Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Contentful VS Drupal

Compare Contentful VS Drupal and see what are their differences

Contentful logo Contentful

You don't need another CMS. You need a better way to manage content — unified, structured, and ready to deploy to any digital channel.

Drupal logo Drupal

Drupal - the leading open-source CMS for ambitious digital experiences that reach your audience across multiple channels. Because we all have different needs, Drupal allows you to create a unique space in a world of cookie-cutter solutions.
  • Contentful Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-07
  • Drupal Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-18

Contentful

$ Details
-
Release Date
2013 January
Startup details
Country
Germany
State
Berlin
City
Berlin
Founder(s)
Paolo Negri
Employees
250 - 499

Drupal

Website
drupal.org
Pricing URL
-
$ Details
free
Release Date
-

Contentful features and specs

  • Scalability
    Contentful is designed to handle high traffic and large volumes of content, making it a suitable choice for enterprise-level applications.
  • Flexibility
    Contentful provides a headless CMS solution that allows you to deliver content across multiple platforms including websites, mobile apps, and IoT devices.
  • API-first approach
    Contentful's robust API enables developers to easily fetch, manage, and deliver content programmatically.
  • Customizable content models
    Users can define their own content types and relationships, offering great flexibility in how content is structured and managed.
  • Multi-language support
    Contentful natively supports multiple languages, which is beneficial for global businesses needing localized content.
  • Extensive integrations
    Contentful can be easily integrated with various third-party services, enhancing its functionality and adaptability.
  • User-friendly interface
    The platform offers an intuitive admin interface that makes it easy for non-technical users to manage content.
  • Strong community and support
    Contentful has a large community of developers and provides extensive documentation and support resources.

Possible disadvantages of Contentful

  • Cost
    Contentful can be expensive, especially for small businesses or startups, as its pricing scales with the amount of content and API calls.
  • Complexity
    The initial setup and customization can be complex, requiring a good understanding of both the platform and RESTful APIs.
  • Dependence on developers
    While the platform is user-friendly, leveraging its full potential often requires significant developer input, particularly for custom integrations and advanced features.
  • Limited built-in features
    Contentful focuses on being a pure headless CMS, which means it lacks some built-in features like website themes or e-commerce functionalities that are present in other CMS platforms.
  • Performance issues
    Some users have reported performance issues when managing a very large number of content entries or making a high volume of API requests.
  • Learning curve
    There is a learning curve, particularly for users new to headless CMS architecture and API-centric content management.

Drupal features and specs

  • Flexibility
    Drupal is highly customizable and can be tailored to meet the unique needs of almost any web project. Its modular architecture allows developers to add functionalities and change behaviors without modifying the core system.
  • Scalability
    Drupal can handle large volumes of content and high traffic levels, making it suitable for both small websites and large, complex applications.
  • Security
    Drupal is known for its strong security features and has a dedicated security team that continuously works on identifying and fixing vulnerabilities.
  • Community Support
    Drupal has a large, active community of developers, designers, and users who contribute modules, themes, and support, facilitating problem-solving and innovation.
  • Multilingual Capabilities
    Drupal offers excellent support for multilingual websites, providing built-in translation modules and interfaces for managing content in multiple languages.

Possible disadvantages of Drupal

  • Steep Learning Curve
    Drupal's flexibility and power come at the cost of complexity, which can be daunting for new users and developers.
  • Performance Optimization
    While Drupal can handle high traffic, it requires careful performance tuning and caching strategies to perform optimally, which can add to development and maintenance overhead.
  • Development Time
    Building a site with Drupal can take more time compared to other content management systems due to its complexity, especially if custom features are required.
  • Resource Intensive
    Running a fully-featured Drupal site can be resource-intensive, often requiring more server resources compared to simpler CMS solutions.
  • Dependency Management
    Managing dependencies and updates for the numerous modules that make up a Drupal site can be complex and requires careful attention to compatibility and security.

Contentful videos

Bits & Bytes Ep. 1 - What is Contentful?

More videos:

  • Review - A Quick look at contentful | #CodingPhase
  • Review - Gatsby And Contentful - The Headless CMS Approach - Episode 1

Drupal videos

Drupal Vs WordPress - Which Is The Best CMS?

More videos:

  • Review - Drupal 8: Comments, Reviews and Content Moderation Workflows
  • Review - Drupal Product Management Review: Out-of-the-Box

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Contentful and Drupal)
CMS
33 33%
67% 67
Blogging
32 32%
68% 68
Blogging Platform
25 25%
75% 75
Headless CMS
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Contentful and Drupal

Contentful Reviews

  1. Eleanor Bennett
    · Digital Marketing Specialist at Logit.io ·
    Very generous free plan

    The free plan of Contentful is generous enough to allow us to run a successful technology blog without having to pay for any overheads to run it. We used them as an alternative to the previously used Ghost. We have experienced a lot of growth since this migration.

    🏁 Competitors: Ghost

21 Headless CMS Platforms That You Should Check Out
Contentful integrates with many tools and helps you create your content quickly. It is mostly used for e-commerce websites.
Source: popupsmart.com
Best Headless CMS in 2022
Contentful is an API-driven headless CMS that focuses on content and the backend. It is considered one of the best systems for small to medium enterprises. You can edit content anywhere by any smart device and integrate it with other services such as Dropbox.
Source: flatlogic.com
Best Headless CMS for 2020
Yes, hosted providers, such as Contentful would be easier to use but it literally comes with a price...
Source: dev.to
11 Headless CMS to Consider for Modern Application
It uses RESTful API development kits for all popular languages. Contentful is welcoming newcomers, so anyone can quickly create data entries.
Source: geekflare.com
34 Headless CMS That Should Be On Your Radar
Founded in 2013, Germany-based Contentful offers an API-driven headless CMS. Contentful’s RESTful API gives developers full programmatic control of content, digital assets, and translations. The platform also takes advantage of caching techniques as well as external CDN integrations to enable the delivery of API payloads in the sub-100ms range.
Source: www.cmswire.com

Drupal Reviews

Comparing 9 WordPress alternatives & competitors in 2024
Drupal isn’t for beginners, as it lacks in-product tutorials, and you will need to find a separate hosting service to publish sites online. But if you’re an experienced developer looking for a tool that gives you complete design control, Drupal might be the right choice.
Source: webflow.com
19 Best WordPress Alternatives in 2025
Drupal is a content management system known for its flexibility, scalability, and security. It's popular for complex websites, including news outlets, e-commerce platforms, and government portals. While Drupal is free and open-source, customization and development require technical expertise.
Source: www.pixpa.com
Top 10 Web Content Management Systems
Keeping up with the trend of introducing great open-source CMS systems, Drupal is our next entry on the list. Drupal is one of the oldest and most reputable customizable CMS options out there, with its original release dating back to 2001, making it older than WordPress. As a web CMS, Drupal’s principal focus is on security. It is known to have one of the best security...
Source: cloudzy.com
8 Great Drupal Alternatives to Try for your Website (Nov 2021)
Whether you're creating a new website from scratch or looking for a way to upgrade your existing one, you'll need the right content management system. A content management system (CMS), is a tool that helps you to modify and optimize your website however, you choose, without the need for any complex API or PHP work. While some CMS solutions allow you to have some control...
WordPress alternatives: Which CMS platform is the best?
With Drupal, the startup costs are higher than WordPress, since developing with Drupal requires more technical expertise. It’s more complex than WordPress, and you will likely need to pay for a developer. Besides that, you’ll have to invest in the basics like – domain registration, hosting, added security, and so on.
Source: factory.dev

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Drupal should be more popular than Contentful. It has been mentiond 28 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Contentful mentions (10)

  • How to connect nextjs app to contenful cms - 2025
    First, you need to register on the Contentful website and create an account. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • My blog post workflow
    Next, I’ll copy and paste the draft text to my CMS. I’ve been using Contentful since working there in 2021. I use Rich Text rather than Markdown for my posts and what’s great about this is that copying and pasting from Notion preserves hyperlinks and formatting. If I’m including anything else like code samples, images and other embedded media, I add those as separate linked entries manually whilst working through... - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • How to Style Markdown in Next.JS Using React-Markdown and SASS
    If you have a blog or website with articles or long text documents, markdown is your friend. It makes authoring documents so much easier and more intuitive than straight HTML. Markdown has a far smaller learning curve than HTML and can easily be taught to non-tech-savvy writers. Markdown editors are also built-in to headless CMSs like Contentful. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Looking to Create a Wordpress Style Website with Python / Flask
    It depends on the requirements, but this might actually call for a headless CMS like Forestry.io or Contentful coupled with a Static Site Generator like Hugo. The CMS will manage users/permissions/data hierarchy and provide a simple frontend for users to add content, lay out pages, etc. And then when they save a change, the SSG will re-run and render everything to static HTML/CSS/JS. Source: almost 3 years ago
  • How to Create a Blog Using Next.js and Contentful CMS
    Contentful is a headless content management system (CMS). Headless simply means there is no front-end to display the content to the consumer. It's basically a database, but much easier to setup and maintain than a traditional relational database. Contentful provides a very easy-to-use API for fetching and managing content. They also support GraphQL queries if you're into that. - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
View more

Drupal mentions (28)

  • Is there and easy way of porting a site from d7 to d9?
    I would be interested in some good migration tools, paid ones are also ok. I found a post about this on drupal.org, but it didn't seem like an easy process. It is a multilanguage site with many content types, and a totally custom theme. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Is there any nice group, where I can ask questions, when I get stuck and recieve some guidance instead of crytics?
    You got already good advice, but wanted to point the guide of drupal.org where you can see some tools listed with instructions and channels https://www.drupal.org/community/contributor-guide/reference-information/talk/tools. Source: over 2 years ago
  • MAMP issue after Pro trial ended
    There is a service call GitPod that provides a temporary container Drupal environment. If you are familiar with what is going on around the future of how Drupal modules will eventually be offered up, you will likely have seen the "Project Browser" module as a contrib demo of the approach. It is used for people to give feedback to the developers. So they set up the typical 'SimplyTestMe' but also a GitPod... Source: over 2 years ago
  • Best Modules for Product and Recipe?
    For reviews, it depends entirely on what you mean by "review". I believe core has a simple comment module, although it may have been deprecated for D9? There are likely many review-style modules on drupal.org that might work, or if you just want to link out to third-party reviews then it could just be a repeating-value link field on the Product content type. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Leadership?
    They should also use standards tools like Github. The drupal.org platform was certainly impressive 10 years ago, today it's a pain to use it. They ducktape it with gitlab, but really it sucks to have to read documentation to simply do a pull request. Source: over 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Contentful and Drupal, you can also consider the following products

WordPress - WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

Strapi - Manage any content. Anywhere. The leading open-source headless CMS. 100% JavaScript / TypeScript and fully customizable.

Joomla - Joomla! is the mobile-ready and user-friendly way to build your website. Choose from thousands of features and designs. Joomla! is free and open source.

Prismic - prismic.io is a web software you can use to manage content in any kind of website or app. API-driven.

Ghost - Ghost is a fully open source, adaptable platform for building and running a modern online publication. We power blogs, magazines and journalists from Zappos to Sky News.

Sanity.io - Sanity.io a platform for structured content that comes with an open-source editor that you can customize with React.js.