnerability involved. As far as safety is concerned, Sitecore is the sure winner.

High-Powered Performance and Scalability to Deliver Great Results

Drupal is helpful to scale your brand's website as it has offerings like BigPipe and Redis for advanced caching. In case your website is experiencing massive traffic, Drupal can handle a vast number of users. On the other side, Sitecore's scaling feature could be tricky as you might need separate servers to perform each function. For instance, you would need a different server for content delivery and another for reporting.

Advance Accessibility Tools

When it comes to accessibility tools, both CMS platforms are equipped with highly advanced accessibility tools. Drupal offers some professional features and modules such as Abbreviation, WAI-ARIA, and Siteimprove. However, Sitecore offers unique and customized modules, such as SXA, that you can easily develop and integrate into your business website. You can receive help and support from backend and frontend developers, test those offered HTML prototypes, and then reimplant them back into your website to enhance the accessibility of your business tools for customers. Thus, for anyone looking to develop customized accessibility tools based on their needs, Sitecore is the best option for its flexible features; otherwise, Drupal does the job. 

Headless Vs. Decoupled Approach to Power Up the Website

Both decoupled and headless are being used frequently when it comes to CMS. But are these the same? The answer is no. There is a crucial difference between a decoupled and headless CMS.

A decoupled CMS enables changes to be made in the presentation (formatting) and behavior (programming) layer without impacting website content. Drupal and Sitecore are traditional CMSs that offer decoupled versions of management systems. Sitecore is the most sought-after CMS compared to other CMSs, such as Umbraco, as it maximizes the decoupled approach to showcase content on any device for the customers. The content automatically gets adapted for that specific screen as well. 

Headless CMS eliminates the frontend delivery layer (presentation and delivery) and leaves only the backend (creation, management, and storage) content repository. With a strictly headless CMS comes a significant risk that can increase your solution's complexity. It doesn't allow you to create personalized experiences or respond in real time.

Deciding Between Sitecore vs. Drupal

Both Sitecore and Drupal have so much to offer, such as their powerful performance, wide range of advanced features, and improved personalization. Also, specific disparities can be significant depending on the enterprise's requirements and expectations. 

However, as we know, it can get tough to decide which CMS could be the right choice for your business goals, audience, and services; our content management system experts are here to assist you with determining which system is suitable for your objectives and goals. Ready to take the plunge? Explore Icreon's Ecommerce Services.