Drupal 8 vs WordPress – Which Website Builder is Better?

It’s a good idea to have your own website as an online course creator even if you don’t intend to host the online course on it. 

One of the first decisions you’ll have to make when you develop a website is to choose a content management system. 

In this post, we’ll compare two of the best content management systems out there, namely Drupal and WordPress, to determine which one is best for online course creators.

Features	Drupal 8	WordPress
Pricing	4 stars	4 stars
User-Friendliness	3 stars	4 and a half stars
SEO	3 stars	4 stars

Now that you have a brief idea of what to expect, let’s look at both content management systems more closely to figure out which one is best for you. 

Drupal 8 Review – Robust and Easy to Use

Drupal has actually been around for longer than WordPress and powers 2.3% of all websites on the internet. 

While Drupal is definitely more complex to use than WordPress, it makes up for it by increased functionality that WordPress lacks. 

For example, it offers much more flexibility when you create custom content types and even has core support for multilingual sites. 

The latter can be extremely beneficial to you if you intend to target students outside of the United States. 

Drupal is also often used when your website will have a lot of data that could become difficult to manage. Its taxonomy system makes data management and organization much more convenient. 

Pros	Cons
• Provides mobile-friendly themes • Highly flexible with great customizability • Highly secure • Free • Neat interface	• The Drupal community is fairly small • Requires technical expertise

Benefits of Drupal 8

Firstly, the most obvious benefit of Drupal is the fact that it’s free to use. As an online course creator on a budget, we’re sure that’s something you can appreciate. 

Next, it provides you with great options to set up custom content types to include within your Drupal site. 

This can be especially useful if you reuse the same types of content blocks on different pages of your website. 

We mentioned above how Drupal 8 provides multilingual support. As you can probably imagine, this can be extremely useful to target audiences worldwide as an online course creator. 

The CMS itself is constantly being updated to fix bugs and issues that users may face. Furthermore, these updates also introduce quality-of-life changes which make the platform even more convenient. 

Factors to Consider Before you Decide to Buy Drupal 8

Pricing

While you can use the Drupal CMS for free, it’s true that you’ll have to find a domain and hosting solution for it. 

Hence, don’t expect to set up your website and publish it online completely for free just because you use Drupal. 

You will have to find a third-party web hosting service for it and pay their monthly fees (which are usually somewhere between $3 to $12 per month). 

User-Friendliness

Drupal is definitely not a CMS that is famous for its ease of use. Its learning curve is known to be fairly steep. 

Its main focus is to provide maximum functionality to the developers that use it, not user-friendliness. 

While it’s true that once you get the hang of it, Drupal becomes a joy to use, that can take time. 

As an online course creator, you may not have the time necessary for you to become proficient enough with the CMS to build a compelling website. 

SEO

Drupal provides you with all of the necessary options you need to make your website SEO-friendly. 

That being said, you need to know what you’re doing in the first place. 

If you mess up alt tags, URLs, and other factors that influence SEO, it can be a major headache to try to fix them due to the way Drupal functions. 

What Do the Customers Think?

Ultimately, Drupal is mostly utilized for complex projects and in that domain, it’s definitely all the rage. 

People love how it’s able to make the management of enormous amounts of data easy and how it comes with many important features straight off the bat. 

This refers to features that you’d normally have to install plugins for in other CMS such as marketing, eCommerce, and SEO. 

Here are some of the reviews we found: 

Best CMS for Data Management 

The best CMS for data management is Drupal and it’s definitely something you can consider if you intend to host your online course directly on your website. It allows you to create custom content types with dynamic pages to give your website visitors the best experience possible. 

WordPress Review – Reliable and User-Friendly

We mentioned how Drupal powers about 2.3% of websites on the internet. Now compare that to WordPress which powers about 40%. 

Of course, the market share for WordPress is higher since it’s the most popular CMS out there. 

Before we go further, it’s important to note that this section is about WordPress.org and not WordPress.com. 

WordPress.org is the popular content management system that you know. 

WordPress.com is a web hosting service. That’s not what we will discuss here. 

The main reason for its popularity is how easy it is to use, especially for non-developers. 

If you’re an online course creator that has never developed a website before, then WordPress is definitely your best option. 

Not only is its interface easy to understand and navigate but you can also get assistance from the huge WordPress community to help you with any problems you may face. 

Pros	Cons
• Tons of themes to choose from • Custom code options • Huge library of plugins to boost functionality and ease development • Flexible customization options • Completely free	• Does not come with a domain and hosting solution • Does not offer security or backup options

Benefits of WordPress

The most obvious benefit of WordPress.org is that it’s open-source and completely free. 

You can go to their website right now and get started with developing your online course website without spending a dime. 

This is especially useful to new online course creators that don’t have much of a budget to work with. 

Next comes WordPress’s versatility. You may already know this but people use WordPress to develop all sorts of websites. It’s a blogging platform but can also be used to make online stores, eCommerce websites, business websites, and much more. 

Thus, you can choose to host your online course on it but even if you don’t intend to do that, you can still create your online course business’s website through WordPress. 

This would serve to boost your reach and help get the word out about your online course(s) to the right audience. 

Speaking of boosting your reach, WordPress offers tons of plugins such as Yoast SEO and SEOPress which can be used to make your WordPress site SEO-friendly. 

This will help it rank on search engines and thus, will help you gather more customers. 

Since WordPress is the most popular CMS out there, you’ll also have access to the largest online community in the world when it comes to content management systems. 

Thus, if you face any issue, you can look to discussion boards and forums and it’s more than likely that you’ll find someone else who had a similar issue and was able to solve it. 

Factors to Consider Before you Decide to Buy WordPress

Pricing

As mentioned above, WordPress is completely free to use. 

It’s important to note, however, that WordPress does not provide domain and hosting solutions as part of its package. 

You can create your website with WordPress but in order to make it available for others online, you will need to find a web hosting service. 

And of course, you’ll have to pay that web hosting service’s monthly fees. 

User-Friendliness

In terms of user-friendliness, WordPress is the complete opposite of Drupal. 

As we mentioned earlier, WordPress’s ease of use is one of the main reasons why it grew so much in popularity. 

The themes available to you can be great starting points for your website. You can apply them and then customize them according to your needs. 

Furthermore, you don’t need to have coding knowledge at all to be able to use WordPress. That’s the great thing about it: It eliminates the need to code completely out of the web development process. 

If you still run into trouble with any aspect of custom development, you can choose to install relevant WordPress plugins to make your job even easier. 

SEO

Barebones WordPress has most of the common features you need to make your site SEO-friendly. 

In addition to that, you can also download relevant WordPress plugins to make the job even easier. 

Plugins such as Yoast SEO and SEOPress provide you with the ability to alter title tags, meta descriptions, URLs, and alt-texts in any way you need. 

What Do the Customers Think?

Of course, people love WordPress. 

It’s easy to use and the abundance of plugins makes the job even easier. 

People also love its versatility and how they can use it to make any type of website they want. 

Here’s what the reviews we found had to say: 

Best User-Friendly CMS

The best user-friendly CMS is WordPress thanks to its neat interface, elegant themes, and easy customization options. It’s very easy to preview your changes so you know exactly what you’re doing. Furthermore, you can install plugins to make the custom development of your website much easier. 

WordPress vs Drupal 8 – Buyers’ Guide

Both WordPress and Drupal are great options to build your online course website. 

However, we can understand that it can be confusing to choose a CMS due to many of its similar features. 

Here are some of the factors you need to keep in mind when you choose a CMS: 

Pricing

You don’t want to spend a ton of money on a CMS because you’ll most likely already need to pay for other tools and subscriptions needed for the development of your online course. 

Hence, you should either go for a free CMS or choose one that costs no more than $15 per month. 

User-Friendliness

We’ve said this a million times but user-friendliness is essential in pretty much every tool or service you choose for your online course business. 

This is because it’s important for the majority of your time to be devoted to creating and perfecting your online course. 

You cannot afford to spend an extended amount of time learning how to use the CMS you choose. 

SEO

The main purpose of creating an online course website is to reach new audiences and increase your online presence. 

For that to happen effectively, it’s important that your website be SEO-friendly. 

Hence, always opt for a CMS that is known to have extensive search engine optimization settings and options. 

Final Verdict

This brings us to the conclusion of our comparison post for WordPress vs Drupal. 

In the end, we definitely have to go with WordPress. While Drupal definitely does many things better than WordPress, it’s mainly aimed at large organizations that want to build complex projects with tons of data. 

That is not something you’ll want as an online course creator. WordPress does not have much of a learning curve and is much better suited for your needs. 

Which CMS do you think is better? Let us know in the comments below.